Kingston (note that the village is Kings ton, as opposed to South Kings town, both pronounced as spelled) was Little Rest until around 1825. Apparently no farmer's grumble accounted for its wry designation, but soldiers who camped here before the Battle of the...
Stretching eight miles along Rhode Island's southern coastline and reaching inland an equal distance, Charlestown comprises two distinct zones: a flat, sandy, coastal plain and the hilly, swampy woodlands of the interior, which extend to the town's northern edge. These zones...
Cross Mills, also called Charlestown Village, is on the Old Post Road, which was probably the first highway laid out through Charlestown (about 1703). It played a significant role in the area's agricultural interests in the eighteenth century. The early mill of Joseph Cross...
About seven miles north from U.S. 1 on Route 112 is the portion of Carolina that lies in Charlestown. One either side of the road are a church and residences that were related to the mill complex sited on the other side of the river in Richmond. The rural character still...
The tribal lands and management area of the Narragansett cover almost nine square miles in Charlestown. They encompass a number of primary historical sites, burial grounds, and buildings related to tribal history and are the center of tribal population and...
The fame and the obvious well-being of this privileged promontory raise high expectations. Surprisingly, however, there is less to say about Watch Hill architecturally than one would expect: the reticent ensemble and ambience of grand comfort about the place are more...
Westerly, the principal city historically—really the onlycity—in southern Rhode Island, is rarely cited for the merit of its buildings. Yet there is much to see. What one expects architecturally of Watch Hill, one finds in Westerly. Above all, the spruceness of the city...
Designated “Vacant Lands” until 1709, when the Rhode Island General Assembly sold the area into private ownership, Hopkinton remained part of Westerly until 1757. It took its name from Stephen Hopkins, the governor of the state at that time. Mill towns are scattered along its river...
This “city,” containing six eighteenth-century houses as well as some Greek Revival and mid-nineteenth-century buildings, may have justified its early pretentious name when its prospects loomed large with the stopover traffic of the New London Turnpike and a booming...
Located on the Ashaway River, this village added textiles to gristmills and sawmills. By 1816 it had a woolen manufacturing operation, which was transformed in 1825 into a manufactory for fishing line and twine. The plant's owner named it for the river. Ashaway became a premier...
Richmond shares river boundaries with Charlestown to the south and east and with Hopkinton to the west. On the Charlestown side are the Usquepaug and the Pawcatuck. Along the whole of the Hopkinton side is the Wood, a fast-moving river with scenic stretches that make it a favorite...
The architectural interest of Carolina, more than the other principal mill villages along the Pawcatuck and Wood rivers, is split between Richmond and Charlestown. Buildings on the Charlestown side of the town (see that section under Charlestown) are conveniently viewed en...
In 1880, William A. Walton bought a woolen mill that had been established in 1862. He attempted to develop a model mill town, building houses with individual garden plots, laying sidewalks, initiating a tree-planting program, and providing for such community programs as a brass...
In contrast to the rectangularity of Coventry and West Greenwich, which are stacked above it, Exeter has the shape of a pistol aimed at Connecticut. Exeter adopted the name of the Devonshire city when it split from North Kingstown in 1742 and set up its own town government....
East Providence is a long, narrow, zigzag-shaped town—three to four times as long as it is wide—squeezed between the Seekonk River to the west and, to the east, the Ten Mile and Runnins rivers, which, together with other streams and ponds, mark most of its border with...
Barrington has the highest per capita income of any town in the state. The architectural pilgrim who expects from this a precinct of walled estates and grand mansions, however, will be disappointed by the low-key quality of the place overall. There are imposing houses, of course....
This area was the property of the Drown family from the eighteenth century. The opening of a railroad station here in 1855 on the Providence, Warren & Bristol Railroad served as impetus for residential development, which occurred in appreciable amount only after the Civil...
In contrast to an ad hoc assemblage of mid- and late-twentieth-century commercial strip establishments and the civic precinct which constitutes as much of a center as Barrington has to show, Warren has an old, close-packed seaport as its core. More emphatically than that of any other...
Apart from the few buildings mentioned for special attention, Water Street is fascinating for its variety. Its many late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century houses, even those that have been carelessly altered, offer interesting architectural details too numerous and...
Warren and Bristol provide one of the more remarkable contrasts among Rhode Island towns. From the close-packed seaport village of Warren, the best-preserved example of the seaport type in Rhode Island, one enters its stateliest town. Bristol's center stood among the queen cities of...
Only by way of the Mount Hope Bridge and Route 138 east, across the northern tip of the town of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, thence across an inlet on the bridge to Tiverton, can one stay in Rhode Island to conclude the journey of those towns which line the eastern shores of...
West Main Road (Route 77), the principal Rhode Island approach to Little Compton, follows a ridge which permits broad views across fields down to the Sakonnet River as it swells to create the easternmost arm of Narragansett Bay. The scene is dotted with widely separated,...
Adamsville, gathered around a convergence of country roads on the Massachusetts–Rhode Island border, is a pretty cluster of shingled and clapboarded buildings. Some of them have been converted into the boutique sort of shop. It is dominated by the Abraham Manchester General...
The Southern approach of Mount Hope Bridge connects with the largest island in Narragansett Bay, Aquidneck Island. The west shore of Aquidneck faces the east channel of Narragansett Bay proper. Its east shore faces the broad mouth of the Sakonnet River (or Sakonnet Bay), which is...
Glen Road is the northern boundary of what was a contiguous cluster of large farm estates in one of the most beautiful settings on Aquidneck Island, comprising stone-walled fields, magnificent stands of trees, and views across Sakonnet Bay. North to south along East Main...
The history of Middletown as a pretty farming area adjacent to Newport is similar to that of Portsmouth, except that its very substantial farms never developed to estate proportions. It was part of Newport until the differences between the two, and charges that Middletown's rural...
Broadway, which still substantially retains a nineteenth-century residential character along most of its length, is not the introduction to Newport but is the most direct route to its heart. The termination of Broadway in one corner of Washington Square is...
The main portion of the harbor ends to the north in a blunt jut of land. Between this and the approach to the Newport Bridge is a long, narrow gridiron of streets called the Point, fronted toward the harbor by Washington Street. Over a hundred of its...
This wedge contains the major cemeteries of the city, to which Farewell Street is the cortege artery. Toward the tip of the wedge is the Friends Meeting House, the largest Quaker meeting house in the state and, crossing its tip, immediately behind Washington Square,...
Newport's harbor area (known locally as the Historic Hill Section) includes the original core of Newport, on a broad slope rising from the heart of its harbor (and now from the tourist...
