Beneath the grass and pathway of this Chestnut Street memorial park lies the Portsmouth African Burying Ground. Beneath the grass and pathway lies an 18th-century gravesite that held almost two hundred freed and enslaved African people. This place is the only archaeologically verified African burying ground for the time period in New England, and that fact shapes how quiet and reverent this spot feels.
Maps as far back as 1705 included a cemetery here; the burying ground fell out of use in the late 18th century, and it was even mentioned in a newspaper in the mid-1800s. City maps continued to show it until 1902, but road pavements, sewage work, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century building construction covered this ground over time. In 2000 a marker was placed near the cemetery, and in 2003 construction workers digging a manhole unexpectedly discovered buried remains.
Archaeologists exhumed eight individuals and determined they were of African descent: four men, one woman, one child, and others whose sex could not be determined. Notice the quiet marker placed here in 2000, honoring the eight individuals discovered and exhumed in 2003.