Woodlawn Cemetery Tours - West Palm Beach

06/26/2026

Update: The Billionaires who want to take over Woodlawn Cemetery are laying low - for now. Their plan is to let this uproar "blow over" then they will be back with their plan to hide the cemetery under trees and hold events to the city. This is the time to keep writing to the city commisioners and the mayor that the developers need to stay out of the cemetery. Someone who had no idea who I was blurted it all out in public. We aren't going away - let them KNOW THAT! I would like to plan a rally at Woodlawn for the fall. They are trying to hide...LET'S EXPOSE THEM! Give me your best ideas below!

06/14/2026

Katherine Sue Willoughby (1941–2022) Resting at Woodlawn Cemetery, Katherine Willoughby is remembered as a devoted mother, grandmother, social worker, environmental advocate, and lifelong lover of books. She dedicated her life to helping children and families in South Florida, founded a bookstore in North Carolina, and touched countless lives through her compassion, intelligence, and service. Her legacy lives on through her family and all those she helped along the way.

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.