Volunteers are working to clean up a cemetery in Sanford they say hasn’t been maintained in nearly 100 years. 

  • Page Jackson Cemetery in Sanford overgrown, uncared for
  • Volunteers working to clean it up
  • Volunteers hope the county will take over the cemetery

Shantell Williams says she wishes she could lay flowers on her grandparents’ graves.

“I hear about their life and I say, ‘oh, I want to visit their gravesite,’” said Williams.

Williams knows much of her family is buried back in the Page Jackson Cemetery in Sanford, but she says it’s impossible to get to those graves through the trees and other brush that’s grown up around them.

Volunteers say the original owners of the cemetery donated it to the community so that people had somewhere to bury their loved ones.  But that means now, no one’s responsible for maintaining the cemetery.

“And so when I go for that venture and I found out, and that’s not a good feeling,” said Williams.

Tom Ward is one of several volunteers now working to clean up the cemetery. 

“They’re back there, all the way to the wall and to the fence. It’s just a matter of what all you’re going to clean out,” said Ward.

Volunteers have uncovered the graves of veterans.

“They served our country,” said Williams. “We can certainly do better than that.”

The volunteers’ work is slowly uncovering history. 

We’re told much of Central Florida writer Zora Neale Hurston’s family is buried somewhere on the overgrown property. 

Volunteers say they were able to uncover the grave of Drew Bundini Brown.  Brown grew in Sanford, and was one of Muhammad Ali’s trainers, the one who came up with Ali’s famous phrase “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

Volunteers say the state took over the land years ago. They are now pushing Seminole County to buy it and maintain it. 

“A lot of work, a lot of money and a lot of time,” said Williams. “But it can be done though.”