If you’ve ever tried to geolocate from Bryant’s College of Business, you may have noticed something strange: instead of the location appearing as the “Business Entrepreneurship Leadership Center” or even “BELC,” what shows up on your phone instead is “Dr. Simeon Brown Lot." This is peculiar, because Brown isn’t a Bryant professor, administrator, or alumni. In fact, he’s been dead for over 200 years.
Brown's mortal remains are interred behind the BELC, so as far as Google Earth is concerned, your call isn’t originating at a school — it’s coming from inside a graveyard.
The Dr. Simeon Brown Lot, a small family plot a few yards from the BELC, includes the final resting place of Brown (1720-1807), his wife, Elizabeth (1727-1827), and their son, Lucas (1772-1786). Visiting it is easy: just walk out the back door of the Corey E. Levine '80 Dining Commons.
The Dr. Simeon Brown Lot one of at least six historic cemeteries scattered around campus, including some with direct ties to the university’s history. Members of the Bryant community, for example, may recognize the Mowry family name: John Mowry Road runs along the west side of the Tupper campus, and the 1708 Captain Joseph Mowry House is still in use as Bryant’s Mowry Alumni House; the former Mowry homestead’s barn is now the Art Barn.
The Nathaniel Mowry Lot, located between private homes on John Mowry Road and the campus, includes more than a dozen graves of the Mowry family, including that of Nathaniel Mowry (1772-1841), namesake of the Mowry family patriarch who was one of the original 17th-century European settlers in Rhode Island.
Located near the Facilities Management complex on the west side of campus, the Daniel Mowry Lot contains 69 graves, many of the Mowry family, including that of Judge Daniel Mowry, Jr. (1729-1806), a Revolutionary War veteran and Continental Congress delegate. The Mowry Sayles Lot is in the woods across Douglas Pike (Route 7) from Essex Street and contains the graves of Lydia Mowry (1771-1815) and Mowry Sayles (1799-1822).
Between the rugby and field hockey fields and Rogler Farm Road you’ll find the Nathan Aldrich Lot, a stone-walled cemetery with 20 graves, including that of Nathan Aldrich, Jr. (1799-1869), a member of a prominent Quaker family that lived in Smithfield. Also off Rogler Farm Road, near the northern edge of campus property, is the William Enches Lot, which actually was moved about 100 feet north of its original locating when its historic site was torn up to build a warehouse for a drugstore chain.
The Thomas Smith Lot, Bryant’s most easily located cemetery, is just off the main campus entrance (on the right as you drive in). It includes the gravesite of Thomas Smith (1785-1857), a descendant of the settlers who gave Smithfield its name.
During the 2017-18 academic year, Bryant students in a "Doing Public History" course participated in a project examining campus's historical cemeteries, transcribing gravestone information, and reporting on the conditions of each site. More recently, the same course has led cemetery clean-ups during the institution's annual Research and Engagement Day (REDay).
The Bryant cemeteries are among the more than 130 Smithfield graveyards catalogued by the Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Commission, which maintains a statewide database that provides details and GPS locations gathered by volunteers. In addition to established cemeteries, the database records information throughout Rhode Island on (often unmarked) burial grounds containing the remains of Indigenous communities and enslaved individuals.