Have you ever explored historic St. Michael's Cemetery?

Perhaps the epicenter of Pensacola's many historical landmarks is St. Michael’s Cemetery, one of the two oldest extant cemeteries in Florida, the other being St. Augustine’s Tolomato Cemetery. St. Michael's is an open air museum that is a testament to the diverse history of Pensacola. It was dedicated as a state park in 1949. The site holds the graves of many of Pensacola’s earliest 18th Century Spanish and Colonial founders as well as important 19th and early 20th Century industrialists, politicians and entrepreneurs whose names still adorn streets and buildings throughout the downtown area.

Among the more well-known names of persons buried in St. Michael's is Dorothy Walton, wife of George Walton, the young Georgia patriot, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Of the hundreds of gravesites in St. Michaels, the oldest is that of Jose Roig, a native of Spain who died in Pensacola in 1812 at the age of 85, a remarkably long life in an age of wars and devastating outbreaks of lethal diseases.

Many of the grave sites in St. Michael’s are those of children who, as attested by tombstone inscriptions, died only days apart from their siblings and parents during several local yellow fever epidemics that lasted into the early 20th Century.

A must-see site during a walking tour of downtown Pensacola and on the National Register of Historic Places, St. Michael’s Cemetery is open to the public year-round and daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You can learn more at https://www.stmichaelscemetery.org/