Lucy Haskell
1780 - 1831 or 1832
Lucy Brown Haskell was an African American woman born in Stonington, Connecticut around 1780. She married Revolutionary War soldier Charles Haskell in Providence in 1811. She died ten months after their wedding day at the age of thirty one. In 1831 her husband Charles purchased a house on Olney's Lane from his father, just months before the riot that caused so much destruction in that part of town.
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Erik Christiansen, PhD, Rhode Island College
Similar to what occurred after WWI and WWII, African American veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families received little respect for their service to the nation.
Similar to what occurred after WWI and WWII, African American veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families received little respect for their service to the nation.
One fascinating area is that of segregated burials. Burials of whites and blacks ("colored" in the records) was clearly segregated in the early days of the cemetery. Section AG [close by the mild rise as you enter straight through the main gate], a colonial section, contains many gravestones that give the race of the individual in the inscription as colored or Negro. The first fifteen gravestones in the northeast corner of this section face north-south, the only such orientation in the colonial section. Early Christian burials almost always faced east-west so that on Judgment Day, when the sun rises in the east they can rise up and be facing the rising sun. It is probably no coincidence that these fifteen Africans, including one who served in the Revolutionary War, do not face in the preferred orientation to be called to heaven. Many but not all of the burials in [this] section... are African slaves, former slaves or free blacks.
John E. Sterling, North Burial Ground (2000: xxxiii)