Written in Stone: God’s Little Acre in Newport, Rhode Island

Katie Cynkar, WPAMC ’25

For many people, cemeteries are places that physically represent the end of a person’s life. For material culture scholars, they are archives of remembrance of the people who came before us, located and categorized by grave markers and tombstones. However, the cemetery archive is not a democratic space. Many burials of Africans and African Americans in North America remain unmarked, jeopardizing the remembrance of the people buried there. Prior to the Winterthur Program, I had experienced this firsthand through the excavation of a burial ground associated with the First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia. Out of the sixty-three graves that were discovered, only one had a grave marker: the bottom part of a wine bottle buried upside down near the individual’s head.¹ While analysis of the teeth and bones of the remains revealed that this individual was a teenage boy at the time of his death, his name and his life remain lost to time. It is with this perspective that I entered God’s Little Acre.

God’s Little Acre is a part of the Common Burying Ground located in the city of Newport, Rhode Island. It is filled with the graves of former members and leaders of America’s first Free African Union Society, African Governors of Newport, religious leaders who founded their own churches such as the Seventh Day Baptist Church and St. John the Evangelist church, and many more individuals.² Each tombstone provides insight into the culture and identity of the Africans and African Americans of Newport from the early seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. One tombstone that stood out to me belonged to Cuffe Gibbs. His tombstone reads:

This Stone was
cut by Pompe
Stevens in Memo
ry of his brother
Cuffe Gibbs, who
died Decr. 27^th. 1768,
Aged 40 Years.

Pompe Stevens and Cuffe Gibbs were two of over a thousand enslaved individuals in Newport prior to the American Revolution. Based on the stylistic element of the thistle border, Stevens most likely was trained and enslaved by the stone carver, William Stevens.³ Not only does this marker provide the names of Stevens and Gibbs, but it also explicitly proclaims Stevens’ agency as an author, artisan, and brother. As I looked upon this and the plethora of tombstones that exist at God’s Little Acre, I kept thinking back to the teenage boy in Williamsburg, whose name we may never know, and thought about the one thing these people have in common: their lives meant something to someone. Someone cared for each of these individuals to commemorate their lives and deaths with a token of remembrance, whether that be in stone or in glass. It is a striking reminder of the power that material culture holds and of the daunting task we as material culture scholars have to present these objects for the remembrance of those who came before us.

1. Lost graves reveal story of African American church in Williamsburg,” The Washington Post, published April 6, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/04/06/graves-bones-african-american-church-williamburg/.” ↩︎
2. “God’s Little Acre.” God’s Little Acre: America’s Colonial African Cemetery, accessed August 28, 2024, https://www.colonialcemetery.com/. ↩︎
3. Caitlin Galante-DeAngelis Hopkins, “Object Lesson: Pompe Stevens, Enslaved Artisan,” The Journal of Early American Life 13, no. 3, Spring 2013. ↩︎