Teeven Memorial Circle

Smithfield, RI

In the summer of 1943, the United States was deep in World War II, and the skies over the home front were crowded with military aircraft ferrying crews, training airmen, and testing planes bound for the war effort. Accidents were tragically common: thousands of servicemen died not in combat overseas but in crashes on American soil. This marker in Smithfield remembers three such men — an officer from Virginia, a sergeant from New Jersey, and a lieutenant from nearby Pawtucket — who lost their lives together when their aircraft went down on August 5, 1943.

Attleboro, MA

This square in Attleboro honors Sergeant Constantine C. Peters, a local son who served in the U.S. Army Air Force and died on May 10, 1944, at the age of 28, during the Second World War. Naming a public square for a fallen serviceman was a common way American towns wove the war's global scale back into the streets people walked every day. By his death in 1944, the Army Air Forces were flying vast bombing and support campaigns across Europe and the Pacific, and communities like Attleboro sent thousands of young men into that effort.

Auburn, MA

In the small central-Massachusetts town of Auburn, this riverside park was set aside to honor local residents who served in the Second World War and the Korean Conflict. Communities across New England raised memorials like this one in the years after 1945, when nearly every town had sent its sons and daughters overseas and wanted a permanent, public place to remember them. Naming the park for Water Street roots that national sacrifice in a specific neighborhood, turning an ordinary green space into a place of civic memory.

Providence, RI

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) spent nearly his whole life in Providence, where he wrote the atmospheric weird tales and cosmic-horror mythos that would quietly reshape American speculative fiction. He died in relative obscurity and was buried in the family plot at Swan Point Cemetery, his name at first only inscribed on the shared monument. In 1977, four decades after his death, admirers funded this individual headstone and chose an epitaph drawn from his own correspondence — his declaration of belonging to the city that saturated his imagination.