Portsmouth African Burying Ground

The Portsmouth African Burying Ground is a small memorial park on Chestnut Street marking the site where an 18th-century burial ground for enslaved and free African Americans was discovered in 2003. A memorial marker was placed in 2015 after a decade of community engagement about how to appropriately acknowledge the site. The remains of three individuals were reinterred there with ceremony.

The memorial is not large — it occupies a small portion of a city block — but it carries real weight. Portsmouth's colonial prosperity was built substantially on participation in the slave trade and on enslaved labour, a history that is inadequately represented in the city's more prominent historical narratives. The plaques and the nearby African Heritage Trail markers help fill in this gap. The trail connects sites across the city associated with Portsmouth's Black history.

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A story
In 2003, construction workers excavating a utility trench on Chestnut Street uncovered human skeletal remains that turned out to be an 18th-century African burial ground. Some 200 people are estimated to be interred here — enslaved Africans and their descendants who lived and died in Portsmouth before and after the Revolutionary War. The discovery fundamentally changed how the city understood its own history.

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