Lincoln and Cumberland fit together in the northeast corner of the state roughly as two right-angled triangles, except that they are askew with a few nontriangular jogs and curves and with the Blackstone River making an undulant hypotenuse between them. Lincoln is broad at its...
The three affluent closely related Providence families who controlled the Lonsdale Company—the Browns, the Iveses, and the Goddards—brought a relatively new mode of ownership to the state's industry. Operating initially as the investment firm of Brown and Ives, this was the...
What became the textile manufacturing town of Saylesville began with a small cotton print works in the 1830s. William F. Sayles initiated its important history in the textile industry, however, when he purchased the bankrupt print works at auction in 1847. He converted it to...
A short distance north of the Jonathan Harris House on Louisquisset Pike are remnants of the early layout of Lime Rock: the remains of a stone furnace for burning limestone, which is dug into a hillside, then a rusting metal boiler, which is a later furnace, and just beyond it...
Cotton manufacturing started in a small way in Manville in 1812; eventually, after several corporate reorganizations, the Mann family came to play the leading role in the mill and town, by the 1830s under the leadership of Samuel Mann. The Manns were bought out in the 1850s by...
Albion is another mill community which came to be controlled by the Chace brothers. The designation of this village by the ancient name for Britain indicates the predominant nationality of its original work force, as do the names of the neighboring villages of Ashton, Berkeley,...
On Lower River Road, along what still remains as a beautiful stretch of the Blackstone Canal, are the remnants of the mill village of Old Ashton, which steadily lost visibility after the brief heyday of the canal. This mere speck of a village has had many names....
Cumberland marks the northeast corner of Rhode Island. It was here that William Blackstone arrived in 1635 (before his friend Roger Williams) as the first white settler in what is now Rhode Island. A well-educated minister and among the first settlers of Boston, he left because of...
With the support of its Providence backers, the Lonsdale Company expanded from Lincoln across the Blackstone River to Cumberland in 1860, building its first mill on the new site in 1871. This is gone, like most of the company's mills on the Lincoln side of the village. What...
With the success of the Lonsdale mills in Lincoln (and in conjunction with their expansion across the river into Cumberland), Brown and Ives purchased sites farther up-river for two more mill villages, in 1867 for Ashton and in 1872 for Berkeley, where they continued the...
Until a fire in 1987 destroyed it, a dilapidated but picturesque wooden factory of 1825 provided the climax for this early-nineteenth-century mill village—the best preserved of its date in the state—and just as plans were underway for the mill's restoration. So the...
Legend has it that Woonsocket means “thundering mist,” in celebration of the largest waterfall on the Blackstone River. But mist hovers as much over the legend as over the falls. The name seems to have been given to nearby Woonsocket Hill (in the adjacent town of North Smithfield...
North Smithfield emerged as a separate town in 1871. Like Central Falls, Lincoln, and a portion of Woonsocket, it too had until then been submerged within a much larger Smithfield. The first settlement of consequence within present-day North Smithfield was established toward...
Woonsocket before Woonsocket! This little village seems originally to have gone by that name from its location on Great Road at the intersection of Woonsocket Hill Road. The first houses in the future village were built around 1690 by Richard Arnold, Jr., and his brother-...
Nothing but the footprint of Forestdale Mill remains, set deep in a hollow against the Branch River and obscured by growth. Built in 1860, it was one of the grandest stone mills in the state, boasting a monumental tower and an open cupola of superb proportion; a brick...
Most would agree that of all Rhode Island mill towns, Slatersville is the prettiest, as its final owner intended it to be. The village, which is today the town seat for North Smithfield, began around 1800 as Buffum's Mills, named for the family who owned most of the land in...
Of Smithfield's seventeenth-century settlement, almost nothing remains. Much was destroyed in King Philip's War of 1675–1676, the rest by attrition. Hence the oldest extant buildings in the town date from the eighteenth century—the Mowry House, which appears to be the oldest, from...
Among Smithfield's oldest roads, Austin Avenue contains a row of farmhouses, all but one going back to the eighteenth century. Their owners, mostly members of the Winsor family, came to dominate the apple business around Greenville. Like the others we have seen, they...
Although it had a short-lived academy, begun in 1814, and a bank, established by 1822, Greenville was long little more than a farm and tavern village with some importance as a local transportation hub, the usual rural industry, and a small thread and twine mill. Then, in the...
This linear mill village, the northernmost on the Woonasquatucket River (which eventually flows through downtown Providence), twice saw its livelihood consumed in factory fires. A cotton mill built here in 1824 was demolished in 1866 for a new woolen mill. It burned in 1872...
Architecturally, this is the most interesting mill village in Smithfield, and among the most interesting in the state. Manufacturing at this location began with an iron forge shortly before the Revolution. John Farnum, together with his sons Joseph and Noah, set up the...
On the map of the town it is the Scituate Reservoir which dominates. Construction of the reservoir, which supplies water for the Providence metropolitan area, got underway in 1915 with the appointment by the Rhode Island General Assembly of the Water Supply Board. Up to its time, it...
After the construction of the Scituate Reservoir, the village of North Scituate, located toward its northern end, became the principal surviving town and new town seat. Although there is nothing outstanding about Main Street, the white clapboarded ensemble, with some nice...
As a manufacturing village, Hope was first important for its ironworks. A site for the furnace was purchased in 1766 by the four Brown brothers of Providence—Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses—together with other investors, including Stephen Hopkins, a former governor, and Israel...
A town of poor soils and small farms, rocky and, by Rhode Island standards, hilly, Foster contains the state's highest elevation. Jerimoth Hill in northwestern Foster is 812 feet above sea level. The area of the future town was isolated in the colonial period and retained a sense of...
The grove of trees from which this place took its older name of Hemlock has mostly disappeared, leaving to local geography and government the renaming of this well-preserved country village of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. Although it is the administrative...
“Foster-Glocester”: this euphonious territory serves local weather forecasters on TV and radio as the “inland” comparison for conditions along Narragansett Bay. In this sense the towns are popularly linked, becoming a shorthand for the northwestern portion of the state. More...
Chepachet, the principal town in Glocester, is located where the major east-west highway (variantly known by its original name of Killingly Road or, more popularly, as Great County Road and, west of Chepachet, as West Chepachet Pike before becoming Putnam Pike and Route 44)...
Putnam Pike is Chepachet's main street. The east side of the street especially preserves much of the Federal legacy of the town in an array of boxy buildings, which is all the more remarkable in that a number of them maintain their original uses. The fairly...
Aside from Putnam Pike, the other important east-west road in Glocester is Snake Hill Road. It was laid out as South Killingly Road in 1733 across Glocester into Connecticut, apparently following the route of an old Indian trail, but in the early twentieth century...
