Nine Men's Misery Cemetery is a historic cemetery in Cumberland, Rhode Island, marking the traditional mass grave of nine colonial soldiers said to have been captured and killed by Indigenous combatants in March 1676 during King Philip's War. The site is often described as one of the earliest colonial veterans' memorials in the United States. Located within Monastery Park and registered as Rhode Island Historical Cemetery CU012, the cemetery was formally dedicated in 1928. Recent national attention has highlighted the ghostlore associated with the site.
Background On March 26, 1676, Captain Michael Pierce of Scituate, Massachusetts, led a force of English and allied Wampanoag soldiers into present-day Central Falls, Rhode Island, where they were drawn into an ambush by Narragansett combatants and overwhelmed after several hours of fighting. The battle was one of the most devastating defeats suffered by colonial forces during King Philip's War. A longstanding local tradition holds that nine English soldiers were captured and executed after the battle. Their bodies were later found and buried in a mass grave by fellow soldiers, who marked the site with a pile of stones.
Site
Location Nine Men's Misery Cemetery lies within Monastery Park off Diamond Hill Road in Cumberland, Rhode Island. It is roughly 3.3 miles north-northeast of the Pierce's Fight site, now memorialized in Central Falls, Rhode Island as Pierce Park and Riverwalk.
Historic-cemetery designation Nine Men's Misery Cemetery is designated as Cemetery CU012 by the Rhode Island Advisory Committee on Historic Cemeteries. Their description notes the state plaque added in 1928 and the stone cairn that was cemented into a permanent structure by the Trappist monks who once occupied the property.
Historical accounts and later traditions
Seventeenth-century accounts Four writers recorded Pierce's Fight close to the time it happened: Rehoboth minister Noah Newman, writing the day after the battle; Boston merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall, writing that July; Increase Mather, later in 1676; and William Hubbard, in 1677. Their casualty counts vary, but all describe a small, mixed English–Wampanoag force overwhelmed by a much larger Narragansett one, and all mention survivors who escaped the field. None of the four accounts mentions any colonial soldier taken captive during the battle. They offer no basis for the Nine Men's Misery tradition, which appears only in much later sources.
Nineteenth-century tradition The Nine Men's Misery narrative first appears in nineteenth‑century local histories, beginning with John Daggett’s 1834 History of Attleborough. Daggett wrote that nine militiamen became "separated from the main body" near "Camp Swamp" while pursuing a small group of Native warriors, after which they were surrounded and killed "on the spot." He stated that their comrades arrived too late to save them and buried the bodies beneath a heap of stones at the place where they fell, a site later known as Dead Men's Bones. Daggett noted that he received the story from "intelligent persons living in the vicinity" who were descendants of early settlers. Daggett also reported that bones at the site were disinterred "not many years ago" by physicians, and that one skeleton was identified as Benjamin Bucklin (also spelled Buckland) of Rehoboth by the presence of "a set of double front teeth" (hyperdontia). Rehoboth’s official death register lists Benjamin Bucklin among those "slain on the 26th of March, 1676." In the posthumous 1894 edition of Daggett’s history, completed by his daughter Amelia Daggett Sheffield, she added that her father had personally spoken with one of the physicians involved in the exhumation who had read his book. Sheffield wrote that the physician "was able to testify that [Daggett’s 1834 account] was substantially correct," noting that he had been "one of the 'medical gentlemen' present, aided in the exhumation, and finally examined the bones." Leonard Bliss’s 1836 History of Rehoboth expanded the tradition and recorded three different oral accounts of the nine men’s fate. The first, quoted directly from Daggett, held that the men had strayed ahead of their party and were slain and buried where they fell. A second tradition placed the nine in advance of a Providence reinforcement party. A third tradition differed sharply, describing the men as captured survivors of Pierce’s Fight, tortured in a natural "amphitheatre," subjected to a war-dance, and finally "dispatched with the tomahawk" after their captors quarreled over how the torture should proceed. Bliss attributed this narrative to the testimony of a Native informant taken prisoner shortly afterward. Bliss also repeated Daggett’s claim that some of the bones had been disinterred by Providence physicians—but around the time of the American Revolution—and that Bucklin was identified by his unusually large frame and "a set of double teeth all around." A Providence Journal article on January 20, 1886 echoed Bliss’s three-version history and added that the physicians included Dr. Bowen of Providence, claiming they exposed three skeletons before being driven off by local farmers. William J. Miller’s 1880 Notes Concerning the Wampanoag Tribe repeated Bliss’s narrative in full and added a new claim that a skull from the site had once been taken to Brown University and displayed in its museum, where it "plainly shows the cut of the tomahawk," though Brown University has stated that it has no record of such an object.
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