Volume II- Projects in Progress
The News from Island Cemetery
Serving Newport families for over 175 years …
Cedar Way
The most visible and important development is the progress on the Cedar Way columbaria and cremation garden, designed by Tanya Kelley. The newly designed cremation area in Cedar Way makes use of one of the original carriage ways laid out in the 1848 design of the cemetery. To date, eight trees have been planted, the garden walk has been laid out and we are awaiting delivery in mid-June of the four columbarium structures. Each will contain 15 niches with individual granite covers to securely hold two urns for cremation remains for a total of 60. The backs of the structures will be faced with fieldstone and capped with bluestone similar to other walls in the cemetery. The in-ground burial of cremains in the grass area will have small slant markers placed in a ground cover. Several granite memorial benches will also be placed along the way.
Rendering provided by Tanya Kelley
Belmont Memorial Chapel Restoration
Renewed interest in the building was created last summer when the Art Exhibit by Arts&Newport and Dodie Kazanjian attracted many visitors who were new to the Island Cemetery. Beautiful images of the interior were taken and published by the Daily News. The Newport String Quartet performed one of their Hidden Newport concerts, “highlighting some of Newport's most eclectic, beautiful, and unusual spaces” and posted the video of the performance on their website. Their videography provided exterior and interior views of the beautiful architectural details of the chapel.
Following up on the renewed interest in restoring the chapel to its former beauty, we applied for and received several grants to begin the restoration work this summer. The first activity, funded in part by Preserve RI, will be to install below-ground electrical service to the chapel. This will facilitate installation of an alarm and fire system to protect the building. The Alletta McBean Charitable Trust has generously provided funds which will enable restoration of the slate roof, a necessary and substantial step that has to precede any restoration of the interior.
Watch for the work to begin this summer as soon as contracts are finalized with the construction team and materials are available.
Building Updates – Island Cemetery
Garage: Proceeds from the sale of the pickup truck and the backhoe, machines that had been sitting idle, funded property maintenance projects to the garage across from the cemetery entrance at 33 Warner Street. To secure the building, several repair steps were undertaken including removing the asbestos, repairing the large holes and replacing the entire roof. The exterior was spruced up with new gutters and a new coat of paint.
Office: We are seeking an assessment report to develop a proposal for replacing the slate roof on the office building and repairing the windows and gutters. In addition, we have contracted to install an alarm and fire system to secure the building against vandalism and fire.
Fencing: Cassidy Bros. Forge Inc. have removed the entrance gates for repair at their shop in Rowley MA. They specialize in the restoration of decorative iron works such as those that grace garden cemeteries like Mount Auburn and Island Cemetery.
Historical Records - Document Preservation
Thanks to grant funding from the EJMP Fund for Philanthropy, all paper records have been entered into a systems management program, Cemetery Find, by Bosscan Computer Scanning of Wakefield, MA. The database has a publicly accessible portion and can be used by anyone to research burials in the Island Cemetery as well as locations under www.CemeteryFind.com. We have had a Salve intern (Zack Russell) for the past 4 months who is continuing with us part-time on staff this summer, doing corrections to the database and checking mapping for handwritten records that were difficult to transcribe accurately. In addition to corrections, newly developed areas such as Cedar Way and mapping of the Friends Cemetery on Tilden Avenue need to be included.
A second project is the preservation of the historically valuable volumes of interment records and deeds stored in the massive safe in the office building. Jim Currier, local bookbinder specialist, has been engaged to do this project. Our goal is to protect the integrity of the books for serve current and future researchers.