Oaklawn Cemetery in Tampa, Florida

Oaklawn Cemetery is Tampa's oldest cemetery and first public burial ground, a city-owned site on Harrison Street that dates to 1850.

The City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department lists it at 606 E Harrison St., Tampa, 33602, open from 8 am to 6 pm daily, and publishes a cemetery map, a USF Library GIS map and a self-guided walking tour. The grounds hold two adjoining cemeteries, the city-owned Oaklawn and a Catholic-owned portion known as St. Louis Cemetery, which together occupy approximately three acres in downtown Tampa. Questions about the grounds go to the city's Cemetery Coordinator at 813-274-8023, according to the same page, which the city last updated on January 29, 2026.

Oaklawn is one of the cemeteries the City of Tampa maintains. The city cemeteries page says the department maintains only eight cemeteries within the City of Tampa, with over 40,000 burials, yet its own list of city-owned cemeteries names seven: Centro Asturiano, Marti-Colon, Oaklawn, Woodlawn, Jackson Heights, Memorial Park and Pyramid Crypts. The city states that it does not have any spaces for sale, because spaces have been sold and deeded to individuals. In 2017 the city worked with the University of South Florida Department of Anthropology on an interactive mapping interface of Oaklawn, and in the same year Oaklawn received a designation on the National Register of Historic Places, the Oaklawn page states.

Oaklawn became Tampa's public burying ground in 1850, when minutes of the Alachua County Commissioners designated it for "white and slave, rich and poor."

Tampa was then a struggling town of around 500 people, the city's walking tour records. A portion of the cemetery was set aside for enslaved people and for those the tour calls "marginal" persons, such as pirates, and public money was designated to bury indigents.

Most of the first Oaklawn markers were wood, usually carved cypress, because stone had to reach Tampa by an expensive combination of sail, steamship and wagon; the town had no rail service until 1884. Fire, rot and storms destroyed the wood markers and left many graves without durable markers. The original plat of the cemetery was also misplaced after the Civil War, so the locations and identities of many early Oaklawn interments were lost, according to the same tour page.

The city also places Oaklawn within a national change in burial custom. The rural cemetery stop of the tour describes how severe colonial views of death softened by the early nineteenth century, and how family plots and crowded church graveyards gave way to designed public burying grounds with landscaping, paved pathways, statuary and markers. The city calls Oaklawn an early Tampa example of that rural cemetery trend.

Oaklawn holds many of Tampa's pioneer families, thirteen mayors of the city, one Florida governor, two Florida Supreme Court justices and the framers of five state constitutions, the city's walking tour states.

The first of the thirteen mayors is Tampa's first, Judge Lancaster. The Oaklawn page counts him and 12 other City of Tampa mayors among the burials. The Lancaster stop notes a lasting puzzle: local records, Masonic accounts and a headstone confirm his 1856 burial at Oaklawn, yet a memorial stone for him also exists in the old city cemetery in Jacksonville.

Henry Laurens Mitchell, described by the city as a promising young attorney before his term as governor, is the only state governor buried at Oaklawn. James McKay Sr. came with his wife from Scotland to the Tampa area in 1848, operated commercial sailing and steam vessels was a blockade runner during the Civil War and served as mayor of Tampa from February 1859 to February 1860, the tour states.

John P. Wall served as a Confederate Army surgeon and moved to Tampa in 1869. The Wall stop lists his later roles as Tampa mayor, editor of The Sunland Tribune newspaper, a state representative and founder of the Tampa Board of Trade. Cattle families are here too: William B. Hooker gained land through the 1842 Armed Occupation Act and established a beef business that stayed in family hands for generations, according to the Hooker stop, and John T. Lesley, a pioneer cattleman and Confederate captain, formed his own volunteer company, the Sunny South Guards, in 1860 and later became a state senator, the Lesley stop records.

The city calls the graves of William and Nancy Ashley by far the most celebrated and one of the most curious interments at Oaklawn. William Ashley was a prominent white civic leader who served as City Clerk, and Nancy, an African American servant who bore his surname, was his longtime companion. Following instructions William left to his executor, the Ashley grave was opened to receive Nancy upon her death, and a headstone was erected "to commemorate their fidelity in each other," according to the Ashley stop.

Oaklawn has two mass graves, both in its Northeast Section: one for 102 people moved from Fort Brooke and one for yellow fever victims.

The first, adjacent to the Sexton Cottage, holds 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 was the first European settlement in the area, the mass graves stop states. Fort Brooke was founded in 1824 and abandoned as a military post in 1832, by which time the settlement of Tampa had taken root.

The second Oaklawn mass grave holds an undetermined number of yellow fever victims; the city notes the disease was known throughout the South as "yellow jack." Tampa had five outbreaks between 1850 and 1905, the worst in 1887 and 1888, when residents who did not know the cause buried victims en masse. John P. Wall, also buried at Oaklawn, suggested that a mosquito spread the fever, but the city notes he was widely disbelieved at the time.

The small building near the Fort Brooke grave has its own date. The Sexton House, originally known as the Pavilion or Gazebo, was built in 1910 to store tools and equipment for the Oaklawn caretakers. The word sexton comes from the Latin sacristanus, someone who looks after the sacred objects.

The raised vaults at Oaklawn cover burials that are below ground, and its cradle graves were flower beds rather than markers only for children, the city explains.

The vaults and cradle graves stop says square or domed vaults are often misread as above-ground burials, though the raised monument is a counter-measure against graves sinking in Florida's soft soil. Cradle graves, crib-like stone or masonry forms, contained seasonal flower beds. Decorative enclosures of ironwork, stone or masonry, very common in the 19th and 20th centuries, surround a single grave or, more commonly, a family plot, and some memorial plantings of cedar, oak, ivy and myrtle endure at Oaklawn today.

The carved symbols follow nineteenth century custom. The grave art stop lists the broken column for a life cut off, recumbent lambs on children's graves, the draped urn, the sheaf of wheat for a fruitful life, the rose on women's graves, the weeping willow, ivy for immortality and fidelity, and fraternal emblems of Freemasonry, Woodmen of the World, the Elks and the American Legion. The walking tour asks visitors to the Harrison Street grounds not to touch grave markers, make rubbings or step inside the plot enclosures.

The City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department is responsible for the general care of Oaklawn and the other city-owned cemeteries.

That care includes removing old, dead or discolored real or artificial flowers, and the city cemeteries page reserves the right to remove decorations that do not comply with City Ordinance or the Cemetery Rules and Regulations, including items made of glass, ceramic or clay. AmeriCorps Green Team clean-ups take place bi-weekly on Tuesday mornings, rotating through city-owned cemeteries as needed, and clean-ups with Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful and The Cemetery Society are scheduled at various locations through the year.

Families with a veteran buried in a city-owned cemetery such as Oaklawn can apply to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a Veteran headstone. The city works with families on installation but does not install the stones itself, so the family must find a monument company to accept and set the headstone, the same Tampa page states.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the City of Tampa Oaklawn Cemetery page (address, hours, coordinator phone, 2017 National Register note), the city cemeteries page, and the Oaklawn walking tour home and its stops for Lancaster, Mitchell, McKay, Wall, Hooker, Lesley, the Ashleys, the mass graves, the Sexton House, the rural cemetery, vaults and cradle graves, and grave art.