TARPON SPRINGS -- The headstones in both the graveyards lining narrow Jasmine Avenue speak the same language of loss and love: Beloved Mother. Dear Father. Kind Sister. Gone But Not Forgotten. But the cemeteries might as well be two different countries.

Weeds run riot at Rose Cemetery, but the grass is definitely greener at the city-owned Cycadia Cemetery across the way. Rose's broken headstones have long been overshadowed by the gleaming mausoleum housing prominent former city residents at Cycadia.

It's been this way for as long as anyone remembers: Rose for blacks, Cycadia for everybody else.

Alfred Quarterman hopes that will start to change Saturday. That's the day the president of the Rose Cemetery Association plans to unveil a memorial headstone for one of this city's long-forgotten Confederate sons. The historic grave could help his group secure state and federal historic preservation grants to pay for improvements at Rose Cemetery.

More than 40 members of the Sons of the Confederacy and United Daughters of the Confederacy will arrive in dress grays at 10 a.m. Saturday to honor former slave, Confederate infantryman and longtime Tarpon Springs resident Richard Quarls. Until recently, Quarls was one of nearly 40 veterans buried at Rose Cemetery in unmarked graves.

When Quarls died in 1925 at age 92, his obituary described him as the area's most well-known black resident. Born on a plantation in Edgefield County, S.C., he enlisted alongside his master's son in South Carolina's K Company, 7th Regiment.

Researchers believe Quarls, who later changed his name to Christopher Columbus, was a rifleman and fought at Gettysburg. His Civil War service earned him a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson and a Confederate veteran's pension.

After Quarls died, the Tarpon Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan delivered an envelope to his widow containing $25 and a sympathy note.

Like many black residents from Clearwater to New Port Richey, Quarls was buried in Rose because, for several generations, Jim Crow laws restricted black burials.

For weeks, Quarterman, workers from the Tarpon Springs Housing Authority and the Palm Harbor Boy Scouts have raked, weeded and watered the land in preparation for the ceremony.

But there's more to be done, Quarterman said. Looking out over the jumble of more than 2,000 unmarked graves, the 72-year-old Tarpon Springs native shook his head in dismay.

"For this place to be like it is when you've got that across the way is horrible," he said, nodding toward Cycadia. "I think the city could do a lot more to help."

The city administration turned down a request earlier this month to lend the Rose Cemetery a city staffer to help with landscaping and upkeep once a month, Quarterman said. City officials say caring for Cycadia already is a financial drain, and they lack the authority to improve a privately owned cemetery.

"We just don't go around and work on private property," said city manager Ellen Posivach. "There's liability issues with that. From a management perspective with our existing cemetery we just don't have the resources to do it."

Cycadia has long suffered from a shortage of burial spaces and lack of funds, Posivach said. Cycadia's financial outlook improved last week when the city approved a plan to sell a 21-by-15-foot burial space for a family to build a privately maintained mausoleum at the edge of Cycadia's man made lake.

The family of former Tarpon Springs resident Dan Rocco will pay the city $337,125, of which $317,125 will go into Cycadia's perpetual care fund. The 10-foot-high stone mausoleum will accommodate up to 14 family members and will be air-conditioned around the clock. The city will make room for the new mausoleum by using land now occupied by maintenance and caretaker's sheds next to the lake.

News of the expansion at Cycadia galls supporters of the Rose Cemetery. Rose has more than 2,600 spaces for graves, but only about 600 of them were found during a 1999 survey. The cemetery's records fell into disarray as board members came and went over the years.

Marking all the graves and making basic improvements could cost as much as $20,000 to start, Quarterman said. But rehabilitating the land fully could cost thousands more than the board has.

"It hurts to see that the city takes care of that over there. Then you come over here and you see it's all overgrown. At one time I didn't even want to be put out here because it was so bad," said Cynthia Cole, an association supporter. "But my sister and my mother are out here, so now I tell my children they've got to keep it up."

In recent years, several Florida cities have stepped up their involvement in rehabilitating privately owned black cemeteries that were a result of segregation. In October, a rundown black cemetery in Fort Lauderdale was refurbished and rededicated after concerned city officials designated it a municipal cemetery.

Herb Elliot, the attorney for the Rose Cemetery Association, said the city could do a lot more if it owned the 5.25-acre cemetery, but it doesn't. The association's six-member board has owned and operated the cemetery since 1916, when the state of Florida deeded the land to black residents of Tarpon Springs. Cemetery board members have long been committed to maintaining Rose Cemetery's private status, Elliot said.

"If the association wants to offer the cemetery for dedication to the city, that's their call," Elliot said. "But I will say it bothers me that the public maintains one cemetery in town and doesn't maintain another which is primarily black."

Mayor Frank DiDonato said he'd like to find a way to help maintain Rose Cemetery, but a solution to the problem is still a ways off.

"It's hard because Cycadia's not paying for itself either," DiDonato said "I think there could be some sort of compromise."

Cole hopes so. Tears streamed down her cheeks last week as she poked at a ratty mound of kudzu tangled at her mother's grave. The 53-year-old school bus driver said segregated cemeteries should be a thing of the past.

"I wish we could forget all that and start over and make this one look like that one," Cole said. "We love our people, too."

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this article.

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