Floyd Council 02

Moncure Road used to be called Osgood Road.  The good news is that it's also called SR 1002 - which means the DOT can put a highway marker out by the cemetery if they choose to...

     Assumptions are dangerous. So. I assumed that because Floyd was buried in an A.M.E. cemetery he belonged to an A.M.E. congregation. However, the Watts, Horton and Watson funeral homes all tended to put their indigents in the Potter’s field at the White Oak A.M.E. cemetery. I’m getting ahead of myself…

     On Wednesday I drove to Sanford. I visited the cemetery again and had another good long look for Floyd (and got chigger-bit as hell in the process). Then I went and visited about every municipal building in Sanford. Maybe it just felt like all of them. Every person I met who worked for the city or Lee County was as pleasant, helpful and easy to get along with as you please. I was treated particularly well by Gene Hathaway in the Lee County Mapping Department and by Susan Patterson, the city attorney.

So this is what the current state of the story looks like:

     I had it in my mind to track down the current owners of the land the church and cemetery set on and the current (and perhaps former) owners of the land adjacent (in the event that an accessible memorial required right-of-way or other neighbor-navigable support). Also, I hoped maybe to find an old-timer who might have known Floyd – or at least of him. Gene Hathaway helped me by making me a map of the church, cemetery and neighbor-property lots and he found the deed for the church-land for me.

     We struck gold! As it turns out, the land the cemetery lies on was deeded to the city of Sanford in 1965 – nine years before Floyd’s death. Remember about the assuming?

     Immediately I assumed this meant that the city would have to have a record – somebody would have bought the plot Floyd was lying in, if Floyd himself, financially flush and looking to the inevitable (if unfortunate)future, hadn’t bought it for himself – so there would be a deed or at least a receipt book. At the very least, the city would have a cemetery legend – some kind of map of the grave plots so that no one was ever buried on top of anyone else…

     I made an ass out of me – sort of. It turns out that the city was, in fact, deeded the property in 1965 – shortly after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. This being the south of J. Strom Thurmond & George Wallace and generally a place with a white population who was unsympathetic to outsiders telling them…well, anything really…toxic politics rapidly ensued. The black folks who had been maintaining the cemetery (all of this according to local legend, now) wanted the city to maintain it and saw the victories of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act as a sign that it was time to flex a little local muscle and assert their rights to some of the same privileges and advantages the folks in town were enjoying. After all, the city was maintaining the white cemeteries well enough. So the Harringtons deeded the 23 acres south of Osgood road to the city. The city got out of the cemetery business and sold of their cemeteries (white and black) to a cemetery commission for $15,000.00 dollars. The cemetery commission took over the two white cemeteries in town and ignored all the rest of them. Since 1965, the city of Sanford has maintained that they are not in the cemetery business and so, even though the city holds a deed for the White Oak cemetery, they’ve never maintained it, never kept documents about or for it and they’ve never mapped it or sold plots (which would really require a map) for it.

Somehow, people still got buried there. The map is out there for the finding…