Old Gravestones

A little while back I posted some pictures of my favorite graveyard, the Clifton Burying Ground, and Barb W had asked how old those graves were. As I told her then, most of the graves are from the 1700s, but there are some from the later 1600s as well. I've included three of the oldest just as an illustration. If you want to see a larger, more detailed version, just flip through the slideshow at the top of this article.

The first is the grave of Sarah Marsh, who died in 1687.

The next is Elizabeth Easton, who died in 1676.

The last is William Reape, who died in 1670.

There are two in this graveyard that may be older than these, but they're unreadable. Even with these three you can see the progression of styles in stone carving and symbolism. The two older stones are fairly plain. Elizabeth Easton's stone has a sort of abstract scroll at the top of the stone, and I suspect, from the broken edge at the top, that William Reape's stone had the same. This is the characteristic of an unknown carver known to history as the Coggeshall Carver, who did many of the stones dating from the mid to late 1600s in Newport. Nobody's really sure if the Coggeshall Carver was a Newporter or an itinerant carver from Connecticut. Most of Newport and southern RI's oldest stones were carved by itinerants from CT.

Sarah Marsh's stone reflects the change to the style that became the predominant style in the 1700s, the dome with shoulders. This is a fine example of the earliest form; the death's head in the dome is the typical winged skeleton. As the years advanced the death's head became more human and less skull-like; by the 1760s these became angels with flowing hair and wings, and by the end of the century some even became portraits of the person buried there.

There are other family plots in Newport dating from colonial times as well as the Common Burying Ground in the north end of the city. There are some very old graves indeed in these places. Dissidents from the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived in Portsmouth, on the north end of Aquidneck Island, in the 1630s, and a further split in the group led by John Clarke came down to the south end of the island to found Newport not long afterward (1639). Hence the old gravestones.

I'll do an article on the Common Burying Ground, around Halloween, which will be long and have a lot of pictures so you can get a feel for the diversity and the richness of the carving there. But I thought I'd do this right now in light of Barb's questions. In any case, I hope you've enjoyed this little lesson in stone carving and Newport history.