PPS's Festival of Architecture & Design: North Burial Ground

This program is part of Providence Preservation Society's Festival of Architecture and Design (Sep 26 - Oct 30, 2026). You can find !

This walking tour of North Burial Ground covers about 1.5 miles of the historic cemetery’s 150 acres and the research conducted here. Tour leaders include Annalisa Hepner, City Cemetery Director; Thomas Leischner, Cemetery Programming Coordinator; and Keating Zelenke, Reporter-Researcher at PPS. We begin at our Rochambeau Gate where we will hear from the team about the history of cemetery design and how to read the historical and cultural landscapes of North Burial Ground, then move to the Free Grounds to learn about the grave relocation project that was undertaken in the 1960s as well as the research PPS has done on that era. We conclude with a conversation about the current research projects before sharing plans for the future including the landscaping masterplan.

Many Providence residents may not be aware that North Burial Ground was completed in 1700, less than 20 years after Roger Williams died and about 70 years before Brown University was established on College Hill, making it one of the oldest surviving sites in the city. If there is one place that encompasses the breadth of Providence’s history, it is North Burial Ground. The site is owned and operated by the Providence Parks Department and includes over 40,000 gravestones.

Annalisa Heppner serves as the City of Providence Cemetery Director where she manages five municipal cemeteries. She received her MA in Anthropology from the University of Alaska Anchorage and spent most of her career in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Thomas Leischner joined North Burial Ground as Programming Coordinator this year. Prior to working at North Burial Ground, they taught and coordinated educational programming in high schools, museums, and universities in Philadelphia, where they also completed their MEd from the University of Pennsylvania.

PPS researcher-reporters Keating Zelenke and Katy Pickens wrote two stories about the North Burial Ground in 2025 and 2026 on the reinterment of thousands of graves to make way for I-95 and the cemetery’s new landscape plan, which can be read as background to this tour. The North Burial Ground appeared on PPS’s Most Endangered Places List in 2000 due to deferred maintenance and issues with vandalism.

Tickets: This is a pay-what-you-can donation event with a suggested donation of $15 per person. Please note that a minimum of $1 is required to complete registration for this event – this is a $1 fee that goes to Eventbrite, not to PPS.

All tickets are fully refundable up to seven days in advance of each program. After that, tickets are nonrefundable because we may not be able to sell the released tickets within a short timeframe. Thanks for your understanding!