Evergreen Cemetery (Ocala)

The City of Ocala reserved land for a public cemetery on July 8, 1850 — just two years after Marion County was organized and roughly a decade after the end of the Second Seminole War that cleared the region for American settlement. The burial ground thus begins at the founding moment of Ocala itself, and nearly every significant figure in the city's nineteenth-century history eventually came to rest within its boundaries.

The cemetery's layout reflected the racial segregation of antebellum and postbellum Florida. A low wall divided the grounds between a western section for white residents and an eastern section for enslaved individuals, free Black residents, and later freedpeople and their descendants. This arrangement was standard practice throughout the American South. In 1965 the Progressive Community Association formally acknowledged the eastern section's significance by placing a commemorative plaque at its gate, renaming it the Rueben Mitchell Memorial Garden, with an inscription dedicating it 'In memory of the negro slaves and all early settlers of Ocala for whom this cemetery is the final resting place.'

Among the more than 500 people buried at Evergreen are: Robert Bullock, a Confederate Brigadier General who commanded at the Battle of Chickamauga and the Atlanta Campaign before later serving in Congress; John Franklin Dunn, for whom Dunnellon, Florida is named; Benjamin Waldo, a physician who gave his name to the town of Waldo; Ebenezer Harris, who founded Citra; and Ocala's first mayor. Civil War veterans from both Union and Confederate service are represented, as are soldiers from nearly every other major American conflict through the twentieth century.