Polly Town / Pollywood / Eastport “Colored” Cemetery

by Tim Gilmore, 12/12/2023

Hannah Swan loves the part of Polly Town that’s not “town.” She loves the sands, the mudholes, the wildlife. Though she talks about how much bigger it is “than the Pentagon,” she says, “Only a handful of people know the specific location.” In fact, there’s no real “town” here, despite old mobile homes and woodframe houses that occupy a grid of 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Street and streets named for trees – Cedar, Pine, Holly and Hawthorn – like the oldest streets in so many towns.

Hannah loves riding four-wheelers through the mud out here. Friends go fishing and hunt deer and hogs. Amidst the oaks, “the whispering of the pines” and teenagers wearing camouflage, the sand, she says, “is so white it looks like a tropical paradise.”

The history of Polly Town lies dispersed and lost in the trees and sands and dirt roads and the oxidized iron disintegrated beneath the old trailer park, but Hannah keeps a keen and ghostly sense of that history. Still, where were the “mill quarters” and “the shell road” and the vanished A.M.E. church? Was that church connected to the later concrete block sanctuary, now abandoned, at the end of Holly Street? Where span the continuities?

“Other people don’t know the history Polly Town holds,” she says, “but my friends and I do. Polly Town goes back to the 1800s when slaves lived on a plantation here.” Indeed, were they bones of the enslaved the Florida Department of Transportation moved across the Northside when news broke in 2020? A few older Northsiders retain vague memories of Polly Town, or of stories they heard long ago.

“There were just a few Black families that lived down Faye Road on the Eastport side of the railroad ‘trussel,’” Mary Simmons remembers. She left the area in 1973, after graduating high school and getting married. She remembers three Black kids who rode the school bus and a family named the Johnsons. “I don’t remember there being many people down there,” she says, “and then it ‘built up’ with a bunch of house trailers.” She thinks the last Black families moved out in the early 1970s.

“My grandparents had a hog farm right across the street from Polly Town,” Debbie Carter Burch says. “It was an all-Black community back then in the ’60s. There were old houses back there, but small. My grandpa would get R.V. and Liz, a married couple from Polly Town, to help with the hog cleaning. There was a woman named Flossie who came and cleaned the floors.”

Robin Roberts remembers “an old school bus that sat parallel with Faye Road back in the late 1960s that several Black people lived in.” If necessity’s not the mother of invention, what’s desperation?

Out here on these wooded trails, Hannah says she “can almost feel the presence” of enslaved people who once lived and worked and suffered here: “There’s a specific turn about a mile in, past a cement border, where I feel the presence each time.” The turn cuts uphill, “then proceeds down to where about five acres of flat land lies.” She and her friends “make special trips” on their four-wheelers “to clean up litter and cut down trees that have fallen on the trails.”

The skull and the longbones, Hannah says, came from “near the turn that everyone rides every single mudding trip.”

She’s referring to the “remains of multiple people,” the headstone, and the pieces of old wooden caskets that construction crews uncovered in February 2020, when bulldozers pushed through mounds of dirt amassed to build new overpass ramps for Interstate-295, the Jacksonville beltway, at North Main Street. The Florida Department of Transportation was mining “fill-dirt” from these woods off Eastport Road, north of Heckscher Drive, then transporting it three miles to the new highway interchange.

Before St. Regis Paper Corporation bought this land in the 1950s, the federal government’s Works Progress Administration listed “Eastport Colored Cemetery” here in its 1940 – ’41 Veterans’ Grave Registration, providing the following directions through unnamed roads: “turn left on Shell Road through old mill quarters and go beyond about 200 yards, turn right and go until this road joins another running North and South, turn left (North) for about one-quarter of a mile to the Cemetery on the right, which is not fenced.”

It’s the only mention of this cemetery’s name to have surfaced. In fact, the 1936 headstone application for Thomas Watson, whose stone came from somewhere in these fill-dirt pits, says, “No name” on the line for “Name of Cemetery.”

A 1918 United States Geological Survey map shows those “mill quarters,” a collection of workers’ houses for an adjacent sawmill, but no cemetery. A 1923 ad placed in newspapers throughout the state said:

“MEN WANTED – White and colored can use seventy-five men in planing mill, saw mill and new construction work, also four pond men. Wages $2 day and up according to class work, we pay standard wages. Brooks-Scanlon Corporation, Eastport, Fla. Seven miles from Jacksonville, take bus near Hemming Park. Leaves 6 a.m. 12 noon and 4 p.m.” [Several sics.]

The “village,” says Joel McEachin, principal planner with the Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission, seems to have included a “large number of worker houses” connected to the saw mill “and probably a company store.” Individual workers’ houses were “separated by race, which may be the reason the marshy area” in old maps “separates clusters of houses.”

But this mill workers’ village seems to differ from Polly Town, just further north, while to which community the “Eastport Colored Cemetery” connects is unclear. Its inclusion in the WPA’s Veterans’ Graves Administration survey doesn’t necessarily mean every grave in the cemetery belonged to a military veteran. Was the graveyard even older, or was there an older Black graveyard nearby? Amidst these questions, the mystery of the name “Polly Town” blurs further, as a century-old record refers to a lost Black church not at “Polly Town,” but at “Pollywood.”

Built in 1917, the Wesley Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is described as “a dark red, rectangular, Meeting-house type frame building.” Directions said “4 miles north turn on Eastport Road” from “U.S. Highway #17,” then “1 ½ miles turn left, Pollywood, Jacksonville, Duval County.” Five years later, the church was defunct and its only pastor, W.W. Spann, converted the sanctuary into his primary residence.

