February 28, 2025 • 26 mins
A fast-growing city might forget its history. But there is a place where West Palm Beach's fascinating past lives on, where gravestones tell the story of the old days in West Palm Beach. We talk with local writer and historian Ginger Pedersen about Woodlawn Cemetery and how you can visit the place where stories of the City's colorful past are retold.
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(13:00:23):
Welcome to the City Center podcast. I'm
Jerry Marcello. As cities like West Palm
Beach continue to change and grow, it is
a challenge to preserve its history.
New structures wipe away the old, taking
with them the memories of when this area
was a small town and a largely
undeveloped frontier.
But there is a place where ties to our
(13:00:43):
city's past live on, and strangely
enough, it is where we remember our dead.
Today, we'll explore Woodlawn Cemetery
and why this place of eternal rest also
serves as a link to West
Palm Beach's rich history.
Next on the City Center
podcast from West Palm Beach.
(13:01:03):
And joining us today is Ginger Peterson,
who is a writer and historian who is also
native to the area. Ginger, welcome.
Thank you. Good to be here.
We're here to talk about history, and
there's no one better I can imagine
having this conversation with West Palm
Beach, even though we are about 135 years
or so old at this point.
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We have a very rich history. There's an
amazing story between its birth through
Henry Flagler and its growth, and a lot
of amazing stories have taken place here.
It's almost a shame that sometimes people
who are moving here aren't even aware of
some of the fantastic
things that have happened here.
(13:01:44):
You're a historian. Tell us what made you
so interested in history and why West
Palm Beach history is a focus for you.
I always loved history. Even as a child,
growing up in Jupiter, I used to love to
go to see the Du Bois family and some of
their older members.
They always had pioneer coffee once a
year in Jupiter, and I would drag my
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parents along to it,
not the other way around.
So I always had that penchant for
history. Plus, my family had some deep
history roots in Palm Beach County.
My grandparents ran a tourist attraction
in Boca Raton called Africa USA, which
was kind of an early
version of a lion country safari.
There were no cages, so the animals, not
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carnivorous, were out and about zebras
and giraffe and elephants and things.
Let's touch on that just for a second
here. It's really zany. Now, it's not
about West Palm Beach, but in Boca Raton,
there was a lion country
safari style animal thing?
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Yeah, you would drive through on a little
Jeep train that they took you when you
sat in one of the little wagons that were
dragged behind a Jeep, and you would
watch and you could interact somewhat
with the animals, even in that time.
So, yeah, it was open in the 1950s. I
never saw it personally, but I have heard
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all the stories from my
cousins who grew up there.
Something new for our friends in South
County. Y'all had a thing there that was
a lot like, oh, it's just insane.
The things we learn just by having
conversations and talking about parts of
the past that would never come up in
normal conversation, you
learn about the history.
And I think that's part of what we're
doing here, is rediscovering a very
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colorful past, not only here in West Palm
Beach, but as far as the entire county is
concerned, so much has happened here.
So much has happened, and I think people,
especially who have come here and made
this their home, don't realize that we do
have a long history.
So back in 2014, we wanted to capture
part of that history in a book, saying
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why not—the Legendary Locals is a
series that's done by a book company, and
we said why not Legendary
Locals of West Palm Beach?
And it was through the research for the
book that we found ourselves in Woodlawn
one day, looking at where some of the
people that we wrote
about had been interred.
So we said why not do a tour of Woodlawn
and tell these same stories that we tell
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in the book and tell different ones, and
all of us find—we're
always finding something new.
Even after 10 years, we discover new
stories in Woodlawn.
Something interests you in a tombstone,
or you read something in a paper, and
you're like, "I wonder if they're in
Woodlawn," and sure enough, they are.
And there's very dark stories, and
there's very
wonderful stories in Woodlawn.
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It was a point where a lot of people from
the 1928 hurricane were buried in a mass
grave because they had no choice.
The people—the disease threat was so
great after that hurricane that they had
to do something as terrible as that.
So it's really quite amazing.
Well, we're going to talk a lot more
about Woodlawn and the cemetery, but I
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note you were kind enough to bring along
the copy of the book that has
you as one of the co-authors.
I've written quite a few books with Janet
DeVries-Naughton, and we do a lot of our
research together, and
we've done other writings.
So it's always good to have someone to
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bounce ideas off of when you're writing
and thinking of these things.
That's really great. I'm flipping through
it for the first time, and it's packed
with images, packed with tidbits.
It is a treasure trove of
information about local heroes.
Yeah, local heroes. I know we had a
couple of scoundrels we talked into
because you always have.
That's part of the total community.
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But the center point is
West Palm Beach in the county.
It always has been for such a long time
as its county seat when
we became a county in 1909,
that it's always been here that things
are centered in the county.
If someone's interested in getting a copy
of this, where can they get it?
It's on Amazon. It's widely available.
(13:05:57):
It's available in
local bookstores as well.
We'll show it on the screen. Legendary
Locals of West Palm Beach
is the title of the book.
Correct. It's West Palm Beach Base Book.
All right. That's very good. I understand
that you have something
else that you're working on.
Just very quickly before
I get into the cemetery.
Yes, I do. It's the story of Dr. Mabel
Elliott, who was a physician following
World War I in
Turkey, Armenia, and Greece.
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That family has very deep ties to West
Palm Beach, especially
because they had 14 children.
Wow.
Her father, Joseph Elliott, was the
chairman of the committee that formed the
town of West Palm
Beach on November 5, 1894.
So you can't get much more
West Palm Beach than that.
Absolutely.
