Tallahassee's first public cemetery served as the burial place for both blacks and whites as early as 1829. Laws required that blacks were buried in the western half of the cemetery. Thomas Van Renssaler Gibbs (Reconstruction legislator and educator), James Page (founder of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church) and John G. Riley (noted educator) are buried here. After 1937 most African Americans were buried in Greenwood Cemetery.