The biggest of the towns in the northwestern corner of Rhode Island—making the corner, in fact—is Burrillville. Its qualities and its broad historical development compare with those in Foster and Glocester. Its eastern border, too, follows the Seven Mile Line which marked the...
Mapleville and the adjacent mill village of Oakland are at the mouths of the Chepachet and Clear rivers respectively, where they join to make the Branch River (a major tributary of the Blackstone). From the south, Victory Highway enters Mapleville at a triangle crammed with...
Mapleville is connected to Oakland by the linear arrangement of buildings along Victory Highway. Whereas Mapleville grew in higgledy-piggledy clusters, Oakland exhibits a gridded street pattern with well-spaced houses off the main road (Victory Highway). It remains among the...
As a manufacturing village, Glendale began, like most others, with a cluster of sawmills and gristmills in the 1790s. They were converted to cotton mills in 1841, when the place was known as Newells Mills. After a fire in 1850, a new mill was built in 1853, this time for...
These adjacent mill villages began with the manufacture of such edge tools as scythes, axes, and hoes. Leonard Nason's mill, founded in 1821 and in operation until destroyed by fire in 1881, was renowned for the high quality of its products. Textile manufacturing...
Harrisville, the administrative center of Burrillville, is among the most interesting rural mill towns in the state. It is not its extant mill complex, however, that makes it so. Nineteenth-century mill buildings have been mostly superseded by nondescript...
In Pascoag, once the largest of Burrillville's woolen manufacturing villages, generations of the Sayles family, going back to the end of the eighteenth century, were the mill owners. Wool manufacturing in this area began with Daniel Sayles's mill in 1814, augmented by...
[Editorial note: WHJ left no introduction and relatively few entries for Warwick. The following is offered as a brief overview of a community more thoroughly shaped by the automobile than any other in the state.]
Developed irregularly from the time its first European settlers...
Until the twentieth century, West Warwick was part of Warwick. Its intensive industrialization and the increasingly polyglot composition of its immigrant work force, however, set the western portion of the town apart from the rest of it. Well into the twentieth century, the...
Once known as Wales for a property owner in the vicinity, Phenix acquired its present name from a fire which in 1821 destroyed the Roger Williams cotton mill, a wooden structure of 1810–1811, along with much of the center of the town. Parts of the existing mill “rose from the...
At the end of the plant site on Fairview Avenue is a fine enclave of houses ranged along a steep hill. Most are worth examination, but three especially so. The scale of these hilltop houses reflects the importance of Phenix as the nineteenth-century...
Originally named Rice Hollow and Wakefield, Arctic, one of the three principal West Warwick mill villages lined along the South Branch of the Pawtuxet, received the curious name it has today from the Spragues in the mid-nineteenth century. The location of their mill at the bottom...
From the complicated history of early mill building on both sides of the Pawtuxet at Greenville, no more than a single important structure remains, and that in precarious condition. Although the Providence entrepreneurs Almy and Brown united all the small mills into a single...
Squeezed into the northeast corner of Coventry are two mill towns, Arkwright and Harris, links in the chain of Pawtuxet River mill towns beginning at Hope and Fiskville immediately across the Scituate border and extending downstream in West Warwick to Phenix, Lippitt, Clyde, and...
The village, earlier known as Remington's Run and Burlingame's Mills, received its present name when the Arkwright Manufacturing Company (in honor of Richard Arkwright, the British inventor and mill owner) got underway in 1809 and opened its cotton mill during the following...
Cotton manufacture, which began here after the War of 1812, was more impressively established when Elisha Harris, later a governor of Rhode Island, bought the mill and a large farm and erected a new stone mill. It is the third mill, that of 1851, which stands today in...
Stephen Taft converted a paper mill to cotton in 1811, then sold out to A. and W. Sprague in 1846. They in effect built a new town, centered in two stone mills set in line with one another, parallel to the river, and at right angles to Washington Street. Of all the Spragues'...
Originally this area and neighboring Quidnick were generally known as Greeneville, for the farming family who owned most of the land in the vicinity. A member of the Greene family opened a cotton mill here in 1806, among the first in the state. The six-story mill which replaced...
Although cotton manufacturing came to this village in 1809, it was Pardon Peckham, who arrived in 1848, and his Peckham Manufacturing Company that eventually dominated the village. To the now disappeared Upper Mill (originally on the corner), he added the three-storied...
Although West Greenwich shows on the map as a considerable rectangular swatch of west central Rhode Island, it offers less of architectural interest than any town in the state. Historically, it has been the most isolated of all Rhode Island towns. Poor soils discouraged any...
Division Street marks the town line between Warwick to the north and East Greenwich to the south. South of Division Street is the compact part of East Greenwich, divided by the north-south axis of Post Road, which is Main Street to the local population. Most Main Street...
The history of North Kingstown is closely allied with two aspects of its topography: its thirty-mile coastline and its three river systems. The town's irregular northern border follows the Hunts River as it flows northeasterly into the Potowomut River estuary. In the central...
Wickford was platted c. 1700 by Lodowick Updike, the owner of Cocumscussoc, who proudly proclaimed his achievement in giving the town its original name of Updike's Newton. Like many Narragansett Bay ports, Wickford enjoyed its greatest period of growth between the end of the...
The Gregory Building imposingly marks the entrance to one of the most endearing town views in the state. The prospect east on Main Street is a nearly uninterrupted tree-lined vista to the town dock at the opposite end, approximately half a mile away. Most...
Narragansett is long and narrow, with water borders. Along its east flank the shore extends beyond the entrance to the West Channel of Narragansett Bay to face the open ocean. Off its narrow southern end is more open ocean. Up its west flank, ponds and the ponding of the...
Bathing came to Narragansett Pier in the 1840s, when local farmers took in boarders. The first hotel appeared in 1856. Between 1880 and 1890 the village boasted almost fifteen of them—the most impressive concentration in Rhode Island. Large wooden structures, most of...
The “summer chapel,” an informal type of church building designed for a vacation community, is frequently found in Rhode Island resorts, especially in upper-class communities, where summer weddings were (and are) a special part of the season's festivities. Uniquely,...
South Kingstown (as for North Kingstown, the final syllable should not be slurred) is shaped like a skewed axehead with beaches and open ocean at its cutting edge, but with water marking its eastern boundary as well, along Point Judith Pond to the south and the Pettaquamscutt...
The village of Wakefield is at a turning point. The sense of its traditional existence as a village is still there, and could be reinforced if there were the will to regulate the hyped-up commercialization which suburban growth and a hub of major regional highways have brought...
Although Wakefield, Peace Dale, and Rocky Brook are today merged into a regional urban area, Peace Dale still retains the clearest sense of its village character. It has its shambly commercial district, and incessant traffic winds through it. Recent development has spoiled...
