John Coggeshall’s Gravestone in Newport
Learn more about the historic Rhode Island figure whose family helped found the City By The Sea.
The Coggeshall Burial Ground in Newport holds several generations of the prominent Coggeshall family, one of nine families who founded the city in 1639. Notable interments include Arthur Sterry Coggeshall (1873–1958), a paleontologist and museologist, and Abraham Redwood (1709–1788), a merchant and slave trader who helped found the Redwood Library & Athenaeum. Below, John Coggeshall’s gravestone, and the family burial ground, which is marked by an obelisk that honors John Coggeshall, erected by Russell Coggeshall (1788–1864), John’s great-great-great grandson. Photography by Lewis Keen and the R.I. Historical Cemetery Commission
Just steps away from the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, at the corner of Coggeshall and Victoria avenues, an important part of the state’s history is set in stone. Slate, to be exact.
It’s the final resting place of John Coggeshall, the patriarch of the prominent family who helped found the city in 1639 after fleeing England seeking religious tolerance. He died in 1647 at the age of forty-seven, making his resting site’s marker the oldest carved gravestone in the state, says Lewis Keen, chairman of the Newport Historic Cemetery Advisory Commission.
The slate marker features a winged skull — a memento mori — a figure common in old Colonial burial grounds that means “remember you must die.”
Coggeshall served as the first president of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which united Newport, Portsmouth, Providence and Warwick under Roger Williams’ patent of 1643. Coggeshall only served for a few months until his death in November 1647. His wife, Mary, died in 1684 and is buried alongside him.
“These are the oldest carved stones that we know of in the state of Rhode Island,” Keen says.
There were no stone carvers in Newport at the time of Coggeshall’s death, so the markers came from somewhere else, likely Boston, Keen says.
John Coggeshall’s gravestone likely inspired another notable Newport family: The intricate details caught the eye of John Stevens, a stone carver who founded a business on Thames Street in 1705. Six generations of the Stevens family carried on his work, a tradition continued today by a third-generation stone carver, Nicholas Benson, whose grandfather bought the John Stevens Shop
in 1927.
Another multigenerational family with a Newport legacy set in stone.
