NEWPORT, R.I. — A free walking tour on Saturday afternoon will take visitors through St. Mary’s Cemetery, one of the city’s oldest burial grounds and the resting place of generations of Irish families who settled in Newport.
The Museum of Newport Irish History is hosting the tour at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24. Local researcher Steve Marino will lead the group, and the walk lasts about 45 minutes. Guests meet at the Kingston Avenue entrance, close to Warner Street. The museum asks people to reserve a spot and to wear sensible flat footwear, since the grass and paths may be wet and bumpy.
The museum counts more than 1,000 Newporters buried in the cemetery. Many were Irish immigrants or the children of immigrants who arrived as the city grew in the 1800s.
The cemetery is tied to the parish that became St. Mary’s Church, the oldest Catholic parish in Rhode Island. The congregation was founded in 1828 and first worshiped in a small wooden church, St. Joseph’s, near Barney and Mount Vernon streets. As Irish families poured in, the parish built a brownstone Gothic Revival church in 1848–52 at Spring Street and Memorial Boulevard, designed by Brooklyn architect Patrick C. Keely. That church later drew national attention as the place where Jacqueline Bouvier married Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1953.
The burial ground was laid out as the larger church neared completion. Space ran short in the 1890s. From then on, parish families buried their dead at St. Columba Cemetery in Middletown, and the Newport grounds have long been closed to new graves.
More details and reservations are available through the Museum of Newport Irish History.
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