The Carter Jackson Monument

Tucked in the brush beside the old Post Road in Saunderstown stands a stone pillar that records a colonial murder. In the middle of the seventeen hundreds, a Newport ship captain named Thomas Carter is said to have killed a Virginia traveler named William Jackson on this spot and robbed him of a large sum of money. Carter was caught, convicted, and hanged. By tradition, his body was left to rot in an iron gibbet cage, said to be one of the last such cages used in Rhode Island.

The crime would have faded from memory, except that more than a century later, in eighteen eighty-nine, a wealthy and eccentric local spiritualist named Joseph Peace Hazard raised this obelisk. He carved the strange tale across all four faces of the stone, and there it has stood ever since, slowly swallowed by the roadside greenery.