It's going to be a really incredible
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story of bravery and heroism that we
don't necessarily
associate many times with women,
but everybody can be a hero.
And when will that book become available?
That'll be coming out in
late summer, early fall.
Okay. So we'll keep an eye out for it,
too. I'm sure it'll be
available on Amazon as well.
It'll be on Amazon and
all the major booksellers.
Okay. So let's talk a
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little bit about the cemetery.
Now, is Woodlawn the only cemetery in
West Palm Beach, or are there others?
There are others. There's Hillcrest
Cemetery up on Parker.
That's a privately owned cemetery.
But Woodlawn is the only public cemetery,
I believe, in the city of West Palm Beach
that is part of the
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city's parks department.
And it has been. It was a gift from Henry
Flagler. It
originally belonged to Flagler.
He had paid to have the layout of the
cemetery way back in the late 1800s.
And then that's when the burials began.
Now, it's not West Palm
Beach's first cemetery.
There was a couple of small
cemeteries in the Northwood area.
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There was one downtown very, very briefly
at Clematis and what we would call Dixie
today, what the pioneers
would know as Poinsettia.
It's like right here where City Hall is.
Yeah, pretty much. A little
bit. Yeah, it was basically here.
And it was very few people interred
because they knew it
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would be way too small.
So then there was a much larger cemetery
where the Norton Museum is located that
was called Lakeside.
And that was also privately owned by the
Lake Worth Pioneer
Association, which still exists.
And they had hundreds of burials there.
Most of the people were moved over to
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Woodlawn when the association decided to
deed that property to the
city because they couldn't.
They didn't have the
funds to maintain it. Gotcha.
There are still people interred under the
Norton, at least 40.
There are also a few tombstones in a
crawl space under the Norton.
So, you know, whether the place is
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haunted, I mean, some people think it is.
I'm not, you know, I always stress to
people we're not doing a ghost tour. No.
This is a very dignified storytelling
tour of the people that
are there in Woodlawn.
So we've had ghost hunters on our tours,
but that's not the focus of what we do.
And I think that's completely valid.
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I mean, it's a lot of fun to tell the
ghost stories and to, you know, it gets
to be Halloween time and
you go out and do stuff.
But you know what? The real value of what
you provide and the memorial quality of
the cemetery is, again,
a reminder of the lives that were lived
here in West Palm Beach and the people
who came here as
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pioneers or as early residents.
And looking back at their lives and how
life was for them and how radically
different it is for us
today is like a history book.
You open it up and you can learn so much.
I had the opportunity to go on the tour
that you're describing just recently.
And what I discovered was so special for
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me was instead of saying, OK, well, here
is this location or here is this marker.
A lot of the stories you told were very
personal and about people at different
moments in the city's history and how
they lived and what happened to them.
And it really brought it to life.
Yeah, you know, and I think
that's really what we did.
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I mean, I always think as humans are the
thing that makes us to me different than
any other creatures is we tell stories.
It is the basis of so much of what we do.
And I tell people, if you want to be
remembered, tell your story.
Tell your story to someone because
everybody has a great story
and they just don't know it.
And I know I was surprised to learn that
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we had some fairly, you know, fairly,
fairly old markers in the cemetery.
I believe one of the very first stops we
stopped, we were looking at a veteran
that was alive during the Civil War or
active during the Civil War.
And that's, you know, you don't think of
West Palm Beach, you think 50s, you think
40s, you don't jump all
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the way back into the 1890s.
Yeah. And there are several people from
that time period and
people born as early.
I've never seen a 1700s, but there are
several like 1810, 1812 people that were
born at that time that
are interred at Woodlawn.
That's that's amazing.
So once again, you mentioned that I think
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I use the term that there
are many heroes located there.
You said that there
could possibly be villains.
What sort of villains could we possibly
have in the cemetery?
Well, there are there are villains and
there's tragic stories and there are
empty graves, the most famous of which
belongs to Judge
Chillingworth and his wife.
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There is a nice, very
nice headstone there.
And I always tell people this is an empty
grave because their bodies were never
recovered after they were killed by
basically the hit men who drowned them
somewhere out in the ocean.
So those kinds of tragedies.
But, you know, villains, if you want to
call them that someone who was kind of
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someone who killed someone like Lena
Clark, the murdering postmistress of West
Palm Beach, who served time in a insane
asylum for two years.
But she came out after two years after
killing a man and stealing thirty two
thousand dollars of government money.
So it's all those kinds of twists and
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turns and crazy tales that you stumble
across one day that I don't even I've
never gone looking for
a story that I found.
It somehow just just bounces into me.
And in the strangest ways with with Lena
Clark, my parents first
house was on Lake Clark.
So I was curious.
I'm like, oh, I wonder who
like Clark is named after.
So I googled Clark and her story was like
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the third link girl murderer.
I'm like, what is this about?
So that's how sometimes things happen
with the Elliott book.
Somebody put something
on Facebook about her.
And I was like, oh,
I've never heard of her.
How did that happen?
So it's very strange how
how things like that happen.
And even with Birdsville, Mendoui, that
we wrote a book about pioneering Palm
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Beach, which was a true West Palm Beach
story about a woman who was a writer, had
founded the town of Boynton and had this
beautiful estate called Ben Travato.
Well, one day someone emails me and said,
I think they're theming
a hotel around your book.
I'm like, what?
And she's like, it's the Ben.
And so the Ben Hotel is about Birdsville,
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Mendoui and her dogs.
And there's a copy of
her book in every room.
And I was like, well, I
never saw that coming.
