By JOSEPH FITZGERALD

WOONSOCKET — A memorial ceremony for the 71 individuals — including six from Woonsocket — who were relocated from the old State Farm Cemetery at Route 37 in Cranston and re-interred at State Institution Cemetery No. 2 will be held Tuesday, July 14 at 2 p.m.

The cemetery is located at Pontiac Avenue and Knight Street on the Cranston-Warwick city line.
Speakers will include Rhode Island Department of Transportation Director Mike Lewis, Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, and pastors representing the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Armenian Orthodox faiths.
Craig Stenning, director of the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, will also offer remarks.
The program will feature a wreath laying on the graves of several Armenians and on the memorial marker for a Civil War veteran, as well as a roll call of the 71 reburied individuals.
The bones were re-interred last year, two years after heavy spring rains washed away soil from an embankment of Route 37, exposing the human remains. The remains were initially discovered the week of June 19, 2006, by two Citizens Bank employees who were strolling through the area during their lunch break. The area is located behind the Citizens Bank building at 100 Sockanossett Cross Road in Cranston
At the time, city and state officials recovered two coffin plates and numerous human remains exposed adjacent to the Citizen’s Bank parking facility. Several sets of human skeletal remains and associated coffin materials were also exposed within an artificial gulley created within the state’s highway right-of way corridor, continued to the rear of the Citizens Bank building between Route 37 and the existing parking lot. State officials determined the bones were those of individuals interred within Rhode Island’s State Institution Almshouse Burial Ground and subsequently notified the Rhode Island
Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission of the findings.
Archeologists from the state Department of Transportation -  including DOT archaeologist Michael Hebert of Woonsocket - were called in to examine the site and discovered that the bones had come from a potter’s field that had been the final resting ground for state’s sick, indigent and insane people who died at the old State Farm’s workhouse, poorhouse and prisons from 1875 to 1918.
Almost all the remains were adults; about five were children or infants. The causes of death were varied, ranging from hardening of the arteries and senility to pneumonia, tuberculosis and syphilis.
Alltogether, 71 bodies had to be removed and reburied; either they were the ones exposed or ones that had to be moved as DOT corrected drainage problems at the site. About 3,100 are still buried there.
Before re-burial, the remains had to be identified so next of kin could be notified. Hebert and a consultant poured over old records, including census data going back to the turn of the 20th century, and were able to indentify the remains and draft bios on all 71. Most were identified by lead coffin plates found in the soil, with additional details coming from the death records once kept at the old State Farm.
Woonsocket residents who died at the state institutions (State Almshouse, State Infirmary, State Insane Asylum, etc.) and were removed and reburied at State Institution Cemetery No. 2 were:
*Emma  (Benoit) Cadorette (October 27,1861- October 13, 1916), wife of Louis Cadorete.
*Alice May Robinson (Nov. 14, 1917-Feb. 25, 1918), daughter of Alice Robinson and Louis B. Kelley.
*Dinah “Maria” (Finnegan) Cleary (c. 1845- Sept. 7, 1887), wife of Patrick Cleary.
*Nettie Luella (Angell) Brackett (c. 1861-Sept. 30, 1916), wife of Alvin Brackett.
*George H. Briggs (c. 1819- Sept. 28, 1889).
Hebert said new granite grave markers for each grave - complete with names and dates - were made by A.  Sciolto & Son Monuments Inc. of Cranston and installed in the spring of 2008.
"Originally, all of the burials of these people at the old State Farm cemetery were marked with wooden posts upon which a number (corresponding to the grave plot number) was painted," Hebert said.
The reburial included the placement of each individual in separate concrete vault boxes (26” x 30”) with each grave containing only one concrete box, with one exception - during the initial discovery of the human remains in  2006, miscellaneous human skeletal remains from a number of unidentified individuals were found in the rear parking lot of 100 Sockanosset Cross Road. As a result, RIDOT re-interred those remains in several concrete boxes placed in one grave with each grave marked by a flat granite monument. For those identified individuals, the monument was inscribed with the name, age, parents’ names and/or spousal name and birth and death dates.
The reburial was supervised by a state-registered funeral director.