GROVELAND, Fla. — While the holidays can be a time full of joy, love and making new memories with friends and family, it can also be a heartbreaking time remembering those we have lost.

Some set aside time to visit their loved ones’ final resting place, the cemetery, to leave flowers or whisper a prayer. But at one Groveland cemetery, that was almost impossible to do for seven decades.

Lifelong Groveland resident Sam Griffin says he remembers visiting the Oak Tree Union Colored Cemetery of Taylorville, which was established around the 1895 to 1900 time period. It is located in Taylorville, now known as Groveland.

“We called him Uncle Doe. That was his nickname, Doe.” Griffin said.

He is a Vietnam veteran who was named after an uncle who served during World War I. Griffin said he grew up hearing the stories about his Uncle Doe.

“Dad told me about him," he said. "He was tough. Back in that time to make corporal, you had to be tough."

But paying respects to his uncle was challenging.

“Because the property around the cemetery here was owned by other people and we couldn’t cross over that,” he said, explaining that even when they had permission, it still wasn’t easy.

“You’d have to look at a picture, I mean, a real close picture of just how this place looked," Griffin said. "This place was terrible. All this was grown up. Nothing but solid woods and everything."

Griffin said over the years the condition of the cemetery worsened until a call for action lit a flame in one man’s heart: Groveland’s Fire Chief Kevin Carroll, who is the project manager for the effort to save the cemetery.

In 2021, he volunteered to take on a new project to revitalize the site, calling Nigel Rudolph, who is a public archaeologist with the Florida Public Archaeology Network and has 25 years experience in the field. 

“And at that time, it was the worst condition cemetery I’d ever seen,” Rudolph said.

Headstones were lost or broken, and Carroll said the cemetery was in immediate danger of being erased from history forever.

The Oak Tree Union Colored Cemetery of Taylorville was in such a poor state it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore. It was money, Carroll says, the city of Groveland did not have.

“Just coincidentally, right around the time he reached out to me, a new grant had come up from the division of historical resources," Rudolph said.

Rudolph says Carroll went for the African American Cultural and Historical Grant, and landed it, a $495,000 grant that would clear the way to uncover history.

With a simple hand probe, Rudolph found about a half-dozen buried grave markers, and a ground penetrating radar survey discovered 229 possible gravesites.

“The folks that are buried here built this community,” Rudolph said.

He calls them the backbone of the Groveland community. They were people working in citrus groves, in the turpentine industry and for the sawmill industry. But his most compelling find was something many headstones had in common.

Each one of the non-military ones all have a symbol of a fraternal organization on them.

Even in death, Rudolph said there is so much you can learn here about who the people were and how they lived.

It is a history long-time journalist and church musician Linda Charlton made it her mission to discover. She set out to visit numerous local churches to try to track down aging elders who could share firsthand memories of the cemetery and its occupants.

She says she remembers interviewing at one time one of the oldest people in Groveland. Olea Mitchell told her she remembered going to funerals at the cemetery.

Griffin was skeptical at first about yet another effort to turn things around at the cemetery. But after volunteering to help restore it, he says he is encouraged that he and others can now visit this restored burial ground. He points to new strong friendships he has made in the process.

The Oak Tree Union Colored Cemetery of Taylorville will be open to the public in early 2025. It will be open from sunrise to sunset and is located near downtown Groveland on State Road 19 (Howey Road).

Editor's Note: This article has been edited to correct the name of the grant program, which is the African American Cultural and Historical Grant.