Colonial America's Largest Surviving African Burial Ground
Farewell Street, Newport, RI 02840
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public cemetery, open during daylight hours.
Access
Limited Access
Hilly colonial cemetery with grass paths and uneven historic stones
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1665 · Colonial Cemetery · African American History · Slavery and Slave Trade · National Register of Historic Places
The Common Burying Ground was established in 1665 on land bequeathed to the city of Newport by Dr. John Clarke. Clarke's gift carried an explicit requirement: the ground would be open to all who wished to be buried in a common place regardless of social or religious status. That stipulation set the cemetery apart from contemporary New England burying grounds, most of which were tied to specific congregations or restricted by social rank.
The northern section, today known as God's Little Acre, holds 499 marked graves of free and enslaved African Americans, the largest single concentration of colonial-era African American headstones in the United States. The earliest interments date to the late seventeenth century. The marked stones reflect a significant choice by Newport's African community, both free and enslaved, to commission cut headstones at a time when most enslaved people in the American colonies were buried in unmarked graves. The work of enslaved stonemasons Pompe and Zingo is documented on several markers, and one carving is considered possibly the earliest signed artwork by an African American craftsman.
Newport's African American history is inseparable from Rhode Island's role in the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. Newport merchants outfitted hundreds of slaving voyages between Rhode Island, West Africa, and the Caribbean during the colonial period. The presence of the Common Burying Ground, with its rare archive of named African graves dating to that same period, is one of the most significant material records of free and enslaved African life in colonial New England.
The cemetery is administered today by the City of Newport with cultural-history programming led by community groups including 1696 Heritage Group. The Cultural Landscape Foundation lists the Common Burying Ground as a nationally significant landscape.
Sources
The Common Burying Ground is treated by Newport historians and African American heritage organizations primarily as an irreplaceable archive of colonial life rather than as a paranormal site. Visitor reports of unexplained phenomena are sparse and largely restricted to a sense of weight or presence along the older rows, particularly in God's Little Acre near sundown.
The cemetery's significance rests in its preservation of marked graves for free and enslaved African Americans across more than three centuries of New England history. Local 1696 Heritage Group programming emphasizes that the appropriate response to the site is recognition of the named individuals buried there and the labor, kinship, and cultural memory those stones represent. The cemetery is included on some Newport walking-history itineraries.
Walk the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stones of the Common Burying Ground, including the northern section known as God's Little Acre. That portion holds the marked graves of 499 free and enslaved African Americans, the largest surviving colonial African cemetery in the United States, with stones carved by named enslaved stonemasons Pompe and Zingo.
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