Where the foundation of the community lies

Main entrance of the Charlotte Jane Memorial Park. Photo by Jim Virga.

The historic roots of West Coconut Grove lie along Douglas Road between Charles and Franklin avenues.

Here, at the Charlotte Jane Memorial Park Cemetery, is what some say is the heart of Miami’s oldest black community, today called the West Grove or, more recently, Village West. The area was founded before the city itself and within Charlotte Jane’s iron gates rest the settlers who sailed into the Florida Straits from the Bahamas.

“It is the foundation,” Billy Gibson, 58, a lifelong West Grove resident and one of the cemetery’s caretakers, said adding that a community must know where it’s been to know where it’s going. “Without it you can’t build up and out.”

Gibson said he regularly paints the above-ground vaults in the cemetery and places flowers on graves at Easter and Mother’s Day when loved ones cannot.
To him, the graves chronicle the area’s evolution from a tiny settlement reachable only by boat into a neighborhood with a bustling business corridor along Grand Avenue to the efforts to crawl out of the decline into a crime-heavy zone.

“In order to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been,” Gibson said.

Founded in 1906, the cemetery sits next to the historic Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church—the oldest black church in Miami-Dade County, which is gearing up for its 114th anniversary.

The cemetery is the second graveyard for Coconut Grove’s Bahamian settlers. The first, created by the city in 1904, was an area near what is now the Coconut Grove Playhouse, but the bodies were disinterred and moved to their current location. The unceremonious move angered the community, which started the Coconut Grove Cemetery Association to make sure their loved ones could rest undisturbed. Several hundred people now rest at the cemetery, but it’s unclear exactly how many people are buried there.
In 1913, five families bonded together, paying $140,000 for the land and creating a community trust that would be responsible for the property. The historic part of the cemetery, as the center section is known today, continues to be owned and cared for by the community trust, said civic leader Thelma Gibson, who is an association member.
The cemetery is actually three contiguous graveyards in one area. The historic section is owned by the community trust. The other two are owned by the Stirrup family.
The Rev. Ebenezer W. Stirrup was one of the original five association trustees. He later donated land to expand the property, creating two other cemeteries that surround the historic section, the association explained. The entire graveyard is named for his wife, Charlotte Jane, who is buried there as is Stirrup, who once owned what is much of downtown Coconut Grove and was one of the area’s first black millionaires.

“He bought a lot of land in Coconut Grove. And, I image, he wanted to have a nice place for the people in the West Grove to be buried,” said Dr. Dazelle Simpson, Stirrup’s 85-year-old granddaughter.

The family has no plans to sell the cemetery, which, she said, is basically full.

The influence of Bahamian burial traditions is still present at the cemetery with its unique above ground vaults, many of which are left unmarked. Many of the West Grove’s residents still bury their loved ones in the above-ground tombs that were previously purchased plots, as recently as 2005.

Simpson’s grandfather came to Florida from Harbour Island, Bahamas, in the late 1800s at age 15. He worked first as a carpenter’s apprentice in Key West. Stirrup, who had a third grade education, went home several years later, married Charlotte Jane and returned to Florida. This time, he settled in Coconut Grove.

He built the Stirrup house in 1897 at 3242 Charles Avenue, where it remains today. It is the house Simpson grew up in.
When Simpson was 4, her grandmother became ill.

“I said I was going to be a doctor to cure her and make her well again,” remembered Simpson, who became Florida’s first board-certified black pediatrician.
Charlotte Jane Stirrup, however, died in 1928 and was laid to rest in the cemetery that bears her name and much of the community’s heritage.

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