Rosemary Cemetery Project

Sarasota, Florida

The Rosemary Cemetery Project is a collaboration of New College of Florida and the Sarasota Historical Society’s Rosemary Cemetery Committee. The Rosemary Cemetery Committee has been working to preserve the cemetery since the mid 1980s with the goal of putting this pioneer cemetery on the National Register of Historic Places. The committee has done many things for the cemetery in the way of maintenance and restoration, but they have been unable to complete a survey of the cemetery, a major piece of the application packet for the National Register.

During the January 2002, NCF Professor Uzi Baram, and a group of eight students took up the cause of the Rosemary Cemetery. The students surveyed and recorded of all the grave markers. The students worked in pairs to record a quadrant of the cemetery. They took detailed measurements, recorded the condition of the vaults and markers, and made drawings of them. This paper record, as well as black and white photographs of each gravestone, provides a permanent record of the cemetery.  A future researcher will have all the information about the cemetery without even having to visit it. The survey also centralized the scattered records of the cemetery, which are either lost or nonexistent.

Sarasota is an interesting place with lots of history, but because it has a great deal of population movement, not only in the present but historically, the history is not in the foreground. The cemetery is a tangible landmark that brings this history to light.

The Rosemary Cemetery was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 2003 as Site #03001143

History of Rosemary Cemetery  

Lot Map for the Cemetery

Views of the Cemetery

Links for the study of cemeteries

Back to Public Archaeology in Sarasota

Created by Carrie Todd, Maintained by Uzi Baram