Sowams Heritage Area Historian Dr. David Weed spent a rainy July 10th morning indoors with four groups of campers from Warren, Rhode Island’s Burr’s Hill Parks and Recreation Program so they could learn about the early history of the park and their town. Click here for a 23-minute video of one presentation and here for a 20-minute video of another given at the former Mary V. Quirk School.

(Above) Campers gathered to listen as Dr. Weed told them about how 42 graves in the Royal Pokanoket Burial Ground in Burr’s Hill Park, where their camp program is held every day, were exhumed in 1913 by then Town Librarian Charles Carr in order to keep people from digging Native American graves up and taking items home. The items he found were sent to museums, including one that he ran on the second floor of the George Hail Library.

(Above) Dr. Weed explained how members of the Pokanoket Tribe, who had lived for thousands of years where Warren is now located, buried their ancestors where the Burr’s Hill Park is now located. Items taken from the graves in 1913 were reburied in a vault at that location in 2017 and a monument to the Massasoit Ousamequin placed above it.

Dr. Weed then went on to talk more about places that reveal the early history of the Town, including the well that Pilgrim Hugh Cole dug at his farm that now lies behind the Kickemuit Middle School, the kinds of houses that the early settlers built there, and the King Philip’s War that broke out in Warren in June of 1675, now 350 years ago.