Safford Pavilion was an open shelter at Tarpon Springs's Cycadia Cemetery, created in a period when growing communities moved away from informal burials near homes or in makeshift graves toward formal rural cemeteries because forgotten burial plots and decaying bodies raised public health concerns. Residents treated these sacred grounds as places of beauty, planting cycads along the dirt road to the cemetery and erecting a rustic pavilion, while a group of women managed the cemetery and improved its grounds by hauling plants and trees in a mule-drawn wagon. Soledad Bonillas, a native of Mexico and the third wife of Anson Safford, led the Woman's Improvement Association of Tarpon Springs, which beautified the community, tended the town park, and lit the early street lamps each evening. Such pastoral cemeteries also drew people for picnics and gatherings, in contrast to dirty towns with horse droppings and no regular garbage collection, and this pattern helped inspire the development of parks across the country. The pavilion is a rare Florida example of Adirondack Rustic architecture, a style more common in New England and upstate New York, and the origins of many Tarpon residents from those regions may have influenced its design. Anson and Mary Jane Safford died a week apart in December 1891, probably of typhoid, and residents built the cypress pavilion in their honor. After Anson's death, John Cheyney, a leader in the sponge industry, became president of the Lake Butler Villa Company and later donated land to enlarge the cemetery, which came under city responsibility in 1946. Anson Peacely Killen Safford, who lived from 1830 to 1891, had panned for gold in California, served two terms as governor of the Arizona Territory from 1869 to 1877, lived for a time in Philadelphia, and arrived in Tarpon Springs in 1882 by train and boat. As president of the Lake Butler Villa Company, he controlled large tracts of local land while working for investor Hamilton Disston, who owned four million acres in Florida, and his sister Doctor Mary Safford arrived a year later as the first trained physician to practice in the upper Pinellas Peninsula.