And they really wanted.
I said, why did you guys pick that?
The designers of the hotel, they said
they wanted something that was uniquely
West Palm Beach, not Palm Beach, not
Flagler, something
that was just Palm Beach.
And they kind of they
stumbled across her.
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So I think it's important because West
Palm Beach has always had a little bit of
a little brother syndrome.
And it was always the service town to
Palm Beach and all these kind of little
bit derogatory redheaded stepchild.
And it's not.
It's a wonderful city.
And it is like you
said, it is evolved in time.
It is evolving again.
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And it will evolve 100 years from now
when we're all gone.
It's just the way things are.
I call it the layers of history.
But I like to respect what was because I
think it's interesting.
I don't want those people to be forgotten
no more than we want to be forgotten.
We'd be losing color.
We'd be losing part of part of the fabric
that makes this this community so
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interesting and so different.
And it's important that we have the
ability to capture this through your
writings and the folks that you work with
who are also involved with with history
and reclaiming the history.
That would otherwise be lost.
And so it's really, really very valuable
and really, really great.
Again, you know, we talked about heroes
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and people who had less
than heroic histories.
And I know that the the the the Judge
Chillingworth story that
you mentioned is astoundingly.
I mean, why it's not a major movie
somewhere that we've
never figured that out.
They've done two documentaries, both, you
know, national productions.
But the fact that it's never
(13:15:09):
been even written as a novel.
They did the podcast on
it, which was like 12 parts.
And they did a nice job on that.
But to me, there's you know, it's a very
it's a very disturbing
story for so many reasons.
It is a very disturbing story.
And I challenge folks
who are listening to this.
If you don't know about the story of the
Chillingworth, it's
spelled like it sounds.
Go ahead and start to start googling it.
(13:15:31):
Find out more about it.
It is absolutely breathtaking.
The story that that happened
here in the fifties that took.
Yeah, it's very disturbing.
And they did an incredible job of what
they had in the podcast of finding the
original tapes that they did.
And and really giving some
of the details of the story.
There you are.
(13:15:52):
Very striking.
Another party, even though it's a very
dark part of our West Palm Beach history,
it is it is an amazing bit of color.
And it's it's it's a
stunning story to get a hold of.
But we're talking about the cemetery.
Now, you are clearly expert in the people
there, and the history of the of the
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folks who are part of the cemetery.
Is there anything that is a standout to
you, something that you find
inspirational that you'd like to share as
far as one of the people
that are interred there?
Inspirational.
I've always been very taken with Guy
Metcalfe because he was a character and a
half and really
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believed so much in our area.
He was instrumental in
having the county formed.
He was postmaster of West Palm Beach.
He was school
superintendent for the town.
Ran a newspaper that captured so much of
the beautiful early history of West Palm
Beach in the whole area.
And so many people
know nothing about him.
(13:16:54):
He ended tragically, too, by suicide.
But his story kind of stopped so abruptly
that I don't think I've tried so many
times to reach out to his family because
I volunteer at the Historical Society.
They have almost nothing on him.
Literally one photograph and then one
photograph taken from the newspaper.
That's it.
(13:17:15):
And so, you know, he was
such a colorful character.
And his story, because it just ends so
abruptly with him that I just thought
there could be more about him somehow.
But so he's always been one of my heroes
for early county history.
That's really, really neat.
So I'm sure there's a lot of people who
(13:17:35):
are now interested in
taking part in one of the tours.
Is that something that people can where
can they reach out to
find out more about?
So we do the tours from we do them
October and November.
And then we do January, February, March
and April, because then we hit the summer
and we hit mosquitoes and rain and
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thunder and lightning.
So it just became we couldn't do them.
So if they reach out to the Palm Beach
County Parks or I'm sorry, the West Palm
Beach Parks Department,
they have their Facebook page.
And they also have we also have a
Woodlawn Cemetery Facebook
page with the information.
It's a very easy sign up.
It's free.
We just do reservations through a system
(13:18:18):
called Eventbrite, only because we don't
want too many people.
The first time we did the tour, we didn't
have any reservations
and 150 people showed up.
And it was way too many because we can't
accommodate that many.
It's too hard to group to move a group.
We usually have between 40 and 60.
That's a good number.
(13:18:39):
And so they open up reservations not for
the whole season, but
one month at a time.
So right now, as this is being taped in
February, the March
reservations are open.
So we still have March and
April to do for this year.
So to take part, the suggestion would be,
first of all, go check on Facebook and
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see the group that's involved.
It's called Woodlawn Cemetery Tours.
And it's there as a Facebook page or just
simply go to the West Palm
Beach Parks Department website.
And they have the link to the Eventbrite
sign up, which is free.
You don't have to put in any credit card
or anything like that.
It's just a crowd control system.
(13:19:19):
Sure.
And for people listening,
the city website is wpb.org.
You can go ahead and just--there's easy
navigation to find your
way to the park section.
And you'll see information
that will help you there.
So that's terrific.
We have an opportunity a couple of
different ways for
people to get involved.
And that's really, really neat.
So I understand that you
are a volunteer, right?
(13:19:41):
Yes.
So that's terrific.
And thank you for
doing what you're doing.
It's interesting because I think you're
one of the very first people we've had on
our program that wasn't
actually a city employee.
So congratulations.
A volunteer, yeah.
How is it being a volunteer?
I love volunteering.
I think it's giving back to our community
is a way that we don't really consider.
(13:20:03):
People may not like the way
the country's going or whatever.
And the first thing I say to someone like
that, what do you do locally?
