The Forgotten History of Crum-Durrance Cemetery in Polk County, Florida

Some historic places announce themselves.

They have signs along the highway, parking lots, interpretive markers, and plaques explaining exactly why you should stop.

Others are much quieter.

Sometimes you glimpse a few old headstones through the trees as you drive past and think—

Wait. Was that a cemetery?

That’s exactly how Dusty and I discovered the Crum-Durrance Cemetery in Polk County, Florida.

We weren’t looking for it. It wasn’t one of the stops we’d carefully plotted before leaving home. We simply saw it as we passed.

Naturally, I turned around.

We spent a little time walking through the small burial ground, photographing the weathered stones and wondering about the people resting beneath them.

Then we continued on our way.

But we didn’t quite leave the cemetery behind.

Two weeks later, we came back.

That alone should tell you something.

Dusty and I have an ever-growing list of places we want to explore, so there aren’t many locations we deliberately revisit only weeks after seeing them for the first time. But Dusty wanted better photographs of the cemetery, and I wanted to GPS-tag and document the surviving graves for BillionGraves.

Something about this little patch of earth felt worth documenting properly.

Once I began researching its history, I understood why.

Crum-Durrance Cemetery preserves the intertwined stories of two of this area’s pioneer families—and possibly the resting place of the very first elected sheriff of Polk County.

But like so many old family cemeteries, what we know about it may only be part of the story.

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Before There Was a Polk County

To understand the cemetery, we first have to imagine a very different Florida.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, much of Central Florida remained sparsely settled. The landscape was dominated by pine flatwoods, oak hammocks, wetlands, creeks, and open cattle range.

The Second Seminole War had only recently ended, and establishing a permanent home in Florida’s interior required a considerable amount of determination.

The Armed Occupation Act of 1842 encouraged that settlement by offering land to people willing to establish homes, cultivate acreage, and meet other requirements in designated areas of Florida.

That landscape would continue changing as new industries reshaped Polk County. Decades later, communities such as Pierce would rise around phosphate mining—only to disappear again when the industry moved on.

Among the families who made their way into this changing landscape were the Durrances.

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The Durrance Family Comes to Central Florida

Family histories place members of the Durrance family in the area that would become Homeland during the early 1850s after moving south from Georgia.

They were part of a generation establishing farms, raising livestock, building homes, and creating communities across what was still very much frontier Florida.

The community they helped establish has changed dramatically since those frontier days, but pieces of that early Polk County story are still preserved nearby at Homeland Heritage Park, where historic buildings offer another glimpse into the lives of the families who built this part of Florida.

One member of the family would eventually become particularly important to Polk County history.

His name was William Hutto Durrance.

Born in Georgia in 1815, William became a prominent member of the developing community.

Then, on February 8, 1861, Polk County was officially created.

Only days later, William Hutto Durrance became the county’s first elected sheriff.

It’s difficult to imagine what serving as sheriff of a newly created Florida county must have looked like in 1861.

There were no patrol cars or radios. Roads were limited. Communities were scattered across miles of wilderness.

This wasn’t simply a man accepting a job in an established government.

William was part of the generation helping build that government.

And eventually, his story would lead back to the little cemetery Dusty and I almost drove past.

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A Cemetery Before It Had Its Modern Name

One of the challenges of researching old family cemeteries is that their histories weren’t always formally recorded.

There may never have been an official cemetery map.

There may not have been a caretaker keeping burial records.

And many early graves weren’t marked with the permanent stone monuments we expect today.

Sometimes the best clues survive in genealogical records and family histories.

Those sources contain references to an “Old Durrance Cemetery” located approximately one mile east of Homeland.

According to family records, Durrance patriarch Joseph Durrance was buried there following his death on March 29, 1862.

Winaford Durrance is also recorded as having been buried there that year.

If those accounts refer to the cemetery we know today as Crum-Durrance Cemetery, burials here may date back more than 160 years.

At that point, however, I was still looking at what appeared to be a Durrance family cemetery.

Then another name kept appearing in the records.

Crum.

And the story became considerably more interesting.

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The Crum Family’s Pioneer Story

The Crums were another early Florida family with roots in the state’s frontier era.

Some genealogical accounts suggest the Crum surname may have developed from the German name Krum.

Family tradition also preserves an intriguing story about Harmon Crum and his family.

According to those accounts, the family lived close enough to Seminole communities that the Crum children learned to speak a Seminole dialect.

Like many pieces of family lore, the details are difficult to independently verify generations later. But the story provides a glimpse into the complicated relationships that could exist between families living in frontier Florida.

Records associated with the Armed Occupation Act also include an applicant named Herman Crum, believed by genealogical researchers to have been Harmon Crum.

Another piece of the puzzle came from an old newspaper account describing a separate Crum Cemetery near Summerfield, Florida.

It described an old burial ground containing numerous unmarked graves and inscriptions that had disappeared beneath decades of weathering.

Reading that description immediately reminded me of the cemetery we’d just visited.

But the most important detail came later.

Harmon Crum eventually moved south.

To Homeland.

Now the Crums and Durrances weren’t simply two pioneer families living somewhere in Central Florida.

They were living in the same small community.

And eventually, their families became one.

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When the Crums and Durrances Became Family

The date that appears to connect these two stories is October 9, 1875.

On that day, genealogical records show that James Matthew Crum married Nancy Elizabeth Durrance.

