I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; you can learn a lot about a city by visiting its cemetery!  Key West is no exception.  For over 175 years, the City Cemetery has been attending to the funeral needs of all of its citizens – wealthy or poor, any religion, any ethnic background – they’re all interred here.

The Key West Cemetery self-tour map includes write ups on 60 graves of the 100,000 people buried there.  I’d like to write a song about each one of them!  There’s Manuel Cabeza, who was tarred and feathered for marrying a mixed race woman and then was lynched after being accused of murder on Christmas in 1921.  There are the graves of many of the sailors on the USS Maine, which sunk in Havana Harbor, touching off the Spanish-American War in 1898.  There is a family of Cuban cigar makers, a sparring partner for Ernest Hemingway, a star of Negro Leagues baseball, folk artists and rum runners.  It is an amazingly diverse list of people who found their way to this island and made more than a castle of sand.