Ponceannah Cemetery History

The History of Ponceannah Cemetery

A Place Where a Lost Florida Community Still Lives

Along County Road 42, beneath the pines, oaks and palmettos of eastern Lake County, lies a cemetery whose history reaches back to the years before Lake County itself existed. Ponceannah Cemetery traces its beginnings to 1860, when this part of Florida was still a sparsely settled frontier of pine woods, hammocks, creeks, farms and small communities connected by sandy trails.

At the time, there was no Lake County, no paved County Road 42 and no Ocala National Forest as we know it today. One of the small communities scattered through this landscape was called Ponceannah. The settlement eventually disappeared. Its post office closed, its stores vanished, its houses disappeared into the landscape, and many of its old fields and roads returned to forest. The cemetery, however, survived.

More than 160 years later, Ponceannah Cemetery remains an active burial ground and one of the most tangible surviving links to the pioneer communities that once occupied this corner of Central Florida.

Before There Was a Cemetery

The countryside surrounding present-day Paisley looked very different during the middle of the nineteenth century. Settlement was scattered, roads were primitive or nonexistent, and people moved between small communities by horseback, wagon, riverboat and forest trail.

Across what would eventually become eastern Lake County were communities with names such as Ponceannah, Bayview, Lightwood Camp, Kismet, Acron, Fullerville, Hawkinsville and Crow's Bluff. Most would eventually disappear. These were rarely towns in the modern sense. A settlement might consist of several homesteads, a sawmill or other industry, a general store, perhaps a church or school, and trails connecting neighboring families.

Historical accounts place the beginnings of Lightwood Camp around 1854, when families arriving from the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama began settling in the region. Another community developed at Bayview, associated with pioneer families including the Lees, Kirklands, Dykeses and Brantleys. From this same frontier landscape emerged the small settlement of Ponceannah.

The Settlement of Ponceannah

Historical accounts place the beginnings of Ponceannah in the 1850s. Two men frequently associated with its early development are Ellison H. Crow and the Rev. Louis Ballard. The settlement grew around a sawmill operated by Robert L. Kirkland, and Crow and Kirkland later operated a general store together.

Names such as Crow, Kirkland, Brantley, Stokes and McEwen would remain connected with the region for generations. Ellison Crow had previously lived with his family near Crow's Bluff, an early settlement on the St. Johns River, before homesteading in the Ponceannah area.

The settlement became established enough to have its own identity on maps and, eventually, its own United States post office. An 1890 map published by George F. Cram still shows Ponceannah as a named community in Central Florida.

Today, the town itself is gone, but the State of Florida continues to recognize its historical existence. Florida Forest Service land-management records identify Ponceannah as archaeological site LA02780 and classify it as a historic ghost town. Ponceannah may have vanished from modern road maps, but it has not vanished from Florida's historical record.

The Crow Burial Grounds

The story of Ponceannah Cemetery begins with Ellison H. Crow. In 1860, Crow donated land for use as a community burial ground. It became known as the Crow Burial Grounds.

The surviving historical account identifies Newman Brantley, buried in 1861, as the first documented adult burial. There is also a long-standing tradition that a child was buried on the property in 1860, which would make that the earliest known burial, although surviving records have not confirmed the child's identity.

Like many rural nineteenth-century cemeteries, Ponceannah exists at the intersection of written records, family memory and community tradition.

Not every grave received a permanent stone marker. Wooden markers decayed, paper records disappeared, families moved away, and some graves may have been marked only by stones, plants or other features that were later lost. The cemetery visible today may therefore preserve only part of the story of those buried here during its earliest decades.

Before Lake County Existed

Ponceannah Cemetery is older than Lake County. Lake County was created in 1887, when the Florida Legislature formed it from portions of Orange and Sumter counties. By that time, people had already been buried at Ponceannah for approximately 27 years.

The cemetery therefore belongs to an earlier chapter of Central Florida history, when county boundaries, communities and transportation routes were still changing rapidly. When the first graves were dug here, someone describing Ponceannah's location would not have said “Lake County,” because Lake County did not yet exist.

