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Woman Puts Her Heart Into Cemetery Cleanup

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 19, 2007

RIVERVIEW - For Florence Sikes, taking care of the 121-year-old Hackney Cemetery is taking care of family.

The old cemetery at the corner of Providence and Hackney roads has no fulltime caretaker, though a crew from nearby Serenity Meadows Cemetery sees that it gets mowed.

The more genteel touches, such as restacking the fallen brick around a burial site and weeding around headstones, well, that's left to the local folk, many of whom have family buried there.

Once or twice a year, as she did recently, Sikes organizes a cleanup day. On this occasion, about 30 people showed up with gardening gloves and weed trimmers, half of them from Sikes' family, including her daughter, Janis Sikes Boscarello from Virginia.

"It gets next to my heart every once in a while," she says of the cemetery, where her father, a son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren have their final resting place.

Several years ago, Sikes started a trust and has raised money used to help pay the cost of fencing the cemetery and paving the winding road that runs through its length.

"A graveyard is not something for one or two people to tackle," said friend Melanie Thompson, who helped with the Nov. 10 cleanup. "You need community. That's how it should be done."

Yvette C. Hammett

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