Do you work at a shelter?
Do you go to a retirement home and talk
to lonely old people?
I'm like, what do you do?
And invariably what I hear is they don't
do anything except be angry at the world.
And I'm like, do something small.
(13:20:25):
Go work at the--sort food at the--I can't
think of the name of
what they call that place.
They're food banks.
Go to a food bank.
Go to your church.
Find a way to contribute
something to your community.
My way of doing it is by sharing history
and stories and writing and volunteering
at the Historical
Society of Palm Beach County.
(13:20:46):
Those are ways that I try to give back
to--and also what I like to do.
I mean, you're not going to volunteer in
something that you
don't like to do typically.
We've done cleanings in Woodlawn, which
are--I think there's one
coming up where they supply--
they supply the chemicals and things to
wash the headstones.
And we usually get help from Palm Beach
(13:21:07):
Atlantic University.
FP&L has come out and their employees.
So those are great events also to learn
about those because
those headstones need care.
Some of them they get--you know, with our
Florida weather, they
get mildewy and stained.
And so they have special chemicals that
are just made for that.
They're very gentle that will actually
help the headstones look a
(13:21:29):
lot nicer and last longer.
Well, that's fantastic. And we encourage
everybody to get involved.
Yes.
You know, volunteer, as you pointed out,
is the backbone of many things in our
community and a great way to give back to
the place that you live.
So that's fantastic.
And I want to give a shout out.
You've mentioned a couple times the Palm
Beach County Historical Society.
Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah, the Historical Society of Palm
(13:21:49):
Beach County has been around a very, very
long time since the 1930s.
Judge James Knott was one of the key
players in getting it started.
And right now they're
located in the 1916 courthouse.
That's where they have their archives,
what I call the secret chamber of magic,
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where all of the wonderful documents and
photographs are stored.
They also have a facility offsite where
they store a lot of the larger artifacts.
And it's an incredible collection.
And every time I go there, somebody, you
know, I see someone bring in the shoe box
or the photo album or
whatever they have to contribute.
Because I tell people, if you have things
(13:22:34):
like old photographs and artifacts that
are of historical value that tie to our
area, you know, bring them there.
And they will see and assess your
collection to see if it fits their needs.
And it's a place to store things that are
not going to end up in the garbage when
something happens to you.
You know, people who have old letters or
(13:22:55):
things that you may not think have value
of great historical value.
That's with the Elliott family.
I had found some family letters that were
that I was allowed to see.
And I told them, I'm like, please donate
these to an archive.
Because for Mrs. Dewey, when I finally
tracked down her family, I
(13:23:15):
said, who has all her papers?
Who has all her effects?
Oh, they were all lost
in a 1948 house fire.
So I was like, oh, oh, oh, I found them,
but I didn't find them.
So I often think it's like
if she had left some things.
I mean, we're not talking about cleaning
out your garage, but things that are
(13:23:37):
really photographs don't take that much.
And sometimes we get donations that solve
mysteries, like somebody is standing in
front of a house that we've been trying
to figure out where that house was or
what it looked like.
And that's really the thing of the
interest is not necessarily the person,
but maybe it's the house of the street so
that can solve so
many mysteries like that.
(13:23:57):
Sure. I mean, it's what you're describing
is so important, especially in a dynamic,
changing town like West Palm Beach.
The city is reinventing
itself generation by generation.
And it's important for us to do exactly
what you're describing, reaching back and
grabbing a hold of those artifacts and
those memories and preserving them for
future generations so that we remember
(13:24:19):
where we've been as opposed
to just where we're going.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen some aerial
photos and photos taken from tall
buildings in West Palm Beach kind of
looking out in the 50s and 60s.
And it really takes my breath away
because so much has been lost to
development and to high rises and things
where there were simple, beautiful white
(13:24:40):
cottages that just aren't that big of a
part of the city anymore.
But it's evolution. And I get that.
Or even Flagler Drive, people don't know
that that was all filled in.
In the early times when you went south of
the city, all of their yards went
straight into Lake Worth.
Like a little beach.
(13:25:01):
It was like a little beach. And then it
was the time of coconut palms.
It really looked like Tahiti.
Then we had lethal yellowing in the
1970s, which was a coconut disease that
killed so many of the very
old, tall Jamaican coconuts.
And now we have the shorter coconuts and
it looks nice again, but it was those
(13:25:22):
things towered over everything.
But they unfortunately all died of that
terrible disease that hit the coconuts.
We are. We're in a changing community.
And what you're doing to preserve the
past and to capture it so that we have it
to share and to learn from is
so valuable and so important.
And so, you know, we thank you for
(13:25:42):
everything that you're doing and creating
these documents and creating these books
so that there is always a way for us to
reach back to the past and
remember where our city came from.
Yes, that's so important. And West Palm
Beach has a very
special place in my heart.
So it's really like I said, it becomes
the focal point of so much of what I do.
Ginger, thank you. Thank you.
(13:26:03):
And thank you for joining us.
Remember, programs like the Woodlawn
Cemetery Tour can only happen
with the help of volunteers.
There are many opportunities for
volunteers to get
involved in city programs.
You can learn more by visiting the city's
website at wpb.org or call 561-804-4906.
(13:26:25):
The City Center podcast is a production
of the City of West Palm Beach
Department of Communications.
I'm Jerry Marcello. We'll see you soon.
Welcome to the City Center podcast. I'm
Jerry Marcello. As cities like West Palm
Beach continue to change and grow, it is
a challenge to preserve its history.
