Fort Brooke Cemetery Excavation in Tampa, Florida

In 1980 a city parking complex project in downtown Tampa accidentally uncovered the forgotten Fort Brooke Army cemetery, holding 102 soldiers and civilians and 42 Seminoles.

The cemetery's historical marker, credited to the Tampa Historical Society and photographed for the University of South Florida's Exploring Florida collection, says that in time the grave sites became obliterated and passed out of all remembrance, and that in 1980 the burial site was discovered accidentally during the construction of the city parking complex. The marker's own totals are 102 soldiers and civilians, reburied at Oaklawn Cemetery, and 42 Seminoles, put to rest at the Seminole Shrine at Orient Road.

The garage that reached the graves carries the fort's name. USF's photograph of a second memorial, the Old Fort Brooke Parking Structure Memorial, describes it as dedicating the downtown parking structure to Old Fort Brooke, and both photographs are dated January 7, 2006.

The same marker text also appears in USF's ClipPix collection, so the two university copies can be checked against each other; both give the 1883 removal to Barrancas and the accidental 1980 discovery in the same words.

Soldiers, civilian employees and Indians were buried at the Tampa site, in a cemetery the U.S. Army established during the Second Seminole War of 1835 to 1842.

That is the wording of the marker as transcribed by USF. Some of the dead were moved long before 1980: in 1883, the marker says, about 20 soldiers were removed to Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola.

That transfer from Tampa went to a federal cemetery older than the move itself. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says the Barrancas National Cemetery began as a naval cemetery expanded in 1838 and was transferred to the War Department to become a national cemetery on January 30, 1868. It now lies inside Naval Air Station Pensacola, and the department says visitors must follow the installation's rules and check in through the NAS Pensacola website before coming.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida describes Fort Brooke from its own side. Its Florida Seminole Tourism history calls the fort, at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, a United States military stronghold and a stopping point on the forced relocation of Seminoles north, during a war period in which U.S. Army forces pushed Seminole people inward and south from their camps around Tampa Bay.

Official sources agree that Fort Brooke dates to the 1820s but give different years for when it stopped being a military post.

The conflict is real and unresolved on the agencies' own pages. The City of Tampa's Oaklawn mass graves page says Fort Brooke was abandoned as a military post in 1832, while the cemetery marker places the Army's burials at the site during the 1835 to 1842 war and USF's parking structure memorial entry says the fort served through the three Seminole Wars and the Civil War and was decommissioned in 1883.

The 102 soldiers and civilians went to a mass grave at Oaklawn Cemetery in 1981, and the 42 Seminoles were put to rest at the Seminole Shrine on Orient Road.

The marker transcribed by USF gives both dates: the soldiers and civilians were reburied at Oaklawn Cemetery on March 24, 1981, while the spirit of 42 Seminoles was put to rest with the essence of burning herbs at the Seminole Shrine at Orient Road on August 5, 1981.

At Oaklawn the reburial is a single communal grave. The City of Tampa's Oaklawn walking tour says there are two mass graves at Oaklawn Cemetery, both in the Northeast Section, and that the first, adjacent to the Sexton Cottage, contains the remains of 102 settlers and soldiers originally interred at Fort Brooke, the U.S. Army fort near the mouth of the Hillsborough River that the city calls the first European settlement in the area.

Orient Road had become Seminole land the year before. The Seminole Tribe of Florida's tourism history says that in 1980, nine acres of land in Tampa were designated in trust for the tribe to be used as a reservation, and that those nine acres off Orient Road now house the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tampa. The tribe's first museum there took the old name for Fort Brooke, Coo Taun Cho Bee, which the tribe translates as Big Shore Line.

Yes: the Fort Brooke mass grave at Oaklawn Cemetery is a stop on the City of Tampa's self guided walking tour.

The city's Oaklawn Cemetery Walking Tour lists Mass Graves and The Sexton House among its stops, alongside the graves of Tampa's first mayor Joseph B. Lancaster, the Wall and Krause families and James McKay Sr. The city asks visitors to refrain from touching grave markers, making rubbings or stepping inside the plat enclosures.

The setting is as old as Tampa. The city says Oaklawn Cemetery was created in 1850, when Tampa was a struggling town of around 500 persons, as a public burying ground for white and slave, rich and poor, and that it holds many pioneer families, thirteen mayors of the city, one Florida governor, two Florida Supreme Court justices and the framers of five state constitutions. The original plat was misplaced after the Civil War, the city adds, so the locations and identities of many early interments were lost.

On the original downtown site, the Fort Brooke cemetery marker and the parking structure memorial are what remain to see; USF photographed both for its Historical Markers and Memorials of Downtown Tampa gallery.

The marker's answer is time: after the 1883 removals the remaining Tampa graves became obliterated and passed out of all remembrance until 1980.

The sequence is in the official record. The Army established the cemetery during the Second Seminole War, moved about 20 soldiers to Pensacola in 1883, and the remaining graves stayed out of sight until the city's downtown parking complex reached them in 1980, according to the marker text kept by USF. Most of Oaklawn's original grave markers were carved wood, the City of Tampa's Oaklawn history notes, because stone required an expensive combination of sail, steamship and wagon transport and Tampa had no rail service until 1884; those wood markers were destroyed by fire, rot and storms.

The reversal took less than two years. The 1981 reburials at Oaklawn Cemetery and at the Seminole Shrine on Orient Road came within months of the 1980 discovery, and the marker that records both now stands as the site's main account.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against both USF Exploring Florida marker records, the USF ClipPix copy, the City of Tampa Oaklawn walking tour and mass graves pages, the Veterans Affairs Barrancas National Cemetery page and the Seminole Tribe's Tampa reservation history.