Sarah Helen Power Whitman, a poet and romance of Edgar Allen Poe, recounts her life.
Ghosts walked amid the gravestones along North Main Street two days before Halloween as re-enactors talked about their characters’ lives – and deaths.
It was part of a continuing project by the Friends of the North Burial Ground and Randall Park, in collaboration with Rhode Island College to raise awareness of the historical and recreational aspects of the area.
RIC students and professors led nearly 100 people around the grounds to meet with, among others, Sarah Helen Power Whitman, a poet and girlfriend of Edgar Allan Poe, and Samuel Whipple, who may have been murdered so his land could be taken and ultimately become the cemetery.
Providence Journal reporter Tom Mooney wrote that Francis Leazes, a professor of political science and public policy at RIC, said “The people who are interred here can tell the story of the state since its founding. But like all historic cemeteries, it needs the care and attention before the stories disappear, literally.”
Mooney continued that Leazes and some of his colleagues such as Erik Christiansen (an SNA board member), Michelle Valletta and Cathy Hurst, started the Friends group that sponsored its first round of tours in June, featuring a Civil War enactment with stops at some of the historic graves that include early governors, leaders of the Revolutionary and Civil wars, barons from the Industrial Revolution and men such as John Brown, a rich merchant, slave trader and co-founder of Brown University.
For more information, go to /www.facebook.com/northburialground/.
Adults and children in costumes contributed to the festivities.
