Who was Wyman R. Brown?

Today's history mystery has us rabbits hopping out to Ocoee, a small town west of Orlando on SR 50.

Ye local rabbits have no doubt sped along this stretch of highway several times, not realizing there was a graveyard ripe for hopping just north of Lake Blanchard.

The cemetery entrance is actually where Story Road dead ends.


Anyway, the oldest markers in this old graveyard are clustered in the back of the property.

Among them, I found this hard-to-read stone bearing the inscription:

WYMAN R. BROWN
Sept 26, 1820
Jan 12, 1882

Unforutnately, I haven't been able to find out anything further on our mystery man. There was a W.R. Brown included in the 1880 census of Orange County, but he was too young to be this fellow. So, who was Wyman R. Brown?

Distribution of graveyards

Well, rabbits, this week yours truly conducted a very unscientific survey to determine which were the most active graveyards in this little corner of heaven.

I say "unscientific," because all I did was keep a tally while reading the obit page of the Orlando Sentinel for seven straight days--a total of 94 entries.

Here are the results with commentary:

51% of obituaries made no mention of a final resting place at all. I can only assume that this includes the increasingly large number of cremations, as well as families who simply want their privacy.

20% were either out of the area (particularly at the national cemetery in Bushnell) or out of state entirely. This definitely reflects the transient nature of Central Florida's population. Very few of us are actual natives.

That left only 29%, distributed as follows:

8 at Woodlawn in Gotha--hands-down the "winner" in the busiest graveyard category.

4 at Osceola Memory Gardens down in Kissimmee.

2 each at Greenwood-Orlando, Glen Haven Memorial Park, and Winter Garden.

1 each at Chapel Hill, Congregation of Reform Judaism (never heard of this one before!), Edgewood-Apopka, Ocoee, Palm, Pineywood, San Pedro Catholic in Winter Park (also never heard of this one before!), Temple Israel in Gotha (is this new, too?), and Washington Park.