Secluded 150-year-old Pensacola cemetery slowly being lost to litter, vandals and time

There have been an estimated 117 billion people who have been born in human history, according to the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau. Most of them are gone ‒ the population is about 8 billion today ‒ and not remembered.

If they were buried, most of those sites have been lost to time, though archaeologists are uncovering ancient remain sites on occasion. They left no trace, no memory.

Folks who have ancestors buried in Pfeiffer Cemetery in the Bellview Area hope their lost family members won't be lost the same way. The small, community cemetery, which dates to the 1870s, is hidden off Mobile Highway in a neck of woods that borders Marlane Drive in the Cerny Heights area. The cemetery is long neglected and overgrown, with some graves camouflaged amid patches of oak saplings. To access the cemetery, a person has to park their vehicle on the side of Marlane Road and walk down a loose sandy trail road to the cemetery, hidden away inside an old fence.

There is no "Pfeiffer Cemetery" sign to be seen. No signs at all offering any information about the cemetery, which takes up just a small piece of the large, wooded area owned by an LLC. There is no contact information. Just a mostly forgotten cemetery with hundreds of gravesites. Not completely forgotten though.

Barri Bugge has a sister buried at the cemetery.

"She died at birth in March 1965, I believe," Bugge said. "My mom asked one of Waters and Hibbert Funeral Home's directors about it not long ago and she was told that no one has been able to access the site for years."

The sandy road leading to the cemetery has a barrier just off Marlane Drive that prohibits any vehicle entry.

There is a webpage on rootsweb.com that listed two contact numbers for Pfeiffer Cemetery, but both are since disconnected.

"It's kind of a mess," said Richard Bailey Jr., owner and lead funeral director of Waters & Hibbert Funeral Home, which was founded in 1929. "It's always been difficult to get into, even 40 or 50 years ago."

He said that years back, a local family wanted to bury a loved one there.

"We couldn't get out there," he said. "We had to go to another cemetery."

People do access the cemetery by walking after parking. The vast wooded region has had trouble through the years, including illegal dumping, gang activity and vandalism. In 2007, more than 60 grave sites were vandalized. Walking through the woods toward the park, there is trash littering spots near the sandy cemetery entrance road, including a discarded portable basketball goal.

Joseph Pfeiffer's ancestors once owned the land after moving from the downtown area to escape "bustling Pensacola" in the late 1800s. According to Pfeiffer, the well-known Pensacola family hasn't had involvement with the cemetery for many years. He still has relatives in the cemetery as well.

He's walked around the property, but it's been years, he said. Though community cleanups have happened at Pfeiffer Cemetery, the most recent large-scale cleanup on record was in 1998. Pfeiffer said it might be time for another one. He said he is considering organizing a community cleanup sometime this year, if he gets enough support.

"Pensacola has been my home and our family has been here for generations," said Pfeiffer, whose family owned and operated a successful neighborhood pharmacy in Brownsville for years. "I love Pensacola and would love to do something to help get (the cemetery) back in shape."

Bugge said with the cemetery's lack of access, and it's condition, she would like to "relocate" her sister's remains somewhere else.

"I can't imagine I'm the only one who would like to relocate their loved ones moved to a better, more accessible location."

Jennifer Melcher, a faculty research associate with the University of West Florida Archaeology Institute, said the Institute tried to get access to the cemetery a few years back, but was not successful. Melcher and the Institute have researched area cemeteries and said the plight of Pfeiffer Cemetery is a common one.

"Across Florida and the United States it's becoming more and more of a problem," Melcher said. "We are a more mobile society and a lot of us don't live within 500 miles of where our grandparents died."

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She said that as folks with relatives in small cemeteries move away, there are less and less who remain with personal connections to the cemeteries and they often slide into neglect.

She noted that the area of Pfeiffer Cemetery was once a mill community. In fact, the cemetery has been referred to as Pfeiffer Mill Cemetery in the past.

"Communities move on, the mill shuts down and the workers go somewhere else," she said. "If there's not support, local and state, then this is going to continue to be an ongoing problem in the United States."

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola Pfeiffer Cemetery forgotten home of hundreds of gravesites