As part of the 2024 Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Awareness and Preservation Weeks, Sowams Heritage Area Project Coordinator David Weed offered a 20-minute tour of the Royal Pokanoket Burial Ground at Burr’s Hill Park in Warren, RI. Click here for a YouTube video of the tour held on April 6, 2024.
Dave welcomes a small group for the brief tour starting at the historical marker along South Water Street across from the Town Beach. (Click on the photo of the marker below for a larger view.)
The photos above show how Burr’s Hill Park looked at the turn of the century when it was still a dune-covered sand and gravel pit that had been used by the Providence, Warren and Bristol Railroad Company since 1851. Today, several of the dunes covered in grass in the Park are often mistaken for Native American burial mounds.
Above) The group paused at the end of the tour to view the monument that was placed over a vault that was installed in 2017 to return over 600 items to the earth that had been removed in 1913 by amateur archaeologist Charles Carr. Click here for the August 24, 2013 Providence Journal article about Carr’s work.
