Potter’s Field Park Cleanup and Community Serve Day

Volunteers from Manna Church held a Community Serve Day on Saturday, July 20, in and around the Autumn Lakes Apartments of Denbigh. They conducted free oil changes, handed out frozen treats, provided laundry service, and then played a little friendly 3 on 3 basketball in the neighborhood.

Also, as a part of their July Serve Day, the Manna Church volunteers, with assistance from the City of Newport News Parks and Recreation Landscape Services, conducted a cleanup of the local Potter’s Field Historical Park. They cleared a large amount of deadfall and trash from the property. 

Located at Potters Lane and Warwick Boulevard, in 1990 the City Council and the Historical Commission dedicated Potter’s Field as a city park, memorializing those buried in the unmarked cemetery and protecting their remains. The memorial reads:

This memorial was erected to recognize and preserve the final resting place of some 500 persons interred in a pauper’s cemetery, once part of the Warwick County poorhouse operations, since reduced to 4.5 acres. It was occupied between 1893-1935 by a pesthouse barracks and dining hall serving the community’s destitute and infirm. Until 1961, the unclaimed bodies of former inmates, pauper infants, victims of disease, criminals, and nameless indigents were buried here. Most were interred in simple pine coffins without the benefit of tombstones. Over the years, the site acquired the biblical designation “Potter’s Field,” a reference to the lot purchased by the Pharisees “to bury strangers in.” This monument was placed to insure [sic] that the graves of these departed souls remain forever consecrated.