H. Warren Smith Cemetery

One of two municipal cemeteries in Jacksonville Beach, the 26-acre H. Warren Smith Memorial Cemetery is located at 1538 North Second Avenue. The land was used as a cemetery from the area’s earliest inception in the late 1880s, when the town was named Ruby Beach. Local lore has it that the first burial in the town was here and was the unidentified body of a man who washed ashore. A large memorial to the 1888-1889 victims of a yellow fever pandemic was erected in 1979, referring to the belief that a mass internment occurred here in the town then known as Pablo Beach. Burials continued in the area, but it did not become a public cemetery until the 1920s, by which time the town was known as Jacksonville Beach. Former Mayor H. Warren Smith arranged for the donation of the land. Until the 1960s, Caucasian Americans were buried at this cemetery and African Americans were buried across the street at the Lee Kirkland Cemetery.

Warren Smith Cemetery dates back to the late 19th century and the 26-acre burial ground was reportedly expanded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By 2006, nearly all of its 5,000 gravesites were sold. The municipal cemetery is named after H. Warren Smith, the mayor of Pablo Beach in 1914 and city engineer of Jacksonville Beach from 1925 until his death at age 63 in 1936. Smith plotted much of the cemetery, which has 11 sections, A through L with Section A being the oldest. There is no section I. All graves face to the East, toward the "new day" and the "rising sun," a tradition that goes back to the Egyptians and Greeks who worshiped the sun god. Among the most famous persons buried there are former CBS newsman George Syvertsen, former Yale University football coach Herman Hickman and John F. Kennedy's right-hand man on PT 109, John A. Maguire.

"Gardens of Stone," The Beaches Leader, July 17, 2001.