Cranston Historical Society

The Zuriel Potter Lot, Cranston Historic Cemetery #108

Next to parking lot, Garden Village Apartments, 935 Pontiac Avenue

 

CRANSTON – In 1969, when construction of the Garden Village apartments began on Pontiac Avenue, workmen cut down trees and bulldozed the earth to make room for six buildings with 93 apartments.

 

But those crews left something alone. Behind the spot where they built the second building, to the left, you can park your car next to a low retaining wall that holds back a small wooded hill. And you can go through an old gate on the side of that hill. and follow a short path through the trees to a reminder of the people who were clearing it 200 years before; a cemetery for three generations of Zuriel and Abigail Potter’s family.

 

The couple’s headstones sit against a wall of dark gray stones. They are placed in the center of the back row of the cemetery, like  grandparents at the Thanksgiving table, with their five of their children and the families of their sons and grandsons arrayed around them.

 

The state cemetery database lists 25 graves there. The cemetery was in use from 1796, when Zuriel was the first to be buried, until 1916 when his great-granddaughter Anna Maria Slade Potter, born a century after he died, was interred.  It was most active from around 1833 to 1866, when someone was being buried there at least every four or five years.

 

Many of the stones are made of slate and are in remarkable condition, looking like they could’ve been carved last year.  Five were missing, but in the inaugural use of our Cranston Historical Cemeteries Commission probe, a 48-inch long metal rod with a handle, we poked the ground and found three under a couple inches of dirt.  

 

The cemetery is well organized. Each generation has its own row and the stones are aligned perfectly, facing east or, in a few cases, west.  Four husband-and-wife couples are buried there and in each case, if you are facing east, the husband is on the right and the wife on the left. 

 

It’s especially interesting with the Benjamin Hill’s grave. He married Elizabeth Potter in 1799. After she died in 1821, he married Dorcas Kimball a year later. He and Dorcas  were together for 24 years, until she died in 1855 at age 71.  You would think they’d bury him in between the two wives, but instead, they put both wives to his left, with Dorcas in the middle. That preserved the husband-on-the-right layout elsewhere in the cemetery.

 

Back row center are Zuriel and Abigail and five of their children. The next row holds their son Benjamin and his children. The third row is for Benjamin’s son Otis and his family.

 

Abigail King and Zuriel Potter were both born in 1740 and married in 1761. He died in 1791 at age 50 while Abigail lived on until 1819.  Zuriel was a descendant of Roger Williams and is listed as a 1776 veteran of the Revolutionary War by the Daughters of the American Revolution. He appears in the town records as an arbiter in local disputes. He bought and sold property often.  

 

Zuriel got the land from his father Benjamin who owned a large swath on the Warwick border and around modern-day Pontiac Avenue. In March of 1758, according to a hand-written deed in the Cranston land records, Benjamin Potter,  “in Consideration of the love and good will I have and do bare to my son Zuriel Potter” gave the then 18-year-old four acres of land, “with my corn mill thereon.”

 

Three years after his father gave him the land, Zuriel married Abigail.The couple built a house on “the highway,” as the deed described it, and set about starting their family.  Their first child, a daughter, was born ten months after they wed. 

 

Like most 18th and 19th century cemeteries, the Zuriel Potter Lot reminds us how uncertain life was back then. Four graves are for infants or children less than four years old. Zuriel Jr.  died at 19 and, judging by the headstone, the death of their daughter Abigail at age 34 hit the Potters particularly hard.

 

“The summons comes, the saint obeys

Swift was the flight and short the road

...

From grief to bliss, from earth to heaven removed

Her memory brightens as her life has closed”

 

And then there is the inscription on the headstone of William King Potter,  Zuriel’s grandson, who died in 1842: 

 

“He has left a wife and three interesting children.” 

 

Uhhh, okay.

 

We can be pretty sure about where the house was because in 1891 Rhode Island historian James N. Arnold visited the cemetery “back of the old Potter farmhouse.” It sounds like the Potter descendants had pretty much moved on by then, as Arnold described the lot as “well walled although getting to be sadly overrun with brush and wild overgrowth.” There wouldn’t be another burial there for 25 years after Arnold’s visit and then only one more after that. 

 

It is now regularly visited, raked and weeded by Cranston Historical Cemeteries Commission Vice Chair Paul Tognetti, who has volunteered to adopt the Zuriel Potter lot.

 

The farmhouse is long gone, but another vestige of the Potter family, what Benjamin referred to as “my corn mill thereon” remains. On the west side of Pontiac Avenue, where the Pocasset River runs under it, you can see a black building that houses the Gazebo Salon. Its right up against the Pocasset River and its foundation is made of long, flat stones piled one on top of another, in a style that was used more in the 1800s than the 1900s. The basement has a dirt floor.

 

That at first might seem a drawback, but current owner Lynne Forlasto said in the 2010 floods that swamped the buildings along the Pocasset, her basement was one of the only ones in that didn’t need to be pumped out. It didn’t try to fight the river; the water drained out on its own. 

 

The Potters appear to have been a religious family. Their 1600s ancestors came to Rhode Island with Anne Hutchinson, fleeing religious oppression of Puritan Massachusetts. Zuriel’s great-grandmother, Jemima Williams, was a daughter of Roger Williams.   

 

Zuriel’s son Benjamin was a deacon and Benjamin’s son Otis W. Potter, according to his headstone, “was a Baptist preacher for thirty years.”  Zuriel is a biblical name meaning “rock of God.” He had three brothers, Meshach, Shadrach and Abnego, named after three Hebrew men who, according to the Book of Daniel, were thrown into a fire by King Nebuchadnezzar II for refusing to bow to his image. But because of their faith, they did not burn. 

 

Benjamin’s son Otis served in Baptist churches in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He wrote religious books and pamphlets for children. One was the diary of a young Massachusetts girl named Ann Marie Slade, a member of church in Somerset, Mass. She died of scarlet fever in 1838, when she was 15 years old. When Otis and his wife Lydia Tillinghast had a daughter four years later, they named her after the girl.

 

Otis and Lydia had ten children, with two dying in infancy. Those two, and Ann Marie, are buried with them in the Potter Cemetery. A son, Thomas Tillinghast Potter, became a preacher like his father and grandfather. He went into missionary work and was the original pastor of the First Baptist Church of Fresno, California, in the 1880s. He died in 1886, only 46 years old. His wife Sarah Frances died two years later, also at 46. She left her estate to a Chinese mission school she’d founded and which later grew into what became the First Chinese Baptist Church of Fresno. 

 

And, like the headstones in Garden Village, that church, a different type of memorial to the Potter family, still stands today.

 

For more details on this cemetery including a list of who was buried there and when, click here:

https://rihistoriccemeteries.org/newsearchcemeterydetail.aspx?ceme_no=CR108