That fact gives the cemetery's oldest monuments particular historical importance. They record people who lived here before the modern political geography surrounding the cemetery had even been created.

Mail Came Through the Forest

One of the most revealing glimpses of daily life in early Ponceannah comes from the history of the mail. Before Ponceannah had its own post office, mail serving the area was reportedly brought by boat to Hawkinsville, a settlement along the St. Johns River. From there, a mail carrier traveled inland on horseback through communities including Adamsville, Ponceannah and Bayview.

Historical accounts describe the journey as a roughly 50-mile round trip requiring approximately three days. W.C.G. Kilgore is identified as carrying the route in 1859, with another carrier named Jackson later handling the service. Portions of what is now Fishermans Road are believed to follow part of that old mail trail.

This was the world in which the Crow Burial Grounds began. There were no automobiles and few established roads. Travel was measured not in minutes, but often in hours or days. The earliest funeral processions to this ground would have arrived on foot, horseback or by wagon along the same network of forest trails.

Ponceannah Gets a Post Office

As the community grew, it acquired one of the institutions that formally established a settlement's identity in nineteenth-century America: a post office.

In 1877, the United States established a post office at Ponceannah, with E.H. Crow serving as postmaster. Postal records indicate that the Ponceannah post office operated from approximately 1877 to 1887.

Period postal directories listed Ponceannah among Florida's official post offices. An 1882–83 postal directory identifies Ponceannah, Florida, as a post office in Orange County, reflecting the political boundaries that existed before Lake County was created.

This is important because it establishes that Ponceannah was not merely a name later attached to a cemetery. It was a recognized community with residents, businesses, mail service and a place on maps. At one time, people elsewhere could simply address a letter to Ponceannah, Florida.

The Community Begins to Fade

In 1887, the Ponceannah post office closed. That same year, Lake County was created. Other small communities in the region were experiencing similar changes, and the post offices serving Kismet and Acron disappeared by 1890.

As transportation improved and populations shifted, many tiny rural settlements could no longer support independent stores, schools or post offices. Mail increasingly flowed through larger surviving communities, one of which was Paisley.

Paisley retained a post office, church, school, stores and mills and gradually became the geographic identity most strongly associated with this area. Historical accounts describe Paisley as having a schoolhouse, general store, sawmills, a gristmill and a cotton gin. Those institutions helped Paisley survive while communities such as Ponceannah, Kismet and Acron gradually disappeared.

The name Ponceannah nevertheless remained alive. It remained carved into cemetery stones, preserved in family histories and attached to the burial ground established by Ellison Crow decades earlier. In a very real sense, the cemetery eventually outlived the town it had been created to serve.

The Civil War Generation

The cemetery's earliest decades overlap directly with the Civil War and Reconstruction. One local account preserves the story of Elbert Duncan Dykes, a Confederate soldier released from a prisoner-of-war camp at Waldo on May 20, 1865.

According to the story, Dykes traveled toward the Ponceannah area along an old forest trail and encountered a young woman plowing a field. He reportedly offered to finish the plowing if she would prepare him something to eat.

The woman was Jane Elizabeth Kirkland, daughter of pioneers Robert L. Kirkland and Martha B. Conner Kirkland. Elbert Dykes and Jane Kirkland married on September 6, 1865.

Stories such as this give human scale to Ponceannah's history. These were not simply names on stones. They were men returning from war, women working family farms, parents raising children, and families clearing land and building homes in a remote part of Florida.

From Crow Burial Grounds to Ponceannah Cemetery

As the burial ground grew, local residents took steps to provide for its future. On November 6, 1891, trustees of the cemetery association signed Articles of Incorporation.

Historical accounts identify the trustees as J.C. Hethcox, G.H. Gardiner, J.J. McEwen, Joshua T. Crow and R.W. Stokes. The documents were witnessed by Alfred D. Hancock and L.J. Owens, and the association's mailing address was established at Paisley.

By this period, the old name Crow Burial Grounds had given way to the name that survives today: Ponceannah Cemetery.

The new name reflected an important change. What began as land donated by a pioneer family had become the burial ground of an entire community.

