Special to the Herald

Editor’s note: This is the first installment in an ongoing, semi-regular series focusing on the various historical cemeteries in Cranston. You can find the story of a city in all sorts of places: the local history section of the library, old newspaper clippings, land records. But there are other, less-visited corners of Cranston where one can find the history of its everyday people. They are stories that are written, literally, in stone.

You find them in the city’s nearly 170 historical cemeteries. Some are obvious, like Oakland Cemetery on Broad Street, in plain sight of the thousands of drivers who go past it every day. Or the sprawling St. Ann’s Cemetery, the state’s largest, which covers nearly 200 acres in Knightsville and, according to the Diocese of Providence, averages about 1,600 interments a year.

Many of the city’s other graveyards are more understated, some no bigger than a large living room, tucked away in parts of the city from which people and development have, over the decades, moved on. One of those small graveyards with a story to tell is the Ebenezer Fuller Lot, Cemetery No. 39, about 70 by 100 feet, on Hall Lane in Fiskeville, not far from the West Warwick line.

According to a history of the cemetery by Mary and Gregg Mierka and Jim Hall, Ebenezer Fuller Jr.’s and Smith Thayer’s families owned a fulling mill, where wool was washed and thickened, in Fiskeville in the 1800s. Smith Thayer’s first wife, Rachel, was the first burial there, in 1815. She died at age 41. Ebenezer Jr. was the second burial, in 1828. The last was Mary Fenner in 1882, the 80-year-old widow of a Fiskeville mill worker.

The cemetery was carved out of the woods on Hall Lane, a street that today is not much wider than a driveway. Even on a sunny afternoon the cemetery is shrouded in shade. It has not aged well. Most of the gravestones have been toppled, either by a flood that crashed through the area in 1889 or a vandalism incident that one resident said happened around 1978.

Most of the stones are still readable, though some have been eroded by wind and rain to where they are illegible in parts. Others have been knocked down and either left flat or propped up against a tree or stone wall. Still others have been shattered and reassembled like jigsaw puzzles made of marble.

But the stories from the worn and broken haven’t been lost. More than a century ago, a genealogist named James N. Arnold was crisscrossing the state recording headstones and their inscriptions. In 1891, he took the time to record the headstones in the little Fiskeville graveyard.

The inscriptions are a reminder of the harshness of life in the 19th century. The grave markers note the deaths of the old, some into their 80s, but also of the very young. They are cold, hard stones, but many hint at heartbreaking stories.

Thomas Fenner, who probably worked in one of the nearby mills, died on Feb. 3, 1831. He was 31 years old and, judging by his headstone, he had not had an easy life.

“Afflictions sore, long time I bore, Physicians skill was vain, Till God was pleased to give me ease, And free me from my pain,” his grave marker reads. His wife, Mary, stayed on in town for 50 more years. She is the Mary Fenner who is the last recorded burial in the lot.

The graves of the adults usually note their age in years, but for the children, the grieving families sat down and counted out the months and even days of life their deceased children had been given. In 1848, nine days before Christmas, Lucy Ann and Ebenezer Fuller III lost their daughter Lucy. Her gravestone marks her short life with that sad precision: three years, six months and 16 days.

“Tis not the tears at the moment shed, When the cold turf has just been laid o’er her, That can tell how beloved is the spirit that’s fled …”

She was not the first daughter the Fullers had buried there. Ann Frances, an earlier child, died at age five months and 26 days in 1836. Lucy had come late in their lives; Ebenezer was 41 when she was born, Lucy Ann around 40. Mother joined her daughters in the cemetery in 1857. Ebenezer III would be buried there after his death in 1869.

Willie King was 7 months and 12 days old when he died on April 2, 1865. He appears to be the only member of his family buried there. No headstones carry the names of his parents, Rufus and Martha. They had a poem inscribed on his headstone: “Up among the Angels blest, Our little Willie’s gone to rest, Committing body to the sod, His spirit to its maker, God.”

Though long out of use, the cemetery has not been neglected. Cranston Historical Cemeteries Commission Chairman David Guiot said the weeds have clearly been cut back, probably by someone with a weed-whacker. The commission often organizes volunteer cleanups at individual cemeteries, he said, but four weeks or so later, the weeds will be growing back. What the commission really needs, he said, is for people who live near cemeteries to volunteer to tend the graveyards in their neighborhoods.

“I’d like to know who did this,” he said, looking over the Ebenezer Fuller lot and its cut-back ground cover. “I’d shake his hand and say thank you.”

If there is a neglected cemetery near you and you would like to learn about volunteering to maintain it, contact the Cranston Historical Cemeteries Commission on Facebook or by emailing cranstoncemeteries@gmail.com.

John Hill, a resident of Cranston, is a former staff writer for the Providence Journal.