Receding further, it was here, in 1857, when Eastport was called Cedar Creek, Florida, that the state’s 19^th governor was born. Francis and Sarah Bell Broward came to the Spanish territory of East Florida from South Carolina in 1800 and the family operated a series of plantations across the county. Governor from 1905 to 1909, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward proposed moving all Black Floridians into a newly established territory, “either domestic or foreign,” and draining the Everglades. Today, Cedar Creek, which parallels Dunn Creek on the opposite side of the Eastport peninsula, is called Broward River.

Through this land, Hannah Swan connects divergent times. Where lie the continuities? “Every single ride in Polly Town,” she says, “I like to stand up off of my four-wheeler and observe what’s around me.” Empathetically she imagines “what the property used to be used for and the feelings of the slaves that once set foot on this land.”

As in Edgar Allen Poe stories, the dead lie always just under our feet. “To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries,” Paul Fussell writes in his 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory, “is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916.” Fussell is talking about the Somme, the area around the namesake river in Picardy, France, site of the World War I battle, one of the bloodiest in all human history. “When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.”

Likewise, in the prologue to his 2011 book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, David Blight quotes a Union veteran named Russell H. Conwell who writes in 1869 for The Boston Daily Evening Traveller of how the war turned the “Garden of the South” into the “Graveyard of America.” Understood rightly, every garden’s a graveyard.

Early in the inquiries at the Interstate-295 interchange, when police officers and forensics investigators flooded the night scene along the highway with light, the Florida Department of Transportation ceased all excavations and transportation of soil. FDOT representatives swore they’d had no way to know they were digging into graves. Florida’s memory has always been short; no wonder its legislators don’t want its educators teaching its history.

Across the 20^th century, real estate developers displaced historic graveyards, not always but often segregated Black, cemeteries of the lost enslaved. Outside old Yukon on the Westside, white teenagers came back from the woods with arm bones and skulls. Outside new suburbs at Gateway on the Northside, kids stood the skulls they found from old Yellow Fever burial grounds on sticks to scare away enemies. At Fort Caroline Club Estates, kids saw skeletons from the old “Chaseville Colored Settlement” displaced. Developers “removed” Fulton Cemetery in Arlington for a subdivision called Beacon Hills and Harbor. In the 1960s, the child of a physician found hundreds of ancient Timucuan Indian bones protruding from the bluff in the new Fort Caroline subdivision where the family had just moved. Houses are built on bones there.

Then, in the fill-dirt at the 295 interchange, the headstone surfaced, a rarity in old impoverished Black graveyards, identifying Thomas Watson as a private in the 403^rd Labor Battalion of Georgia, QMC, Quartermaster Corps, supporting general supply and distribution management, who died on December 21, 1936.

Watson’s great-granddaughter, Wanda Ngozi Ratliff Ugoh, a Baltimore musician, saw the news right away and made the connection. Her great-grandmother, Nettie Watson, had navigated the year-long bureaucratic process of ordering Thomas a tombstone.

And what do we know of Thomas Watson’s subjective experience? What days of his life made him cry? What songs did he most love to sing? He was 20 years old in 1906, the son of Calvin and Lila Watson in Cordele, Georgia, when he married Nettie Outlaw, 18 years old, in Washington, North Carolina. How did her eyes contract when she smiled? What had they told each other that they’d never said to anyone else? What did she feel when he signed up in 1918 to fight for a country that still denied them basic rights?

Thomas and Nettie named their daughter Salome Nettie Watson, for her mother and for the Biblical dancer who demands and receives the head of John the Baptist. Wanda Ngozi Ratliff Ugoh says people called her grandmother “Miss Manners,” and she calls her her “second mother.”

In previous decades, authorities would almost certainly have covered up Watson’s accidental (or worse – incidental) exhumation, but his great-granddaughter would like to see his remains, currently scattered, reburied with military honors. Parts of Thomas Watson may yet lie dislocated out here in the hills made of bulldozed sand, perhaps mixed with older bones beneath ponds where rainwater has made new ecosystems of excavation pits.

Back in the Polly Town wilds, Hannah calls her friends “to ride out.” She says, “I wear camouflage waders, heavy waterproof boots and a warm cotton hoodie underneath the waders. Normally, my best friend Hayley is on the back with me as we make it to the mudholes.”

Her favorite location is “close to the flat grounds, where you then enter a small trail to arrive at the mudholes,” each “about five feet deep.” You have to “water-wheelie to get out, unless you have an extremely large lift.” Hannah rides a “1996 Honda Fourtrax, with a two-inch lift and about another inch in suspension,” so every time she goes deep in the mud, she “water-wheelies” out.

When deeper water muffles the country music she’s blasting through waterproof speakers, that’s “my queue,” she says, “to have Hayley lean back. Then slowly I press the throttle a little harder.” The All Terrain Vehicle turns straight up and charges through the mudhole. “I look around and see everyone cheering.”

For this too is history. These scenes also layer this land in time. This earth contains also laughter, jubilation, celebrations of being young and alive.

So many lives vanished out here. In The Book of Genesis, the first human born is also the first murderer, and after the killing of Abel, God says to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” The dead demand respect here; they got so little of it in life. Though we always only belong to the earth, the enslaved never owned their own bodies. Who but the earth owns now their disengaged and nameless bones? And how do we present what respect they’re still owed?