By William S. Morgan V from the Fall 2025 Edition of Reflections Magazine
Few people traveling along busy Edgewater Drive in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood are aware there used to be a cemetery across from the modern Incarnation Catholic Church.
It was established in 1906, after the death of Irish immigrant Nicholas Mernaugh. Having outlived his wife and all their children, he bequeathed his entire estate to the Catholic church with some stipulations: that the church must establish and consecrate a cemetery for the faithful, that he should be laid to rest in that cemetery, and that the remains of his loved ones be transferred there from the city’s Greenwood Cemetery.
The church was more than happy to agree to these conditions, because the Mernaugh estate was quite large and included the valuable site of the family’s old grocery store on the west side of Orange Avenue in downtown Orlando. A spot was identified in “Tucker’s Woods” along what was then known as the Apopka Road – now Edgewater Drive – and land was consecrated in the name of St. Mary.
The cemetery soon filled, both with prominent local Catholics and seasonal visitors whose remains could not easily be shipped north for burial in the winter. The 15-foot-tall Mernaugh family monument was the largest and most visible to passersby. Among their best-known “neighbors” was Belgian immigrant John Reynaert, a retired priest who served two terms as mayor of nearby Maitland.
As quickly as the cemetery grew, so did its reputation for being haunted. By 1914, newspapers warned travelers that ghosts in the vicinity were prone to spooking horses.
Early developers and promoters of College Park considered the cemetery and its reputation to be problematic. So, in 1938, a deal was struck to remove all identifiable graves to the newly established Woodlawn Memorial Park in Gotha.
Unfortunately, the speed with which remains were transferred out of the old St. Mary’s Cemetery left some to speculate about how thoroughly the property had been cleared of human remains.
T.D. Mernaugh & Co. Wholesale and Retail Grocers building on Church Street, 1890s.