New structures wipe away the old, taking
with them the memories of when this area
was a small town and a largely
undeveloped frontier.
But there is a place where ties to our
(13:00:43):
city's past live on, and strangely
enough, it is where we remember our dead.
Today, we'll explore Woodlawn Cemetery
and why this place of eternal rest also
serves as a link to West
Palm Beach's rich history.
Next on the City Center
podcast from West Palm Beach.
(13:01:03):
And joining us today is Ginger Peterson,
who is a writer and historian who is also
native to the area. Ginger, welcome.
Thank you. Good to be here.
We're here to talk about history, and
there's no one better I can imagine
having this conversation with West Palm
Beach, even though we are about 135 years
or so old at this point.
(13:01:24):
We have a very rich history. There's an
amazing story between its birth through
Henry Flagler and its growth, and a lot
of amazing stories have taken place here.
It's almost a shame that sometimes people
who are moving here aren't even aware of
some of the fantastic
things that have happened here.
(13:01:44):
You're a historian. Tell us what made you
so interested in history and why West
Palm Beach history is a focus for you.
I always loved history. Even as a child,
growing up in Jupiter, I used to love to
go to see the Du Bois family and some of
their older members.
They always had pioneer coffee once a
year in Jupiter, and I would drag my
(13:02:05):
parents along to it,
not the other way around.
So I always had that penchant for
history. Plus, my family had some deep
history roots in Palm Beach County.
My grandparents ran a tourist attraction
in Boca Raton called Africa USA, which
was kind of an early
version of a lion country safari.
There were no cages, so the animals, not
(13:02:25):
carnivorous, were out and about zebras
and giraffe and elephants and things.
Let's touch on that just for a second
here. It's really zany. Now, it's not
about West Palm Beach, but in Boca Raton,
there was a lion country
safari style animal thing?
(13:02:45):
Yeah, you would drive through on a little
Jeep train that they took you when you
sat in one of the little wagons that were
dragged behind a Jeep, and you would
watch and you could interact somewhat
with the animals, even in that time.
So, yeah, it was open in the 1950s. I
never saw it personally, but I have heard
(13:03:06):
all the stories from my
cousins who grew up there.
Something new for our friends in South
County. Y'all had a thing there that was
a lot like, oh, it's just insane.
The things we learn just by having
conversations and talking about parts of
the past that would never come up in
normal conversation, you
learn about the history.
And I think that's part of what we're
doing here, is rediscovering a very
(13:03:29):
colorful past, not only here in West Palm
Beach, but as far as the entire county is
concerned, so much has happened here.
So much has happened, and I think people,
especially who have come here and made
this their home, don't realize that we do
have a long history.
So back in 2014, we wanted to capture
part of that history in a book, saying
(13:03:50):
why not—the Legendary Locals is a
series that's done by a book company, and
we said why not Legendary
Locals of West Palm Beach?
And it was through the research for the
book that we found ourselves in Woodlawn
one day, looking at where some of the
people that we wrote
about had been interred.
So we said why not do a tour of Woodlawn
and tell these same stories that we tell
(13:04:12):
in the book and tell different ones, and
all of us find—we're
always finding something new.
Even after 10 years, we discover new
stories in Woodlawn.
Something interests you in a tombstone,
or you read something in a paper, and
you're like, "I wonder if they're in
Woodlawn," and sure enough, they are.
And there's very dark stories, and
there's very
wonderful stories in Woodlawn.
(13:04:33):
It was a point where a lot of people from
the 1928 hurricane were buried in a mass
grave because they had no choice.
The people—the disease threat was so
great after that hurricane that they had
to do something as terrible as that.
So it's really quite amazing.
Well, we're going to talk a lot more
about Woodlawn and the cemetery, but I
(13:04:54):
note you were kind enough to bring along
the copy of the book that has
you as one of the co-authors.
I've written quite a few books with Janet
DeVries-Naughton, and we do a lot of our
research together, and
we've done other writings.
So it's always good to have someone to
(13:05:15):
bounce ideas off of when you're writing
and thinking of these things.
That's really great. I'm flipping through
it for the first time, and it's packed
with images, packed with tidbits.
It is a treasure trove of
information about local heroes.
Yeah, local heroes. I know we had a
couple of scoundrels we talked into
because you always have.
That's part of the total community.
(13:05:37):
But the center point is
West Palm Beach in the county.
It always has been for such a long time
as its county seat when
we became a county in 1909,
that it's always been here that things
are centered in the county.
If someone's interested in getting a copy
of this, where can they get it?
It's on Amazon. It's widely available.
(13:05:57):
It's available in
local bookstores as well.
We'll show it on the screen. Legendary
Locals of West Palm Beach
is the title of the book.
Correct. It's West Palm Beach Base Book.
All right. That's very good. I understand
that you have something
else that you're working on.
Just very quickly before
I get into the cemetery.
Yes, I do. It's the story of Dr. Mabel
Elliott, who was a physician following
World War I in
Turkey, Armenia, and Greece.
(13:06:18):
That family has very deep ties to West
Palm Beach, especially
because they had 14 children.
Wow.
Her father, Joseph Elliott, was the
chairman of the committee that formed the
town of West Palm
Beach on November 5, 1894.
So you can't get much more
West Palm Beach than that.
Absolutely.
It's going to be a really incredible
(13:06:39):
story of bravery and heroism that we
don't necessarily
associate many times with women,
but everybody can be a hero.
And when will that book become available?
That'll be coming out in
late summer, early fall.
Okay. So we'll keep an eye out for it,
too. I'm sure it'll be
available on Amazon as well.