The Families of Ponceannah

A walk through an old rural cemetery often reveals the same surnames repeated across decades, and Ponceannah is no exception.

Rural cemeteries were family histories written across the land. Parents were buried beside children, brothers and sisters occupied neighboring plots, married families connected one group of stones with another, and children sometimes returned decades later to be buried beside their parents.

The pioneer families represented at Ponceannah were often connected not merely by geography but through marriage. Names including Crow, Kirkland, Brantley, Stokes, McEwen, Call, Perkins, Fuller and many others became part of an interconnected community.

The cemetery therefore preserves far more than a collection of individual biographies. It preserves a network of relationships among families who populated the vanished settlements surrounding Paisley.

A Trail Becomes County Road 42

The modern road outside the cemetery did not exist when the first graves were dug. For decades, people reached Ponceannah along trails.

In 1918, the Ponceannah Cemetery Association exchanged tracts of land with members of the Crow family. The exchange provided the cemetery with frontage on the principal trail passing through the area, a trail that eventually developed into the roadway we know today as County Road 42.

The timing is notable because Lake County's first paved roads were constructed only during the early twentieth century. What now appears to be an ordinary county highway therefore follows a transportation corridor rooted in the much older network of pioneer roads and trails.

Florida cultural-resource inventories also recognize County Road 42 as a historic linear resource, LA04921, in the area surrounding Seminole State Forest. Visitors arriving at Ponceannah today are therefore moving through a landscape containing several layers of history: the old community, the cemetery and the road itself.

Jessie Call Perkins

One person deserves particular recognition in the history of Ponceannah Cemetery: Jessie Call Perkins.

Jessie was the daughter of Charles Henry Call and Henrietta Catherine Gross Call. She was also the sister of Flora Call Disney and therefore the aunt of Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney. But Jessie's importance to Ponceannah has little to do with the later fame of her nephew.

She was an important member of the local community in her own right. Jessie worked as a teacher in Lake County schools and eventually served as principal of Eustis High School. Her husband, Albert Perkins, became Paisley's postmaster in 1902 and served in that position until his death in 1935. Jessie then became Paisley's postmaster herself and continued serving until 1946.

She was also deeply involved with the cemetery. A plaque at Ponceannah records that Jessie served as Secretary/Treasurer of the Ponceannah Cemetery Association from 1927 through 1946.

The Six-Sided Gazebo

In 1923, Jessie Call Perkins raised money for the construction of Ponceannah Cemetery's distinctive six-sided gazebo. The surviving cemetery plaque records her role in the project.

Over the generations, the gazebo served several purposes. It functioned as a chapel, meeting place, gathering area and shaded place for cemetery association members to rest during work days.

More than a century later, it remains one of the cemetery's most recognizable structures. Its importance goes beyond architecture because the gazebo represents the way Ponceannah survived.

There was no large institution maintaining these grounds through most of their history. Local people did the work. They gathered for cemetery work days, cleared vegetation, repaired structures, cared for graves, raised money and maintained records. The gazebo stands as a monument not only to Jessie Perkins, but to generations of community stewardship.

The Kirkland Well

Near the gazebo is another feature that is much easier to overlook. An old cemetery well was constructed in the mid-1950s by Maceo and Ruth Kirkland.

The well is no longer used and has been sealed. Rather than simply erase it from the grounds, however, it was preserved as a tribute to the Kirklands and their years of service to the cemetery.

It is a small object with a large meaning. Historic cemeteries survive because somebody performs countless ordinary tasks: cutting grass, removing fallen branches, clearing brush from old stones, repairing gates, keeping records and remembering the people buried there. The Kirkland well honors people who did that work.

The Fuller Family and Fullerville

Ponceannah continued to receive new families long after its pioneer period. One particularly poignant story is that of the Fuller family.

The Fullers moved from Saskatchewan, Canada, to Florida in 1920 and settled approximately five miles east of Paisley. Only about ten days after arriving, their daughter Thelma died.

The family purchased a block of cemetery lots at Ponceannah and buried her here. They later established a general store with gasoline pumps and living quarters, and Niles Fuller named the surrounding settlement Fullerville.

