Update - 8/2/23

Laban Matteson Lot | West Greenwich, Rhode Island | Historical Cemetery No. 26

Added to Cemetery List, August 2, 2023! Click HERE to view.

Visiting the Laban Matteson Lot now feels a bit like visiting the ruins of a cemetery, rather than a cemetery itself.

The laban matteson lot as it stands today

Located atop a hill just east of Weaver Hill Road, this lot was heavily damaged by construction of I-95 in the 1950’s, with entire portions of the graveyard having been obliterated entirely in the process. Today, there is only one inscribed stone still standing in its original position, as well as a scattering of fieldstone burials. As though that weren’t bad enough, this lot also contains some of the most severe vandalism we have ever seen. Virtually every inscribed stone has been damaged and/or displaced, their broken pieces scattered across the hilltop or leaning up against trees.

Of the 12 inscribed stones recorded in this lot by Arthur James in 1924 and Grace G. Tillinghast in 1932, only 4 were in evidence when we first paid this lot a visit in 2000. Extensive probing of the hilltop allowed us to recover the headstones of Charles Matteson (Burial No. 10), Verbatus and Mary Matteson’s Infant Son (Burial No. 17), and Mary Matteson (Burial No. 19), as well as several of the lot’s missing footstones. To honor those buried here, we struggled to return the headstones to their proper locations by matching them up with their bases, but with so many headstones still missing, no clear picture of the burial ground ever revealed itself to us, and we were sadly unable to do so. Ultimately, we were forced to record the stones where we found them, resulting in likely the most confusing diagram in the entire BRMA. It is our fervent hope that further excavation work might uncover those burials still lost to time!