Lincoln Memorial Park, African-American cemetery in Brownsville, Miami, Florida, USA
Lincoln Memorial Park is a historic African-American cemetery in the Brownsville neighborhood of unincorporated Miami-Dade County, Florida. It was first used as a graveyard in 1924 on land owned by F.B. Miller. The cemetery uses above-ground burial style, with concrete sarcophagi, common in low-lying areas prone to flooding. It is enclosed and has sections A and B.
Lincoln Memorial Park was first used as a graveyard in 1924 on land owned by F.B. Miller, a white realtor. In 1929 it was purchased by Kelsey Pharr, a black funeral director from South Carolina who had studied embalming in Boston and moved to Miami in the early 1900s. After Pharr died in 1964, the cemetery passed to his goddaughter Elyn Johnson and then to her niece Jessica Williams, who in 2017 partnered with the Coral Gables Museum on restoration. In December 2020 Jessie Wooden bought the derelict Sections A and B and is interring new burials.
Kelsey Pharr, a South Carolina-born embalmer who served as consul to Liberia, bought the burial ground in 1929 and ran it until his death in 1964; his grave is here. Among those buried are H.E.S. Reeves, founder of the Miami Times, and Gwen Cherry, Florida's first African American woman state legislator. Since 2017 the Coral Gables Museum has partnered in restoration work.
The cemetery is accessible to the public during daytime hours and sits within the residential Brownsville neighborhood of Miami. Visitors can navigate the grounds via looped paths through northern and southern sections that pass near the manager's residence near the entrance.
The above-ground concrete sarcophagi follow a burial style common at or below sea level and prone to flooding, as at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery a few blocks away and Charlotte Jane Memorial Park in Coconut Grove. Kelsey Pharr, who bought the grounds in 1929, was a South Carolina native who studied embalming in Boston and served as consul to Liberia.
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