The store reportedly served the community until 1946. Fullerville eventually disappeared as a distinct settlement, but the Fuller graves remained. They preserve another nearly forgotten place-name from eastern Lake County history.

The Call Family Comes to Florida

One of Ponceannah Cemetery's best-known family stories begins in 1884, when members of the Call and Disney families moved from Kansas to Florida.

Charles Henry Call and his wife, Henrietta Catherine Gross Call, settled with their family in the Paisley area. Historical-marker information places the Call family home roughly one mile north of Paisley.

Their children included Flora Call and Jessie Call, along with other members of the family whose lives became intertwined with the history of Paisley and Ponceannah.

The Calls were part of the same world as the other settlers represented here: small communities, rural farms, unpaved roads, postal routes, general stores, schools and family cemeteries. Long before the Disney name became synonymous with Central Florida, the family was already connected to this landscape.

The Call Monument

Near the northeastern portion of Ponceannah Cemetery stands one of the cemetery's most visually distinctive monuments. Designed to resemble a tree trunk carved in stone, it marks the graves of Charles Henry Call, March 22, 1823 to January 6, 1890, and Henrietta Catherine Gross Call, July 23, 1837 to February 21, 1910.

They were the maternal grandparents of Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney.

Charles Call was originally buried elsewhere. Historical accounts state that after Henrietta died in 1910, their daughter Jessie arranged to have Charles removed from Maple Grove Cemetery, near the vanished settlement of Kismet, and reinterred beside Henrietta at Ponceannah.

Their shared monument now stands roughly 140 meters north of the cemetery entrance, near the northeast portion of the grounds, and is one of Ponceannah's most frequently visited gravesites.

Before Disney World, There Was Lake County

The Call family's presence at Ponceannah creates one of the cemetery's most unexpected historical connections.

Charles and Henrietta's daughter Flora Call married Elias Disney on January 1, 1888, in the nearby community of Kismet. Kismet was another small Lake County settlement that has since disappeared.

Flora and Elias eventually left Florida and raised a family whose children included Herbert Arthur Disney, Raymond Arnold Disney, Roy Oliver Disney, Walter Elias Disney and Ruth Flora Disney Beecher. Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901.

Almost eighty years after Flora and Elias married in rural Lake County, Walt and Roy Disney would return to Central Florida as the driving forces behind a project that changed the region forever.

The contrast is remarkable. Long before theme parks, hotels and millions of visitors transformed Central Florida, members of the Disney and Call families lived among the small settlements surrounding Paisley. They traveled dirt roads, farmed, taught school, operated post offices and buried family members at Ponceannah.

Kismet, Acron and the Lost Homesteads

The Call and Disney story also connects Ponceannah to two other vanished communities: Kismet and Acron.

Both once existed in the countryside surrounding Paisley. Both had post offices, and both eventually disappeared. Historical accounts and markers associate the Call and Disney families with homesteads in this landscape.

Old unpaved roads and forest trails still extend toward areas once occupied by those early homesteads. Modern visitors driving through the forest may see little to suggest that homes and farms once stood there.

That is characteristic of this part of Florida. Wooden houses decay rapidly, old fields grow over, and sandy roads disappear beneath vegetation. Within only a few generations, a settlement can become almost invisible. Ponceannah Cemetery survived because graves created a reason for families to keep returning.

Walt Disney and Aunt Jessie

Walt Disney's connection to Paisley did not end with his mother's childhood here. His aunt Jessie Call Perkins remained in the community.

Historical-marker accounts state that Walt visited Jessie in Paisley as both a child and an adult. Other historical sources document the continuing relationship between Walt and his Florida relatives, including later photographs and correspondence.

Because evidence concerning some of the earliest childhood visits is less complete than the evidence for later family connections, those stories are best treated with appropriate historical caution.

What is clear is that the family connection endured. Jessie lived until 1956, long enough to see her nephew become nationally famous, and photographs survive of Jessie with Walt late in her life.

