Magnolia (A)

Magnolia (A) Cemetery

Cemetery = Magnolia (A) Cemetery

Vicinity = Newport N

Status = not located

Community = Afr. Amer.

The 1940-41 veterans' graves registration gives locating directions:

From Wakulla and the intersection of U.S. Highway #319 and State Road #10 proceed south on said #10 going 3 miles; then turn left (east) on State Road #129 going 2 miles; again turn left (north) on dirt road go 5/10 mile to cemetery which lies 2/10 mile to the right and east of road.

The veterans' graves registration recorded the grave of WWI veteran Joe Foxworth (1896-1934) at a site it called "Magnolia Colored Cemetery," and for which it gave narrative locating directions seemingly indicating a place 2/10 mile east of Plank Rd and ½ mile north of US 98. (A section-township-range datum also given in that record is starkly contradictory of the narrative directions and evidently erroneous.) A matching deceased-veteran card for Mr. Foxworth in the state archives says that his grave had a "government headstone." Esther Ladd Woodward (b.ca. 1933) of Woodville, who lived her early life at Newport and is related to persons buried in Magnolia white cemetery, says she knew the Magnolia African-American Cemetery and that it lay a short way south of the white cemetery; she says that it was visible from the old white cemetery. All burials she knew of at the African-American site were employees of Philips Turpentine Company (and earlier Smith-Vereen Company). Even though such a site were only a short distance south of the preserved Magnolia white cemetery, it could have now been worked over repeatedly by machinery in the production of successive crops of pine.

Marie Ladd of Newport says that the graves of 13 African Americans she supposes to have been slaves at the old Magnolia settlement and port are adjacent to, or a part of, the well known Magnolia Cemetery lying a little north (see report on Magnolia (W) Cemetery). She says that she and her husband Joseph Ladd do not know of any other African American graves in the indicated vicinity.

Date of site report narrative - April 2002

Some information taken from Register of Deceased Veterans 1940-41

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