By JOHN HILL

As they pull out of their driveways on their way to work or a store, the biggest worry confronting the people who live around Scituate Avenue is probably how bad the traffic will be when they reach Phenix Avenue

The houses there have ample yards with well-trimmed lawns. Garages protect their cars from the rain and snow and swimming pools cool off their kids in the hot summers. It’s the kind of place you move to as you move up.

But as they drive along Scituate Avenue, they unknowingly pass a reminder that life in that suburb was not always so easy.

It’s nestled on a small lot, about 50 feet square, on the south side of the street, a few yards down from the intersection with Amy Drive. Known as the Nicholas Sheldon Lot, Historic Cemetery Number 19, its 14 headstones and small brick mausoleum are relics of a time when the fields of western Cranston were a challenge and not a reward.

There are actually two Nicholas Sheldon lots, the visible one on Scituate Avenue and another Nicholas Sheldon lot, Historic Cemetery Number 75, hidden in the woods behind the Scituate Vista apartments. That one is named for the patriarch of the Sheldon clan in Cranston, Nicholas Sheldon Jr. The other is named for his son.

One thing is very clear from the Sheldon graveyards, though. Life in 18th and 19th century Rhode Island was not easy, or guaranteed. Between the two graveyards, in use from 1796 to 1890, there are 25 headstones that are either readable or were recorded by Rhode Island genealogist James N. Arnold in 1890. Of the 25, 12 were for people who were 29 years or younger when they died. Of that dozen, five were children, the eldest 11 years old when she died.

Many of the headstones tell of lives that were regularly hit with tragedy, like Jeremiah Sheldon and his wife Sally. Jeremiah was the grandson of Nicholas Jr. and in 1823 he and Sally had a son they named Nicholas. But the boy died in the fall of 1824. The couple later had a daughter, Anna, who died at the age of two. Both are buried in the cemetery on Scituate Avenue named for Nicholas Jr.

Some of the stories on the graves can still be read. Headstones made of slate are nearly as clean as they were the day they were put in the ground. But others, of marble for instance, are weathered by the elements and can be hard to decipher.

But thanks to Rhode Island historian and genealogist James N. Arnold, they are not all lost. Arnold spent last decades of the 1800s visiting cemeteries across Rhode Island and meticulously recording what was on the headstones.

Copies of the volumes of his work that cover Cranston’s cemeteries are available in the main branch of the Cranston Public Library. Anyone with an historic cemetery near them and who wants to know what those worn stones say can find it in those volumes.

In Cemetery 75, behind the apartments, now surrounded by trees, Capt. Gorton Arnold may have spent the two saddest days of his life. According to the state’s “Vital Extracts, 1636-1899,” he had married Mary Sheldon on May 1, 1803, in Cranston and within months they were expecting their first child.

But on May 25, 1804, little more than a year after they were married, Mary was dead. Gorton had a poem of grief and rage carved on her (still readable) headstone, a memorial to his 20-year-old wife, whom he called his “amiable consort.”

“The noblest charm that virtue gave, with all that nature could supply,” it reads. “Then why, dread tyrant, was it given for you to sink such worth in drift; Why t’was the great command of heaven to pluck the fairest flower first.”

But Gorton’s grieving was not over. On June 18, less than a month after he buried his young wife, the baby girl for whom Mary had apparently died giving birth died as well. She was named Mary and was buried in the graveyard with her young mother.

Capt. Arnold appears to have moved on, for there is no gravestone for him in either of the Sheldon lots. But a Col. Gorton Arnold died in Warwick in 1845 and he is buried there. He married a woman named Waitstill Lippitt in Warwick in 1805 and their first child, born in 1807, was a daughter.

They named her Mary Sheldon Arnold.

There are many more stories like these, unread, throughout Cranston’s historic cemeteries. They will remain unknown, and could even be lost, unless the graveyards are cared for. If there is a neglected cemetery near you and you would like to learn about volunteering to maintain it, contact the Cranston Historical Cemeteries Commission on Facebook or by emailing cranstoncemeteries@gmail.com.