Collection: Evergreen Cemetery - Gainesville

In February of 1856, the ground now known as Evergreen Cemetery received its first burial from the newly named community of Gainesville, Florida. The infant daughter of a well-to-do cotton merchant and landowner James Tilatha Thomas and his first wife, Elizabeth Jane Hall Thomas, died at the age of 10 days. They laid her to rest in a place of serene natural beauty beneath a young cedar tree, roughly in the center of vast acreage owned by Thomas that extended from Boulware Springs north to present-day Depot Avenue. Eight months later, in October 1856, Elizabeth died at the age of 40 years and Thomas buried her in the same grave as their infant daughter. Thus, the grave is a double grave, and is marked by a rare and elegantly simple headstone carved by W.A. White, a well-known stonemason from Charleston.

In 1866, Thomas sold the entire parcel of 720 acres to Watson Porter and William K. Cessna for $6000, reserving roughly one acre around the double grave for a graveyard that remai