Today, visitors to Ponceannah sometimes leave small Mickey Mouse figures, Disney memorabilia and other tokens near the Call monument. It is an unusual modern tradition in a cemetery whose story began more than four decades before Walt Disney was born.

A Note About the Historical Marker

A historical marker near the Call graves contains a small but noteworthy error. The marker gives 1900 as the year of Walt Disney's birth, but Walt Disney was actually born on December 5, 1901.

The Historical Marker Database itself notes the discrepancy.

Historical markers are valuable resources, but they are not immune from mistakes. One purpose of preserving local history is not simply to repeat what has been written before, but to compare sources and correct the historical record when evidence allows us to do so.

More Than a Disney Connection

The Disney connection understandably attracts attention, but describing Ponceannah merely as “the cemetery where Walt Disney's grandparents are buried” misses the larger story.

Charles and Henrietta Call are two people among generations buried here. The historical importance of Ponceannah lies in all of them: farmers, children, teachers, postal workers, merchants, veterans, homemakers, laborers, pioneers, families whose names became famous and families whose names remained local.

The lives represented by these stones created the communities of eastern Lake County. The Calls are one chapter in that history, not the whole book.

A Cemetery of Vanished Communities

One of Ponceannah Cemetery's most important historical roles is that it became a resting place for people connected with multiple settlements that no longer exist.

Among those associated with the surrounding region were Ponceannah, Lightwood Camp, Bayview, Kismet, Acron, Fullerville, Crow's Bluff and Hawkinsville.

Some disappeared when transportation routes changed. Some lost their stores or post offices. Some were eclipsed by larger communities. Some vanished when mills or other local industries closed, while others simply faded as families moved away.

The forest eventually reclaimed many of their homes, fields and roads, but when their residents were buried at Ponceannah, pieces of those communities were preserved. Ponceannah Cemetery consequently functions as something close to an outdoor archive of a vanished landscape.

The Forest Returned

Historical accounts indicate that descendants of some of Ponceannah's pioneer families continued to live in original family homes into the 1930s. Eventually those buildings disappeared as well.

Today, a person looking into the surrounding woods may see little evidence that communities once existed there. That is one of the fascinating and sometimes frustrating characteristics of Florida history.

The forest can erase human settlement remarkably quickly. A house collapses, the lumber rots, a well is covered, a road grows over and a field fills with pine. Within several generations, almost nothing obvious remains.

Cemeteries are different. Stone survives. Names and dates survive. Families continue returning. In a changing landscape, Ponceannah became a fixed point.

Ponceannah on the Map

The transition from living community to historical memory can be followed through maps.

An 1890 map still identifies Ponceannah as a named settlement. By the twentieth century, the community largely disappears from ordinary maps, but the cemetery remains.

A 1965 United States Geological Survey map of the Paisley area specifically identifies Ponceannah Cemetery even though the town whose name it carried had disappeared.

The progression tells the story almost perfectly. First there was Ponceannah, a community with a cemetery. Later there was Ponceannah Cemetery, carrying the name of a community that no longer existed.

More Than a Thousand Recorded Burials

Modern genealogical databases identify more than one thousand burials associated with Ponceannah Cemetery.

That number should not necessarily be considered a complete count of everyone buried here since 1860. Historic rural cemeteries commonly contain graves whose wooden markers disappeared, markers whose inscriptions became unreadable, burials omitted from surviving records, graves marked only by fieldstone, lost family plots and people whose burial locations survive only through family memory.

The documented list of burials should therefore be understood as an evolving historical record rather than a perfect census of the dead. Every newly discovered name, photograph, obituary or family record can add another piece to Ponceannah's story.

Veterans at Ponceannah

Like many historic American cemeteries, Ponceannah contains the graves of people whose lives intersected with periods of war and military service.

Its history reaches back far enough to encompass the generation of the Civil War, and later generations buried here lived through America's subsequent conflicts.

Military grave markers scattered among civilian stones are reminders that national events reached even tiny communities such as Ponceannah and Paisley.

A future historical project could document Ponceannah's veterans individually, recording their service, families and stories wherever reliable records can be found.

Children and Family Loss

Some of the most affecting stones in any old cemetery are the smallest.

