The wooden headstones and markers are gone now, lost to the elements of time. Some names on surviving vaults and box tombs of stone or brick have disappeared. 

Only church records can attest to the earliest burials in the late 1500s, two hundred years before the United States was established.

The size of its tree-canopied grounds belies this final resting place of more than 1,000 over three centuries. Burials are believed to have extended under today's Cordova Street and behind the chapel and to the north. 

In addition to Christian Indians, burials are documented of Africans, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Irish, Haitians, Cubans, Canadians, and other nations. All were professed Catholics in this staunch Spanish Catholic territory.

Tolomato Cemetery was originally the site of a Franciscan mission, established on the outskirts of the settlement for Guale Indians from the Tolomato mission in Georgia. Its chapel, built in the early 1700s, was a simple wooden structure with a thatch roof, but a distinguishing feature was a four-story bell tower built of coquina, a compressed seashell stone unique to this area.

Coquina block, discovered on nearby Anastasia Island, was quarried to build the Castillo de San Marcos, and the church and residents were quick to gather up unused blocks for more substantial buildings.

The Tolomato bell tower would survive until the 1790s, when it was dismantled and the material used in construction of the Cathedral Basilica.

In its final year before British occupation of Florida in 1764, the mission was occupied by a group of German Catholics, and it was sometimes referred to as the German or Dutch Church.

With the British occupation, remaining Indians and other mission residents left for Cuba with the Spanish population, and burials ceased. But in 1777 Catholic Menorcans, fleeing Dr. Andrew Turnbull's failed indigo plantation at New Smyrna, were given permission to use the cemetery.

Instrumental was Father Pedro Camps, who shepherded these indentured laborers through years of abuse at New Smyrna and continued his pastorate in their new home.

With reoccupation of Florida by the Spanish in 1783, the cemetery was once again used for Catholic burials. In 1884, burials within the city were prohibited for health reasons, and both Tolomato and Huguenot cemeteries - the latter for all faiths - were closed, though a few clandestine burials occurred in later years.

   Excerpt from Tolomato Cemetery in St. Augustine Bedtime Stories. Click for further information on this fascinating historic series.