Headstones in a lake?

A hidden cemetery may lie on a sprawling Odessa farm. If so, the landowner wants to do right by the deceased.

ODESSA There’s no sign of a cemetery on Carolyn Wilson’s land. Just green grass, a barn and more than a dozen racehorses put out to pasture. Wilson has heard there are headstones here, though, piled up at the bottom of a pond that college fraternity members called “Suicide Lake,” back in the days when they would sneak in for a nighttime dive as a rite of initiation. And somewhere on Wilson’s 130-acre Bay Tree Farm it’s likely that 75 or more people from pioneering black families in Odessa were buried during the first half of the 20th century.

One East Tampa woman who used to live nearby remembers it. Curtiss Wilson, 91, no relation to the property owner, said her father tried in vain to save the burial ground by sprucing it up after new white landowners said it could no longer be used as a cemetery. And a report on Tampa cemeteries issued in 1941 by the federal Works Progress Administration describes a “Keystone Memorial Park (Colored) Cemetery,” 71/2 miles south on Gunn Highway from the Odessa post office and 2/10ths of a mile to the left down Woods Road. The post office building and Woods Road are gone. The headstones disappeared. As for the bodies, “Nobody moved anybody,” Curtiss Wilson said. “They are still there.” Now, nearly 70 years later, emboldened by renewed interest across the Tampa Bay area in forgotten African-American cemeteries, Curtiss Wilson is calling on Carolyn Wilson to have archaeologists survey her land for graves.

FULL STORY

Reporter: By Paul Guzzo -- Times Staff Writer

Word Count: 1337

Publication: Tampa Bay Times

Section: A DESK