Fort Brooke cemetery under a city parking garage: Seminoles, soldiers, settlers and African Americans (downtown Tampa, excavated 1980)

SUMMARYFort Brooke cemetery under a city parking garage: Seminoles, soldiers, settlers and African Americans (downtown Tampa, excavated 1980) [Connections: Tampa Bay, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDA 1982 City of Tampa marker on the Old Fort Brooke Municipal Parking Structure (107 N. Franklin St.) reads: "On this site was located the first cemetery for Fort Brooke, a U.S. military post dating from 1824 to 1882." It says Seminoles, soldiers and civilian settlers buried there were excavated by archaeologists in 1980 before the garage was built and reburied, and that the dig recovered evidence of Native occupation from about 8,000 B.C. to A.D. 1824. Archaeologist Jean Lammie's 2017 Society for Historical Archaeology paper says the cemetery (1824–1883) held "soldiers, white settlers, Seminoles, and African Americans," 146 individuals in all, and that Seminole grave goods show deathways that persisted in contrast to the "Anglicized burials" of settlers and soldiers, possibly as resistance

PATTERNNative and African American dead were found together under a public parking structure

LENS (WW9)Under the parking garage lay the town's true first families, Seminole and African, side by side

OPENThe 1982 Piper, Hardin and Piper report, "Cultural Responses to Stress," Southeastern Archaeology 1:2, pp. 122–137 (not openly online), for the breakdown by group; how the African Americans buried there were identified

SOURCEOld Fort Brooke Municipal Parking Structure marker (HMdb); Lammie, "Seminole Deathways and Resistance at Fort Brooke" (tDAR); Piper et al. 1982 citation (tDAR).