Parting Ways Cemetery

Address:
Corner Of Bishops Highway & Plympton Street
Kingston, MA 02364

Phone #1: (508) 747-0100
Website
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Description:
The graves on this "New Guinea Settlement" land at the corner of Plympton Street and Bishops Highway in Kingston remained unmarked and unnoticed for nearly 200 years until 1975 when a group of Plymouth residents began working on improving the small cemetery where several black men, slaves and Revolutionary War soldiers, are buried. Four young men, Plato Turner, Prince Goodwin, Quamany Quash, and Cato Howe; African-Americans from Plymouth, served in the American Revolution. The first two were former slaves until their emancipation just before the Revolutionary Way. Quash was emancipated after his military service and Howe was most likely a freeman who was never enslaved. Following the War, the town of Plymouth granted these men acreage near the Kingston border, in an area known as Parting Ways. Howe, Turner, Goodwin and Quash - with their families - established a settlement there known as the New Guinea Settlement. For the past 35 years, Parting Ways, The Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, has worked to improve and dignify the cemetery and ensure it receives the recognition they feel it deserves. Recently museum directors and town leaders have dedicated a new sign for the cemetery explaining the importance of this site where a group of former slaves and their families made their homes after receiving their freedom in post-Revolutionary America. "The site never had an official interpretive historic sign that includes the bio and history of the site and the Afro-American veterens," Lynda Thomas-LeGay, the former president of Parting Ways, said. "The sign, as well as cooperation with the Plymouth County Convention and Visitors Bureau and Destination Plymouth, has satisfied a lot of the Parting Ways goals."

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