| Cemetery Number | SK197 |
| Town | SOUTH KINGSTOWN |
| Cemetery Name | OLD NILES FAMILY LOT |
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| Graves List | Display Graves List |
| Location | KINGSTON ROAD |
| State | RI |
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| Inscriptions | 0 |
| Fieldstones | 36 |
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| Exist? | YES |
| Last seen date? | 2003 |
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| Pole | N |
| Comment | This cemetery is north of Kingston Road and south of Plains Road on the campus of the University of Rhode Island. The first mention of this burying ground is in an 1783 deed when Silas Niles II sells the farmstead to Rowland Brown with the following reservation “excepting one quarter of an Acre where the Burying place is to be and remain to the said Silas Niles his heirs and assigns forever for a Burying place.”
James N. Arnold visited this lot Feb. 22, 1880, his #8, “on land of John H. Tefft on plain due west from his house is a burial yard in open lot covered with hazel brush and briers. Graves 17 large and 2 small marked rudely, lot in open field and unprotected. Those of the Niles family the first proprietors of this land.”
The cemetery was on the 140-acre Oliver Watson-Tefft farm that became the original college campus in 1888. An 1889 Providence Journal article describes this cemetery:
There is an old family burial place down on the plain. The mounds long since were leveled. The gravestones, unchiseled, moss-grown and black, have been broken off, or have sunken into the earth, till they have become mere stubs, worn by the lapse of a century. There are 30 to 40 of these grass-grown, unknown graves, where the bones and the flesh of generations of Nileses have crumbled.” According to the article the Niles family slaves are buried nearby “[U]p in the rhomb, to the left of the stream, in the shade of a noble basswood tree.
Electricians working on a new scoreboard for the stadium in 1986 found two thigh bones and a fragment of a pelvic bone. Further digging revealed a skull, a spinal cord and coffin pieces. Descendants of the Niles family asked that the cemetery be left where it was, and so it remained under the ground between temporary bleachers and a concession stand at the university stadium.
In 1999 plans for a convocation center again impacted this Colonial-era burying ground. Archaeologists scraped back the soil above the bodies and determined that there are 36 graves in this cemetery. The architects designing the Convocation Center revised their plans and relocated the center’s footprint by seven yards to accommodate the cemetery. The site has been enclosed with a gray fieldstone wall built with stones from old farm walls that were on the University campus.
Found, registered, and recorded by John Sterling & James Wheaton for a 2004 book on South Kingstown cemeteries. |
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| Enclosure | no enclosure |
| Gate | no gate |
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| Terrain | level |
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