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century families lived with rates of childhood illness and death difficult for later generations to imagine. The tradition of an unidentified child being buried at Ponceannah as early as 1860 is therefore consistent with the realities of pioneer life, even though the surviving historical record has not established the child's identity.

The story of Thelma Fuller, who died only days after her family arrived from Canada in 1920, provides a documented example from a later generation.

These graves remind us that the history of a cemetery is not merely institutional history. Behind every date was a family.

The Cemetery in the Modern Era

Ponceannah never became merely an abandoned historical site. It remains a living cemetery.

The present Ponceannah Cemetery Association, Inc. is an active Florida nonprofit corporation. Florida corporate records show that the current corporate entity was filed in 1992 and lists its principal address as 23813 County Road 42, Paisley, Florida.

That 1992 filing should not be confused with the much older history of organized cemetery stewardship. The burial ground dates to 1860, historical records document formal cemetery association organization in 1891, and the present Florida nonprofit corporate entity dates to 1992.

The organization has changed over time. The purpose has endured.

Continuing Stewardship

Lake County records from the modern era also document cooperation between local government and the Ponceannah Cemetery Association, including community-development work involving the cemetery.

Those records continue a pattern established generations earlier. The cemetery has always depended upon people willing to preserve it.

Different generations used different tools. Early families came with wagons, axes and hand tools. Later volunteers came with lawn equipment, vehicles and modern machinery. But the essential job never changed: care for the ground, protect the graves and remember the people.

A Living Cemetery

It can be tempting to think of a historic cemetery exclusively in the past tense, but Ponceannah remains active.

The cemetery contains nineteenth-century pioneers, veterans, infants and children, people who lived through the transformation of rural Florida in the twentieth century, and members of families whose names have been associated with this area for generations.

It also continues to receive people loved by families living here today.

The newest grave does not diminish Ponceannah's historical character. It continues the story. Every generation adds another layer.

Why Ponceannah Matters

Ponceannah Cemetery matters because it preserves something increasingly difficult to see in Central Florida: continuity.

The surrounding landscape has changed enormously. Counties were created, communities appeared and disappeared, forest became farmland, farmland returned to forest, trails became roads, horses gave way to automobiles, small post offices closed, highways altered settlement patterns and the tourism economy transformed Central Florida.

Yet generation after generation continued traveling to this same piece of ground to bury and remember those they loved.

Ponceannah links today's community directly to people who lived here before Lake County existed and before much of modern Florida had taken shape.

The People Who Kept It

Perhaps the most important part of Ponceannah's history cannot be represented by a single date. It is the accumulated work of the people who cared for it.

Ellison Crow gave the original burial ground. Families buried their dead here. Trustees created an association. Jessie Call Perkins raised money for the gazebo. Maceo and Ruth Kirkland helped maintain the cemetery. Association members gathered for work days, families repaired monuments, volunteers removed fallen branches and vegetation, and generations of people maintained fences, kept records, answered questions and protected old graves.

Today's caretakers inherited that responsibility.

More than 160 years of preservation did not happen automatically. Somebody always showed up. That may be the most important legacy of Ponceannah Cemetery.

The Town Disappeared. The Cemetery Remained.

A traveler passing along County Road 42 today can easily miss what happened here. There are no storefronts announcing the old town of Ponceannah. No town hall remains. No Ponceannah post office remains. The old sawmill is gone, the general store is gone, the houses are gone, and many of the original roads have disappeared.

Much of the landscape has returned to forest.

But turn through the cemetery gate and the community begins to appear again in the names carved into stone: Crow, Kirkland, Brantley, Stokes, Call, Perkins, Fuller and hundreds of others.

Their monuments reveal generations of births and deaths, marriages and children, migrations and wars, tragedies and long lives.

The settlement of Ponceannah disappeared from the map, but its cemetery became its monument. As long as these grounds are protected, its stones preserved and the people buried here remembered, Ponceannah is not entirely gone.

