Newport was one of the busiest transatlantic slave-trading ports in British North America, and God's Little Acre, a segregated section of the city's Common Burying Ground dating to 1705, holds the largest and oldest surviving collection of colonial-era gravestones for enslaved and free Africans in the United States. More than 300 markers survive, some carved by enslaved and free Black stonecutters themselves, including Pompe Stevens, whose signed work is among the earliest known African American artwork. Newport's African community founded the country's first mutual aid society, the Free African Union Society, here in 1780.