Huguenot Cemetery

Huguenot Cemetery buried the dead the Catholics wouldn't take. When yellow fever hit St. Augustine in 1821 — the year Florida became American — the only cemetery in town was Tolomato, restricted to Catholics. The city council opened the public burying ground outside the north gate that September; the epidemic was killing thirteen or fourteen people a day, and while four marked graves survive from the outbreak, local accounts describe mass burials whose numbers were never counted.

The name is a misnomer that stuck — 'Huguenot' meant simply 'non-Catholic' in a town that had been Spanish and Catholic for 256 years. The Protestant newcomers of the territorial era filled the ground: the city ran it until 1832, then the Presbyterians until 1884, when overcrowding closed it. The stones include Charleston carvers' work — the Walkers, Richard Steele — on box tombs that preserve the whole nineteenth-century Protestant population of the oldest city.

The Huguenot connection is real but earlier — the cedar trees planted in the 1950s memorialize the actual Huguenots Menéndez massacred at Matanzas Inlet in 1565, fourteen miles south. The cemetery holds their spiritual descendants — the Protestants a Catholic city had to make room for when the fever came.

Huguenot Cemetery is the archive's non-Catholic file — the 1821 public burying ground outside St. Augustine's north gate, opened for the yellow fever dead the Catholic cemetery wouldn't take, holding the town's Protestants for sixty-three years.