Historical Timeline

1850s — Small pioneer communities including Lightwood Camp, Bayview and Ponceannah develop in the surrounding countryside.
1859 — Historical accounts identify W.C.G. Kilgore carrying mail by horseback through a route connecting settlements including Hawkinsville, Adamsville, Ponceannah and Bayview.
1860 — Ellison H. Crow donates land for the Crow Burial Grounds. Community tradition records a possible child burial during this year.
1861 — Newman Brantley is identified as the first documented adult burial.
1865 — Civil War veteran Elbert Duncan Dykes returns to the region and later marries Jane Elizabeth Kirkland.
1877 — The United States establishes a post office at Ponceannah with E.H. Crow as postmaster.
1884 — Members of the Call and Disney families move from Kansas to Florida and establish connections with the communities surrounding Paisley.
1887 — The Ponceannah post office closes. Lake County is created from portions of Orange and Sumter counties.
January 1, 1888 — Flora Call marries Elias Disney in the nearby community of Kismet.
1890 — A period map still identifies Ponceannah as a community. Charles Henry Call dies and is initially buried elsewhere.
November 6, 1891 — Trustees formally organize the cemetery association, and the Ponceannah Cemetery name becomes established.
1910 — Henrietta Call dies. Charles Call is subsequently reinterred beside her at Ponceannah.
1918 — The Cemetery Association exchanges land with the Crow family, giving the cemetery frontage on the trail that eventually becomes County Road 42.
1920 — The Fuller family arrives from Saskatchewan, Canada. Their daughter Thelma dies shortly after the family's arrival and is buried at Ponceannah.
1923 — Jessie Call Perkins raises funds for construction of the cemetery's six-sided gazebo.
1927–1946 — Jessie Perkins serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the Ponceannah Cemetery Association.
Mid-1950s — Maceo and Ruth Kirkland construct the cemetery well later preserved in recognition of their service.
1956 — Jessie Call Perkins dies after a lifetime connected with Paisley and Ponceannah.
1965 — A U.S. Geological Survey map specifically identifies Ponceannah Cemetery even though the old settlement itself has disappeared.
1992 — The present Ponceannah Cemetery Association, Inc. is incorporated as a Florida nonprofit corporation.
Today — Ponceannah remains an active cemetery, while the State of Florida recognizes the former Ponceannah settlement as a historic ghost-town archaeological site.

A Note About the Historical Record

The history of Ponceannah Cemetery spans more than 160 years, and as with many nineteenth-century rural cemeteries, not every event survives in an official record.

This history draws from cemetery inscriptions, government records, historic maps, postal records, Florida corporate records, genealogical research, published local histories, newspaper reporting, historical markers and community accounts.

Some stories have been preserved through family or oral tradition. Where documentation is uncertain, this page attempts to distinguish tradition from established fact rather than presenting the two as equal.

Historical sources can also disagree. At least one modern source has given 1928 as the construction date of the cemetery gazebo, while the surviving plaque at Ponceannah specifically records 1923. The plaque's 1923 date is therefore used here.

Likewise, the historical marker near the Call graves incorrectly gives 1900 as Walt Disney's birth year. Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901.

Historical research is never truly finished. Additional deeds, photographs, association records, obituaries, family documents, maps and personal memories may allow the story of Ponceannah to continue growing.

Preserving the Story

Every old cemetery eventually faces the same challenge. The people who remember its earliest stories are gone, then their children are gone, and eventually even the grandchildren who heard those stories firsthand are gone.

Names remain on stones, but the stories behind them can disappear.

That makes preservation about more than maintaining grass and monuments. It also means preserving names, photographs, documents, memories and stories.

If you possess historical photographs, documents, family histories or information concerning people buried at Ponceannah Cemetery, those materials may help preserve another piece of this community's history for future generations.

About This Website: This website is an independent historical tribute to Ponceannah Cemetery, the people interred here, and the generations of families, volunteers and caretakers who have preserved the grounds. It is not operated by, endorsed by, or affiliated with the Ponceannah Cemetery Association, Inc. Information presented here is intended for historical and memorial purposes. Official questions concerning cemetery operations, burials, plots, rules or association business should be directed to the Ponceannah Cemetery Association.

Return Home