A marriage record might seem like a small detail in the larger history of Polk County.

Here, it may be the key to understanding the cemetery.

The marriage joined two pioneer families whose histories were already rooted in the same community.

It’s possible that a burial ground once associated primarily with the Durrance family gradually became a shared family cemetery as the two families intertwined.

That could also help explain the name used for the cemetery today.

Crum-Durrance Cemetery.

I haven’t found evidence that this was its original formal name. Instead, the name appears to reflect the two families whose histories became connected here.

And one particularly important Durrance family member would eventually be laid to rest on this ground.

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Polk County’s First Sheriff

William Hutto Durrance died in 1879.

Genealogical records identify his burial place as Crum-Durrance Cemetery.

The first elected sheriff of Polk County rests not beneath an enormous monument in the middle of a city, but in this tiny burial ground hidden beneath the trees near Homeland.

There’s something wonderfully human about that.

History remembers William for the office he held.

His family buried him among his own.

More than a century later, the county around him has transformed almost beyond recognition.

Yet this little piece of the world remains.

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Visiting Crum-Durrance Cemetery Today

Don’t arrive expecting a manicured historic cemetery.

There is no grand entrance welcoming visitors into a carefully preserved memorial landscape.

What remains feels much older.

Only a handful of visible graves survive, most represented by weathered stones that have endured generations of Florida sun, rain, storms, vegetation, and time.

Some inscriptions remain readable.

Others have become increasingly difficult to decipher.

And then there are the spaces between them.

Those may tell the most haunting part of the story.

It’s impossible to know from the landscape alone exactly how many people are buried here.

Early graves may have been marked with wood.

Some could have had simple fieldstones.

Other markers may have broken, fallen, or disappeared completely.

A depression in the ground might indicate a burial.

Or it might not.

Without a complete historical cemetery survey or burial register, assumptions can quickly become “facts” repeated across the internet.

So there are questions I’m deliberately leaving unanswered.

How many people are actually buried here?

Was the cemetery originally exclusively for the Durrance family?

When did members of the Crum family begin using it?

Were neighbors from the Homeland community buried here as well?

How many graves once had markers that no longer survive?

We may never know.

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Why We Came Back

When Dusty and I left after our first visit, neither of us felt like we had documented the cemetery as well as we wanted.

So two weeks later, we returned.

Dusty took more photographs.

I worked on GPS-tagging the remaining graves for BillionGraves.

We couldn’t restore the missing markers.

We couldn’t identify everyone buried beneath the ground.

We couldn’t answer all of the questions the cemetery left behind.

But we could document what remained.

That matters.

Every surviving headstone represents a person whose name still has a physical connection to this place.

Photographing that marker creates another record.

Recording its location creates another.

Transcribing the inscription creates another.

If the stone eventually becomes unreadable—or disappears entirely—the person it represents has a better chance of remaining discoverable.

Maybe not for us.

Maybe for a descendant searching twenty years from now.

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When the Headstone Is Gone

Standing in Crum-Durrance Cemetery reminded me how incredibly fragile local history can be.

We tend to think of history as something permanent.

Dates printed in books.

Documents stored in archives.

Artifacts protected behind museum glass.

But much of our history never received that kind of protection.

It survives in family photographs.

Handwritten notes.

Oral traditions.

Old buildings.

And tiny cemeteries hidden beside rural roads.

Every visible headstone at Crum-Durrance Cemetery represents someone whose name survived.

But there are almost certainly stories here that didn’t.

People whose wooden markers rotted away.

People whose stones broke or vanished.

People whose burial locations were known to their children and grandchildren until, eventually, there was nobody left who remembered.

They’re still part of the history of this place.

We simply may no longer know their names.

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Why Places Like Crum-Durrance Cemetery Matter

Crum-Durrance Cemetery isn’t famous.

There aren’t crowds coming to see it.

Most people probably drive past without realizing it’s there.

We almost did.

Yet within this tiny piece of Polk County are traces of the people who helped build the community around it.

The Durrances.

The Crums.

A county’s first sheriff.

Families who lived in Florida when this landscape looked almost nothing like it does today.

And people whose identities may already have been lost.

We may never write a complete history of Crum-Durrance Cemetery.

Too many records are missing.

Too many markers are gone.

Too much time has passed.

But maybe preservation doesn’t always require solving the entire mystery.

Sometimes preservation begins much more simply.

Take the photograph.

Record the name.

Save the location.

Tell the story.

And make sure that when the next person comes looking…

there’s still something left for them to find.

Dusty and I almost drove past Crum-Durrance Cemetery that first afternoon.

I’m very glad we turned around.

Because sometimes history isn’t waiting inside a museum.

Sometimes it’s quietly sitting beneath the Florida trees, hoping someone notices before it’s gone.

We almost drove right past it.

A handful of weathered headstones tucked beneath the trees in rural Polk County caught my eye just long enough for me to turn the truck around.

What we found was the Crum-Durrance Cemetery—a tiny pioneer burial ground with roots stretching back more than 160 years and connections to two early Florida families.

But here’s the part that surprised even us:

Two weeks later, Dusty and I went back.

We almost never do that.

Why did this little cemetery pull us back—and what did I uncover once I started digging into its history?

Polk County’s history didn’t stop with its pioneer families. Phosphate would eventually transform the region, leaving another layer of local history preserved today at the Mulberry Phosphate Museum. Together, places like these tell different chapters of how Polk County became what it is today.

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