It'll be on Amazon and
all the major booksellers.
Okay. So let's talk a
(13:06:59):
little bit about the cemetery.
Now, is Woodlawn the only cemetery in
West Palm Beach, or are there others?
There are others. There's Hillcrest
Cemetery up on Parker.
That's a privately owned cemetery.
But Woodlawn is the only public cemetery,
I believe, in the city of West Palm Beach
that is part of the
(13:07:20):
city's parks department.
And it has been. It was a gift from Henry
Flagler. It
originally belonged to Flagler.
He had paid to have the layout of the
cemetery way back in the late 1800s.
And then that's when the burials began.
Now, it's not West Palm
Beach's first cemetery.
There was a couple of small
cemeteries in the Northwood area.
(13:07:42):
There was one downtown very, very briefly
at Clematis and what we would call Dixie
today, what the pioneers
would know as Poinsettia.
It's like right here where City Hall is.
Yeah, pretty much. A little
bit. Yeah, it was basically here.
And it was very few people interred
because they knew it
(13:08:02):
would be way too small.
So then there was a much larger cemetery
where the Norton Museum is located that
was called Lakeside.
And that was also privately owned by the
Lake Worth Pioneer
Association, which still exists.
And they had hundreds of burials there.
Most of the people were moved over to
(13:08:22):
Woodlawn when the association decided to
deed that property to the
city because they couldn't.
They didn't have the
funds to maintain it. Gotcha.
There are still people interred under the
Norton, at least 40.
There are also a few tombstones in a
crawl space under the Norton.
So, you know, whether the place is
(13:08:43):
haunted, I mean, some people think it is.
I'm not, you know, I always stress to
people we're not doing a ghost tour. No.
This is a very dignified storytelling
tour of the people that
are there in Woodlawn.
So we've had ghost hunters on our tours,
but that's not the focus of what we do.
And I think that's completely valid.
(13:09:05):
I mean, it's a lot of fun to tell the
ghost stories and to, you know, it gets
to be Halloween time and
you go out and do stuff.
But you know what? The real value of what
you provide and the memorial quality of
the cemetery is, again,
a reminder of the lives that were lived
here in West Palm Beach and the people
who came here as
(13:09:27):
pioneers or as early residents.
And looking back at their lives and how
life was for them and how radically
different it is for us
today is like a history book.
You open it up and you can learn so much.
I had the opportunity to go on the tour
that you're describing just recently.
And what I discovered was so special for
(13:09:49):
me was instead of saying, OK, well, here
is this location or here is this marker.
A lot of the stories you told were very
personal and about people at different
moments in the city's history and how
they lived and what happened to them.
And it really brought it to life.
Yeah, you know, and I think
that's really what we did.
(13:10:10):
I mean, I always think as humans are the
thing that makes us to me different than
any other creatures is we tell stories.
It is the basis of so much of what we do.
And I tell people, if you want to be
remembered, tell your story.
Tell your story to someone because
everybody has a great story
and they just don't know it.
And I know I was surprised to learn that
(13:10:30):
we had some fairly, you know, fairly,
fairly old markers in the cemetery.
I believe one of the very first stops we
stopped, we were looking at a veteran
that was alive during the Civil War or
active during the Civil War.
And that's, you know, you don't think of
West Palm Beach, you think 50s, you think
40s, you don't jump all
(13:10:50):
the way back into the 1890s.
Yeah. And there are several people from
that time period and
people born as early.
I've never seen a 1700s, but there are
several like 1810, 1812 people that were
born at that time that
are interred at Woodlawn.
That's that's amazing.
So once again, you mentioned that I think
(13:11:13):
I use the term that there
are many heroes located there.
You said that there
could possibly be villains.
What sort of villains could we possibly
have in the cemetery?
Well, there are there are villains and
there's tragic stories and there are
empty graves, the most famous of which
belongs to Judge
Chillingworth and his wife.
(13:11:33):
There is a nice, very
nice headstone there.
And I always tell people this is an empty
grave because their bodies were never
recovered after they were killed by
basically the hit men who drowned them
somewhere out in the ocean.
So those kinds of tragedies.
But, you know, villains, if you want to
call them that someone who was kind of
(13:11:56):
someone who killed someone like Lena
Clark, the murdering postmistress of West
Palm Beach, who served time in a insane
asylum for two years.
But she came out after two years after
killing a man and stealing thirty two
thousand dollars of government money.
So it's all those kinds of twists and
(13:12:17):
turns and crazy tales that you stumble
across one day that I don't even I've
never gone looking for
a story that I found.
It somehow just just bounces into me.
And in the strangest ways with with Lena
Clark, my parents first
house was on Lake Clark.
So I was curious.
I'm like, oh, I wonder who
like Clark is named after.
So I googled Clark and her story was like
(13:12:39):
the third link girl murderer.
I'm like, what is this about?
So that's how sometimes things happen
with the Elliott book.
Somebody put something
on Facebook about her.
And I was like, oh,
I've never heard of her.
How did that happen?
So it's very strange how
how things like that happen.
And even with Birdsville, Mendoui, that
we wrote a book about pioneering Palm
(13:13:00):
Beach, which was a true West Palm Beach
story about a woman who was a writer, had
founded the town of Boynton and had this
beautiful estate called Ben Travato.
Well, one day someone emails me and said,
I think they're theming
a hotel around your book.
I'm like, what?
And she's like, it's the Ben.
And so the Ben Hotel is about Birdsville,
(13:13:23):
Mendoui and her dogs.
And there's a copy of
her book in every room.
