A yardman burned Zora Neale Hurston's belongings after she died in a county welfare home in 1960, and a deputy sheriff put out the fire

Zora Neale Hurston died of hypertensive heart disease on 28 January 1960, aged 69, at the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, where she had gone after a stroke and years of poverty. She was buried in the Garden of Heavenly Rest. The grave had no marker until 1973. After her death a yardman told to clean her house began burning her papers. Patrick DuVal, a law officer and friend, saw the fire and put it out, saving manuscripts, letters and photographs. He kept them on his covered porch for about two years while friends looked for an archive. In 1961 Marjorie Silver, a friend and neighbor, gave the core of the collection to the University of Florida libraries. Some manuscripts went to Yale. In 1973 novelist Alice Walker and scholar Charlotte Hunt found the grave area. Walker paid for a marker reading "A Genius of the South," which gives the birth year as 1901 though Hurston was born in 1891. In 2026 the University of Florida holds about a thousand items, and the Zora Neale Hurston Trust oversees her personal material.