Woodlawn Cemetery Tours - West Palm Beach

05/31/2026

Reimagine Woodlawn Cemetery opposition.

The city needs to improve funding for the cemetery and form a board to report and make recommendations to the city commission

05/25/2026

On Memorial Day, many visitors to Woodlawn Cemetery likely passed by the grave of Sgt. Richard “Tiny” Sowell without realizing the extraordinary story behind it.

Richard Gordon Sowell was born in 1922 in Quincy, Florida, and moved to West Palm Beach as a child. He attended Palm Beach High School, where classmates remembered him as athletic, outgoing, and popular. Despite the nickname “Tiny,” he boxed, played baseball and basketball, and participated in school activities during the years before World War II reshaped the city and the nation.

After high school, he attended a year of college at theUniversity of Florida, then enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II. He served as a sergeant in the 295th Joint Assault Signal Company in the Pacific Theater. His unit handled battlefield communications during dangerous amphibious operations.

In July 1944, during the Battle of Saipan, Sowell was killed in action at the age of 21.

Like thousands of American servicemen lost in the Pacific, his remains could not initially be identified. After the war, unidentified remains recovered from Saipan were buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, commonly known as Punchbowl Cemetery.

For more than seventy years, Tiny Sowell rested there as an unknown soldier. Read the full story in my blog: https://janetnaughton.com/blog/remembering-richard-tiny-sowell-a-west-palm-beach-soldier-finally-brought-home/ucyqkq

05/22/2026

https://www.wptv.com/news/local-news/our-community/west-palm-beach/woodlawn-cemetery-revitalization-plan-draws-pushback-from-commissioner-families-in-west-palm-beach?shem=rimspwouoe,&fbclid=IwVERDUAR9sc5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeQ7LVtf6HXX1EvkZomztRyvGl0vjXwb9xZ5BX1XIIQX5EGXGIzFCxLqZkyXU_aem__4WviO7WhAFINPBpc-_09Q

A plan to revitalize West Palm Beach's Woodlawn Cemetery, including an event space, faces backlash from a county commissioner and families.

05/19/2026

Did you know that you could once order monuments, tombstones and grave markers from the Sears Roebuck Company? There's a link to the catalog. https://archive.org/details/monumentstombsto00sear

05/13/2026

Firsthand accounts of the 1928 Hurricane by Judge James R. Knott: On Sunday, September 16, 1928, the Palm Beaches and Lake Okeechobee were hit by the most destructive hurricane in their history. Hundreds of the estimated 2000 dead from the storm are now resting in West Palm Beach’s mass burial in Woodlawn Cemetery.
Later and reports from the storm during the calm brought some grim and descriptive details and final reports. Mrs. W. C. Sutton, brought by the Red Cross with her husband to West Palm Beach from Kramer Island on Lake Okeechobee, told of a day of terror.
“At the first part of the storm we stood on the porch hearing the house would collapse and kill us. But the water was so fast that it soon covered the island and the wind swept the trees away.
“The wind seemed to change and it stripped all the porch and everything disappeared in water over my head and my husband grabbed me and pulled me back. Our house was afloat. It floated for more than a half mile over a poor orchard and across a bayou. We noticed afterward that what we thought was the wind changing, was really our house being turned by the wind as it floated along.
“At the house settled in the water we had to climb through windows and up onto a table so that we could keep our heads above it. That table raised us well.
“We had neither food nor water until Tuesday when the American Legion sent boats, bread and water to us.
“The trees, orchards, houses and everything else on Kramer island have swept away and it was just a bald spot in the lake.
“But we came through alive,” Mrs. Sutton said. “They didn’t do so well in Belle Glade. There a man held up two 16 ft. rafters tied together amid the drowned. He pointed out one woman to me who lost four of her children and then two her clothing from her body and used it to herself to a telegraph pole, and his one daughter ran out her door and died after the storm.”
John Saba was at Chosen, near Belle Glade, when the storm started. He wrote to his sister in Indiana two days later from Sebring. (Sunday Brown Wrapper, The Palm Beach Post, December 10, 1978)

05/13/2026

2015 Boynton Forum interview.

05/09/2026

Here we are during our very first historic tour of Woodlawn Cemetery in March 2013. After the overwhelming turnout for that inaugural event, tour attendance is now limited to fewer than 50 participants. Read the full article in the Palm Beach Post.https://www.palmbeachpost.com/picture-gallery/news/2023/11/21/woodlawn-cemetery-2023/71667574007/

05/08/2026

The First Woman to Run for West Palm Beach City Commissioner - Dr. Lois Dell Schroers was a physician, civic reformer, and one of the first women in West Palm Beach to seek elected office at a time when women were still largely excluded from political leadership. Before moving to Florida, she practiced medicine in St. Louis for more than a decade. After arriving in West Palm Beach in the 1920s, she became active in the city’s civic life, serving multiple terms as president of the League of Women Voters and holding leadership roles with the Greater Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce and other civic organizations focused on child welfare, legislation, business, and women’s athletics. In February 1927, newspapers across Florida reported that she had become the first woman to enter the race for city commissioner in West Palm Beach’s central borough. (Continued) https://janetnaughton.com/blog/the-first-woman-to-run-for-west-palm-beach-city-commissioner/b6n1tm

05/05/2026

Everett E. Sanders was born in 1917 and died in 1922, before his fifth birthday. He was the son of Mr. and Mrs. James Godwin of Boynton. His funeral was held at the First United Methodist Church of Boynton, and he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Block 44, Lot 13. His short life reflects a time before modern medicine when childhood illness often ended in tragedy.

Woodlawn Cemetery is a historic site. It preserves the evidence, the names, dates, and family groupings of how people lived and died.