And I was like, well, I
never saw that coming.
And they really wanted.
I said, why did you guys pick that?
The designers of the hotel, they said
they wanted something that was uniquely
West Palm Beach, not Palm Beach, not
Flagler, something
that was just Palm Beach.
And they kind of they
stumbled across her.
(13:13:45):
So I think it's important because West
Palm Beach has always had a little bit of
a little brother syndrome.
And it was always the service town to
Palm Beach and all these kind of little
bit derogatory redheaded stepchild.
And it's not.
It's a wonderful city.
And it is like you
said, it is evolved in time.
It is evolving again.
(13:14:05):
And it will evolve 100 years from now
when we're all gone.
It's just the way things are.
I call it the layers of history.
But I like to respect what was because I
think it's interesting.
I don't want those people to be forgotten
no more than we want to be forgotten.
We'd be losing color.
We'd be losing part of part of the fabric
that makes this this community so
(13:14:27):
interesting and so different.
And it's important that we have the
ability to capture this through your
writings and the folks that you work with
who are also involved with with history
and reclaiming the history.
That would otherwise be lost.
And so it's really, really very valuable
and really, really great.
Again, you know, we talked about heroes
(13:14:49):
and people who had less
than heroic histories.
And I know that the the the the Judge
Chillingworth story that
you mentioned is astoundingly.
I mean, why it's not a major movie
somewhere that we've
never figured that out.
They've done two documentaries, both, you
know, national productions.
But the fact that it's never
(13:15:09):
been even written as a novel.
They did the podcast on
it, which was like 12 parts.
And they did a nice job on that.
But to me, there's you know, it's a very
it's a very disturbing
story for so many reasons.
It is a very disturbing story.
And I challenge folks
who are listening to this.
If you don't know about the story of the
Chillingworth, it's
spelled like it sounds.
Go ahead and start to start googling it.
(13:15:31):
Find out more about it.
It is absolutely breathtaking.
The story that that happened
here in the fifties that took.
Yeah, it's very disturbing.
And they did an incredible job of what
they had in the podcast of finding the
original tapes that they did.
And and really giving some
of the details of the story.
There you are.
(13:15:52):
Very striking.
Another party, even though it's a very
dark part of our West Palm Beach history,
it is it is an amazing bit of color.
And it's it's it's a
stunning story to get a hold of.
But we're talking about the cemetery.
Now, you are clearly expert in the people
there, and the history of the of the
(13:16:12):
folks who are part of the cemetery.
Is there anything that is a standout to
you, something that you find
inspirational that you'd like to share as
far as one of the people
that are interred there?
Inspirational.
I've always been very taken with Guy
Metcalfe because he was a character and a
half and really
(13:16:33):
believed so much in our area.
He was instrumental in
having the county formed.
He was postmaster of West Palm Beach.
He was school
superintendent for the town.
Ran a newspaper that captured so much of
the beautiful early history of West Palm
Beach in the whole area.
And so many people
know nothing about him.
(13:16:54):
He ended tragically, too, by suicide.
But his story kind of stopped so abruptly
that I don't think I've tried so many
times to reach out to his family because
I volunteer at the Historical Society.
They have almost nothing on him.
Literally one photograph and then one
photograph taken from the newspaper.
That's it.
(13:17:15):
And so, you know, he was
such a colorful character.
And his story, because it just ends so
abruptly with him that I just thought
there could be more about him somehow.
But so he's always been one of my heroes
for early county history.
That's really, really neat.
So I'm sure there's a lot of people who
(13:17:35):
are now interested in
taking part in one of the tours.
Is that something that people can where
can they reach out to
find out more about?
So we do the tours from we do them
October and November.
And then we do January, February, March
and April, because then we hit the summer
and we hit mosquitoes and rain and
(13:17:55):
thunder and lightning.
So it just became we couldn't do them.
So if they reach out to the Palm Beach
County Parks or I'm sorry, the West Palm
Beach Parks Department,
they have their Facebook page.
And they also have we also have a
Woodlawn Cemetery Facebook
page with the information.
It's a very easy sign up.
It's free.
We just do reservations through a system
(13:18:18):
called Eventbrite, only because we don't
want too many people.
The first time we did the tour, we didn't
have any reservations
and 150 people showed up.
And it was way too many because we can't
accommodate that many.
It's too hard to group to move a group.
We usually have between 40 and 60.
That's a good number.
(13:18:39):
And so they open up reservations not for
the whole season, but
one month at a time.
So right now, as this is being taped in
February, the March
reservations are open.
So we still have March and
April to do for this year.
So to take part, the suggestion would be,
first of all, go check on Facebook and
(13:18:59):
see the group that's involved.
It's called Woodlawn Cemetery Tours.
And it's there as a Facebook page or just
simply go to the West Palm
Beach Parks Department website.
And they have the link to the Eventbrite
sign up, which is free.
You don't have to put in any credit card
or anything like that.
It's just a crowd control system.
(13:19:19):
Sure.
And for people listening,
the city website is wpb.org.
You can go ahead and just--there's easy
navigation to find your
way to the park section.
And you'll see information
that will help you there.
So that's terrific.
We have an opportunity a couple of
different ways for
people to get involved.
And that's really, really neat.
So I understand that you
are a volunteer, right?
(13:19:41):
Yes.
So that's terrific.
And thank you for
doing what you're doing.
It's interesting because I think you're
one of the very first people we've had on
our program that wasn't
actually a city employee.
So congratulations.
A volunteer, yeah.
How is it being a volunteer?
I love volunteering.
