Landscape Information
Situated on approximately four acres at the southwest corner of 25th Street and Tamarind Avenue, this commemorative landscape constitutes land that was initially established in 1913 as a three-acre Pauper’s Cemetery, adjacent to a refuse disposal site, also three acres. Fifteen years later the San Felipe Segundo Hurricane (also known as the Okeechobee Hurricane) struck the area: three feet of rain coupled with a hurricane devastated such settlements as Belle Glade on the lake’s southern edge. The storm killed more than 2,500 people, many of whom were African American migrant farmers.
Although 69 white victims of the hurricane were interred in a marked mass grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach, approximately 674 African American victims—and those who could not be racially identified—were interred in an unmarked, two-layer mass grave in the Pauper’s Cemetery. In subsequent years the cemetery was abandoned, and despite an unintentional exhumation of some remains during the expansion of 25th street in 1964, the site was largely forgotten. Beginning in the 1990s, the city and advocacy groups pursued joint efforts to locate the mass burial and designate the land as both park and memorial.
The relatively level, grassy terrain of the rectangular park is populated by deciduous and evergreen canopy and palm trees, flowering shrubs, and, concentrated in the northeast and southwest corners, dense banyan tree growth. Three curving pathways stem from a circular memorial at the bottom of the site, wending through the landscape to the entrance located on Tamarind Avenue to the east, a pergola to the west, and the Pauper’s Cemetery in the northeast, its perimeter lined by an iron fence and two red granite pillars marking the entrance. The pathway continues to the northeast corner of the cemetery, where a 40-foot by 80-foot iron fence—punctuated at each corner by granite piers—marks the location of the one-acre mass-burial ground.
The Hurricane of 1928 African American Mass Burial Site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
