Woodlawn Cemetery tours spotlight West Palm Beach history and volunteer stewardship

Ginger Peterson, a West Palm Beach writer, historian and volunteer, said the city’s Woodlawn Cemetery “serves as a link to West Palm Beach’s rich history” and that organized tours run during the cooler months to highlight the stories of people buried there.

Peterson, speaking on the City Center podcast produced by the City of West Palm Beach Department of Communications, said the cemetery — which she described as the city’s only public cemetery managed by the parks department — contains graves that connect residents to the city’s founding era and later events. “We do the tours from, we do them October and November, and then we do January, February, March, and April,” Peterson said, adding that reservations are handled through Eventbrite.

The tours aim to put faces and stories to names on headstones and to preserve local memory as the city changes. “There’s very dark stories and there’s very wonderful stories in Woodlawn,” Peterson said, noting the cemetery includes burials of people who lived through early…