Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery are a pair of separate cemeteries on Farewell and Warner Street in Newport, Rhode Island. Together they contain over 5,000 graves, including a colonial era slave cemetery and Jewish graves. The pair of cemeteries was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a single listing in 1974.
The Common Burial Ground dates to the 17th century and is owned by the city of Newport. It features an unparalleled collection of colonial era headstones including the largest number of colonial African American headstones in the country. The predominantly African-American northern section of the cemetery is commonly referred to by local African-Americans as "God's Little Acre".
The Island Cemetery is a private cemetery started in the middle 19th century. Many members of Newport's most prominent families have been buried there over the years.
Famous quotes containing the words common, burying, ground, island and/or cemetery:
“There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)