Hundreds of People From Rhode Island Institutions Buried Beneath Busy Highway

A Rhode Island woman's search for the gravesite of her great-great-grandfather led to a discovery near the city of Cranston of nearly 1,000 people buried beneath the busy state Route 37 highway and an unmarked mass grave containing hundreds of bodies, the Associated Press reported.

The bodies were from state institution cemeteries, where more than 5,000 of Rhode Island's poor, sick or mentally ill residents were buried between 1875 and 1953, according to a Monday story by WPRI-TV.

"It was during a time when regulations were far more lax than they are now," Charles St. Martin, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, told AP. "This would never happen now."

Route 37 was built between 1963 and 1969 over part of the institution cemetery called State Farm Cemetery #1. The site is said to have 1,200 gravesites that contain the remains of 3,000 people.

St. Martin said a thousand of those graves should have been moved. He added that historical or environmental surveys weren't done because plans for the highway were finished before federal legislation passed in 1966 that preserves historic and archaeological sites.

He also noted that grave markers weren't placed when the highway was built because original grave markers would have been made from wood and likely would have rotted away.

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below:

Along with grave markers that had rotted away, some had been destroyed by fire, too. The cemetery was near railroad tracks and sparks from the steam engines set fires that consumed the markers, according to a description of the cemetery by the Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Commission. The cemetery deteriorated and became overgrown.

In 2006, dozens of coffins were exposed due to rain and some had to be moved when the road was repaired, the commission said.

That was when the transportation department realized the graves were there, St. Martin said. The department is not aware of any other state highways that were built over cemeteries. It does not plan to move the graves that are under Route 37.

"We are most sympathetic to the families of all the people who long ago were buried in unmarked graves but this is the extent of our knowledge and our records," he wrote in the email.

No relatives of the deceased have approached the department to raise this as an issue. Most of the people who died at the state institutions for poor people and those with mental illness were buried by their families elsewhere.

The woman searching for the gravesite for her great-great-grandfather is named Maria da Graca. She has said she had spent more than a decade looking for his grave and had feared it might be under the highway.

Da Graca's relative, Antonio Coelho, was likely buried in institution cemetery #3 when he died in 1941. Coelho came to Rhode Island from Cape Verde to buy a packet ship in 1891. But after the captain intentionally sunk the ship, Coelho spent the rest of his life in poverty and had to live at the state institution.

The DOT believes his grave was probably one of 577 that were moved to cemetery #2 in 1975 to make way for an industrial complex, but da Graca told WPRI she's not convinced he's there and she will keep searching.