It was “surrounded by a stone wall, and it was largely overgrown with vines and weeds,” said Harvey Perry, president of the Westerly Land Trust and great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Perry, who is buried in the cemetery. “People go by it in large numbers every day, and many didn’t even know it existed.”

Now the land trust has trimmed the grass, cut the weeds and transformed the half-acre cemetery, next to an Applebee’s restaurant, into what it hopes will be a place to educate the public about the Quakers’ traditions and their early influence on the town and state.

Mr. Perry envisions it as a destination for tourists, locals and schoolchildren. Not only has the brush been cleared away and a wooden gate rebuilt, but a sign on the site details the Quakers’ history here and elsewhere in America.

Quakers arrived in Rhode Island around 1657, about the time Massachusetts banned their religion, said J. Stanley Lemons, a retired history professor at Rhode Island College. Most settled in Newport, and by the mid-18th century the denomination had become the colony’s largest.

The Westerly congregation, or meeting, was established in 1743, as were meetings in nearby Richmond and Hopkinton. The three were known as the South Kingstown meeting and assembled together monthly.

About 60 Quakers are buried in the Westerly cemetery, all from the mid-to-late 19th century, Mr. Perry said. As was typical of Quaker burial grounds, it was situated at the local meetinghouse and was striking in its simplicity. Most plots are unmarked, in keeping with the belief that one should not celebrate the secular but rather focus on the spiritual.

Quakers believe that the light of God resides in each person, said Edward Baker, who is active in the Westerly meeting. They celebrate simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality rather than worldly possessions.

“Simplicity is one of the primary testimonies of Friends,” Mr. Baker said. “Not wanting the things of this world to have more importance than the spiritual world includes burial grounds.”

The meetinghouse in Westerly, a seaside community near the Connecticut border, moved across town in the distant past. “Westerly and Its Witnesses,” a 250-year history published in 1878, said that the meetinghouse was built in 1744 near the home of John K. Dunn, on the “north side of the post-road,” but that “a small cemetery, called the ‘Quaker Burial-place,’ is all that now remains to mark the spot.”

With the meetinghouse gone, the task of caring for the cemetery was left largely to descendants of the dead, and over time it fell victim to neglect. Mr. Perry, who was raised a Quaker but does not practice, knew of the burial ground but never thought much about it until he founded the land trust, which saves and renews open space in town. He approached the local Quakers, and the trust acquired the deed from the meeting seven years ago.

“This is a little odd for Quakers, because there’s a certain sense among Quakers that worrying too much about the meetinghouse and burial grounds is giving too much concern to worldly affairs,” Mr. Baker said. “You need to take care of the facilities and resources given to you and practice good stewardship, but you don’t want to go over the edge.”

The meeting recognized, however, that donating the land would allow it to be preserved as both a religious and historical landmark in a tourism-driven town that is becoming increasingly developed.

“Right next door is an Applebee’s, and there’s an Applebee’s everywhere,” Mr. Baker said. “We’re getting to the point where everyplace is becoming the same. And preserving history and historic sites, even some of the most universal historic sites such as burial grounds, is an important part of what defines a place. That burial ground is part of the sense of place for Westerly, and I think the land trust is trying to uphold that value.”

Such preservation may be all the more important given the dwindling of the Rhode Island Quaker community, which now numbers only 300 or so, its membership diminished partly by schisms resulting from growing technology and other foundations of modern life.

Of the 60 graves in the little cemetery, only 5 are marked by engraved tombstones. Three of them belong to the Taylor family; Jude died in 1847, Abigail in 1844, and Fanny in 1860. Thomas Hoxsie died in 1832, and Chloe Bailey in 1870. Most of the remaining dead are anonymous.

Visitors who stop by the markers will be taken not only with the history of the place but also with its serenity, members of the land trust hope.

“It has become a little oasis,” said one, Richard Holliday, “in what is now becoming a burgeoning shopping district.”