The Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Awareness and Preservation Weeks starts this April and will include numerous events for people of all ages. The weeks-long festival is meant to draw attention to the state’s historic cemeteries and the importance of preserving them.
One of the festival’s main goals is to encourage volunteering opportunities for people to help with clean-ups, tours, and other maintenance work at local cemeteries. The Rhode Island Advisory Commission on Historical Cemeteries hopes to find more volunteers to help with various tasks, such as raking, trash pickup, light brush cutting, and weed trimming. While some sites provide gloves, bags, and tools, volunteers are encouraged to bring their own.
Rhode Island Cemetery Weeks will include walking tours of large landscaped cemeteries like Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls and River Bend Cemetery in Westerly, as well as visits to small burial grounds. A special tour of Arnold Burying Ground in Newport salutes the efforts of Alice Brayton to restore its colonial gravestones in the 1940s. For those who prefer to walk in the woods, there are hikes to rural burying grounds in Exeter, Lincoln, and Richmond.
RIACHC Chair Pegee Malcolm said, “The Rhode Island Advisory Commission on Historical Cemeteries is very happy to be working with the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission on Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Awareness and Preservation Weeks. We strive to protect all the historical cemeteries in Rhode Island. This year we will be leading clean-ups, tours, and demonstrations to give the public a chance to see the beauty, history, and nature found in historic cemeteries.”
Several Rhode Island Cemetery Weeks programs honor the memory of those who served our country in wartime. RIACHC Commissioner Debbie Suggs will make a presentation on Revolutionary War patriots buried in Washington County, and her Newport colleague Lew Keen will lead a Decoration Day tour of soldiers’ graves at the Island Cemetery on May 26. Also on Memorial Day weekend, Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park rangers and the North Smithfield Heritage Association will share the stories of Civil War veterans at Slatersville Cemetery. There are opportunities to place flags on the graves of those who served in Exeter and Richmond, and a ceremony at the Babcock Lot in Westerly.
Professional archaeologists will lead a pair of Cemetery Weeks events at the central Cranston Public Library. On April 8, the Public Archaeology Laboratory will be part of a program about the 2006 disturbance of graves of residents who died at the State poorhouse in the early 1900s. On April 24, State Archaeologist Charlotte Taylor will present on Rhode Island cemeteries and the laws that govern them. Interested in nature? Check out the Birds & Burials tour at Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown, a nature tour of North Burial Ground in Providence, and a geology-themed tour in Coventry. Love local libraries? Visit local cemetery exhibits in Middletown and Newport.
The Rhode Island Cemetery Weeks is a collaboration between the Rhode Island Advisory Commission on Historical Cemeteries, the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, and many individual and organizational partners.
Visit rihistoriccemeteries.org/events.aspx for more information and a calendar of events.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) assisted a What’sUpNewp journalist with the reporting included in this story.
