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Stukely Westcott’s burial place, Warwick Historical Cemetery #165, is a wooded lot along Sandy Lane and behind the fire station at 1509 West Shore Road. The Stukely Westcott Memorial is located on the southeast corner of 1515 West Shore Road.
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Rediscovery of the Burial Lot
At a Town meeting on February 20, 1663, Stukely Westcott was designated a member of a group of citizens to survey and lay out the property for a local blacksmith, a town house, and the first public burial ground in Warwick.
In Warwick, Rhode Island: Historical Cemeteries (1997) John E. Sterling lists lost cemetery A18 as the School Master Lot. After nearly a year of researching old maps and documents provided by the Westcott family and in coordination with the Warwick Historical Society, Warwick’s lost cemetery A18 was found by members of the Warwick Commission on Historical Cemeteries in 2014. Renumbered as Warwick Historical Cemetery #165, the cemetery was officially dedicated 351 years after being laid out.
In his History of Warwick, Rhode Island: From its Settlement in 1642 to the Present Time, Oliver Payson Fuller states, “One of the old places [burial ground] now [1875] nearly obliterated is about one hundred feet from the present school house. One of the graves was that of Mr. Emmett, who was a school teacher at the time of his death in 1727. Good substantial slate stones with suitable inscriptions marked the place of his interment” until time and vandalism destroyed them. In addition to the grave of Mr. Emmett are the graves of Stukely Westcott (1592-1677) and his wife Juliana Marchant (b. 1591) and perhaps others.
Click the image to view the site map for Warwick Historical Cemetery #165
In 1886, Hon. J. Russell Bullock wrote in an article for the Narragansett Historical Register, “Mr. Amos Lockwood, a descendant in the seventh generation, living near the first public burial ground, and now [1886] seventy-eight years of age, well remembers when many tumuli (ancient burial mounds), eroded by time and marked by rough and uninscribed headstones, told of the place where the ancient sleepers rest; but now the ploughshare has obliterated all.
The Rhode Island Cemetery Commission accepted the Stukely Westcott Homesite as the burial site of Stukely and Juliana Westcott and as the “Stukely Westcott Historical Cemetery #165.”
Dedication of the Burial Site
At the June 28, 2014 dedication ceremony, from the left, SSWDA Historian Betty Acker, Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, Felicia Gardella, President of the Warwick Historical Society, and Pegee Malcolm of the Warwick Commission on Historical Cemeteries
The Stukely Westcott Historical Cemetery was dedicated on Saturday, June 28, 2014, during the Westcott Society’s 40th Biennial Reunion with 116 in attendance. The burial site had been 337 years without recognition. It is fitting and proper that so many of Stukely Westcott’s descendants were onsite to witness this event. At the ceremony Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian presented a proclamation to Betty Acker, SSWDA Historian, thanking the Westcott Family for its efforts in identifying the first public burial site in the city.
Updated August 30, 2022