I think it's giving back to our community
is a way that we don't really consider.
(13:20:03):
People may not like the way
the country's going or whatever.
And the first thing I say to someone like
that, what do you do locally?
Do you work at a shelter?
Do you go to a retirement home and talk
to lonely old people?
I'm like, what do you do?
And invariably what I hear is they don't
do anything except be angry at the world.
And I'm like, do something small.
(13:20:25):
Go work at the--sort food at the--I can't
think of the name of
what they call that place.
They're food banks.
Go to a food bank.
Go to your church.
Find a way to contribute
something to your community.
My way of doing it is by sharing history
and stories and writing and volunteering
at the Historical
Society of Palm Beach County.
(13:20:46):
Those are ways that I try to give back
to--and also what I like to do.
I mean, you're not going to volunteer in
something that you
don't like to do typically.
We've done cleanings in Woodlawn, which
are--I think there's one
coming up where they supply--
they supply the chemicals and things to
wash the headstones.
And we usually get help from Palm Beach
(13:21:07):
Atlantic University.
FP&L has come out and their employees.
So those are great events also to learn
about those because
those headstones need care.
Some of them they get--you know, with our
Florida weather, they
get mildewy and stained.
And so they have special chemicals that
are just made for that.
They're very gentle that will actually
help the headstones look a
(13:21:29):
lot nicer and last longer.
Well, that's fantastic. And we encourage
everybody to get involved.
Yes.
You know, volunteer, as you pointed out,
is the backbone of many things in our
community and a great way to give back to
the place that you live.
So that's fantastic.
And I want to give a shout out.
You've mentioned a couple times the Palm
Beach County Historical Society.
Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah, the Historical Society of Palm
(13:21:49):
Beach County has been around a very, very
long time since the 1930s.
Judge James Knott was one of the key
players in getting it started.
And right now they're
located in the 1916 courthouse.
That's where they have their archives,
what I call the secret chamber of magic,
(13:22:12):
where all of the wonderful documents and
photographs are stored.
They also have a facility offsite where
they store a lot of the larger artifacts.
And it's an incredible collection.
And every time I go there, somebody, you
know, I see someone bring in the shoe box
or the photo album or
whatever they have to contribute.
Because I tell people, if you have things
(13:22:34):
like old photographs and artifacts that
are of historical value that tie to our
area, you know, bring them there.
And they will see and assess your
collection to see if it fits their needs.
And it's a place to store things that are
not going to end up in the garbage when
something happens to you.
You know, people who have old letters or
(13:22:55):
things that you may not think have value
of great historical value.
That's with the Elliott family.
I had found some family letters that were
that I was allowed to see.
And I told them, I'm like, please donate
these to an archive.
Because for Mrs. Dewey, when I finally
tracked down her family, I
(13:23:15):
said, who has all her papers?
Who has all her effects?
Oh, they were all lost
in a 1948 house fire.
So I was like, oh, oh, oh, I found them,
but I didn't find them.
So I often think it's like
if she had left some things.
I mean, we're not talking about cleaning
out your garage, but things that are
(13:23:37):
really photographs don't take that much.
And sometimes we get donations that solve
mysteries, like somebody is standing in
front of a house that we've been trying
to figure out where that house was or
what it looked like.
And that's really the thing of the
interest is not necessarily the person,
but maybe it's the house of the street so
that can solve so
many mysteries like that.
(13:23:57):
Sure. I mean, it's what you're describing
is so important, especially in a dynamic,
changing town like West Palm Beach.
The city is reinventing
itself generation by generation.
And it's important for us to do exactly
what you're describing, reaching back and
grabbing a hold of those artifacts and
those memories and preserving them for
future generations so that we remember
(13:24:19):
where we've been as opposed
to just where we're going.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen some aerial
photos and photos taken from tall
buildings in West Palm Beach kind of
looking out in the 50s and 60s.
And it really takes my breath away
because so much has been lost to
development and to high rises and things
where there were simple, beautiful white
(13:24:40):
cottages that just aren't that big of a
part of the city anymore.
But it's evolution. And I get that.
Or even Flagler Drive, people don't know
that that was all filled in.
In the early times when you went south of
the city, all of their yards went
straight into Lake Worth.
Like a little beach.
(13:25:01):
It was like a little beach. And then it
was the time of coconut palms.
It really looked like Tahiti.
Then we had lethal yellowing in the
1970s, which was a coconut disease that
killed so many of the very
old, tall Jamaican coconuts.
And now we have the shorter coconuts and
it looks nice again, but it was those
(13:25:22):
things towered over everything.
But they unfortunately all died of that
terrible disease that hit the coconuts.
We are. We're in a changing community.
And what you're doing to preserve the
past and to capture it so that we have it
to share and to learn from is
so valuable and so important.
And so, you know, we thank you for
(13:25:42):
everything that you're doing and creating
these documents and creating these books
so that there is always a way for us to
reach back to the past and
remember where our city came from.
Yes, that's so important. And West Palm
Beach has a very
special place in my heart.
So it's really like I said, it becomes
the focal point of so much of what I do.
Ginger, thank you. Thank you.
(13:26:03):
And thank you for joining us.
Remember, programs like the Woodlawn
Cemetery Tour can only happen
with the help of volunteers.
There are many opportunities for
volunteers to get
involved in city programs.
You can learn more by visiting the city's
website at wpb.org or call 561-804-4906.
(13:26:25):
The City Center podcast is a production
of the City of West Palm Beach
Department of Communications.
I'm Jerry Marcello. We'll see you soon.
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.