Former Islanders

     For years whenever I pedaled between Casa Ybel and Algiers, I wondered about the identities of the souls eternally at rest in the small island cemetery. I made a diagram and took notes on the twelve graves. Betty Anholt's book The Sanibel Story provided most of the information I needed.


            

     One marker resembles a tree trunk engraved with the words "Woodman of the World" and "At Rest".  At the base is a small relief of a beautiful calla lily in bloom. This is the grave of Newton Rutland, born in 1892 and died in 1915.  Newton was the son of Irene and Othman Rutland.  Othman was the island's first lighthouse keeper. 

     The saddest grave to me is Yvette "Cookie" Redinger.  Born in 1951, Cookie lived only ten short years.  She had a heart defect that she never outgrew.  Her mother's name is unknown but she was thought to be Cuban. Her father, Joseph, is buried next to her.  He was a mail carrier.  He drowned in 1964, just three years after Cookie passed away and was 43 years old.

     The grave of William H. Reed indicates that he lived to be 91.  Like so many early homesteaders on Sanibel, Reed discovered the island while serving in the military as a Captain during the Civil War.  He hailed from Maine.  The Reed family included William's wife Lucy, two sons and one daughter.  Shortly after settling on Sanibel, tragedy struck when a son, Eugene Grant Reed, age 21, became hopelessly tangled in fishing paraphernalia and drowned in Tarpon Bay.  The family returned to Portland, Maine where William found work as a shoe salesman but eventually they all came back to Sanibel.  William became known as "Commodore" and socialized with a "roisterous Englishman" named Sam Ellis.  Sam lived in a rough house made of palmetto and spent much of his time drifting about on Tarpon Bay with a jug. According to a story in the Ft. Myers PRESS dated April 21, 1921 "Captain Reed dropped anchor at last and was buried in Penosbscot Bay, Maine."  Was Captain Reed's body shipped north to Penobscot Bay? Many old timers doubted that he was moved and his grave appears to be here in this family plot. For years a beautiful pink hibiscus grew between the graves of Eugene and his mother Lucy.