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...
Redwood Library is one of two cultural institutions that provide an architectural hinge between the buildings on the slope down to the harbor and those on the hilltop, which gradually falls in the opposite direction toward the salt marshes around Easton's Pond....
The neighborhood on either side of Annadale Road, which parallels Bellevue Avenue a few blocks to its west, was developed, primarily from open fields, in the mid-nineteenth century because of its proximity to the ocean beaches. These stretch below what is now the upper,...
Stretching due south from the top of the hill behind the old center of town, Bellevue Avenue was the result of a mid-nineteenth-century development plan whose very name suggests a pleasant, fashionable country landscape. Alfred Smith, a New York tailor turned real estate...
The district named for the street that Newporters call Ocean Drive (even though it is officially Ocean Avenue) is unique in both its stunning coastal beauty and its development as an area of grand summer residences. Although its settlement can be traced to two huge farms of...
What initially strikes the visitor coming from Newport is the simple, unaffected quality of Jamestown. To the excesses of Newport's summer social season during the Gilded Age and its aftermath, in fact, Jamestown was a rebuke. Not that those in other communities took a different...
Among Jamestown's charms is the preservation of a substantial remnant of its eighteenth-century farming tradition, situated on a rise at the center of the island (between Eldred Avenue and Whittier Road, pieces of which define its northern and southern boundaries...
A causeway across the end of Mackerel Cove is the thread that barely hitches the bulk of Conanicut Island to its peninsula appendage. It terminates in a point having the shape of a beaver tail. Just across the causeway, which becomes Beavertail Road, Fort Getty was begun c....
Highland Drive climbs and winds up an inclined bluff, with eruptive outcroppings along the way, to culminate in Conanicut's Southwest Point. Depending on orientation, the topography offers perches for houses with precipitous views down into Mackerel Cove between...
Fort Wetherill and the next several destinations occupy the southeast corner of Conanicut Island. Topographically it is similar to the southwest corner, but with a difference in the way in which the heaving ledge landscape presents itself. The difference accounts for the...
First advertised in 1896, Shoreby Hill was developed by a group of St. Louis residents to be a private community, not unlike the private, gated streets of their hometown. By 1898 seven St. Louis families bought water-view lots and promptly built summer homes in a...
Block Island is the name most often used to refer to the town of New Shoreham, which occupies its eleven-square-mile extent. The island, shaped like a pork chop, is located in the Atlantic Ocean twelve miles from Rhode Island's southern coastline, twenty miles...
South Dakota forms part of the country’s Great Plains region, and Butte County in the northwestern part of the state is the geographic center of the United States. South Dakota is bisected by the Missouri River, and the geography and culture on either side of the river is vastly...
South Dakota is generally considered part of the country’s Great Plains region, and Butte County, in the northwestern part of the state, is the geographic center of the United States. South Dakota is bisected by the Missouri River, and the geography and culture on either side of the river is...
Tennessee is divided into the regions of East, Middle, and West Tennessee. Known legally as the “Grand Divisions,” these regions are represented by the three stars in the center of the Tennessee state flag, which was adopted in 1905. Each has distinctive geographical, cultural, and economic features...
Texas is a crossroads of cultures, histories, and architectures, creating a distinct blend of material traditions spanning a half millennium. Perhaps, one might say, this assertion is true for many places in the...
The many threads of Texas history weave together in Central Texas to form the rich fabric that makes Texas the place of legend. Diverse geography and settlement patterns have combined here to make this the most varied region of the state.
The Gulf Coastal Plain, Piney Woods,...
Austin spreads across 251 square miles north and south of the Colorado River. The city's climate is hot and dry in the summer and mild in the winter. As the state capital and home to the state's largest university, Austin hosts a diverse population that is generally young, well...
Mary Hargrove Haller founded the town of Chappell Hill in 1847, naming the town for her grandfather Robert Wooding Chappell, and the sale of lots began two years later. The community is near the center of Stephen F. Austin's original colony and attracted...
Brenham, the county seat of Washington County, is named in honor of Richard Fox Brenham, a local physician. In 1858, the town became an agricultural center supported first by the Washington County Railroad (1860) and later the Houston and Texas Central...
Independence is a small community with a long and impressive place in Texas history. J. G. W. Pierson, Robert Stevenson, Colbert Baker, and Amasa Burchard founded the community in 1835 on seventy-eight acres of the original Austin colony land grant....
Named for Jabez Deming Giddings, an early railroad promoter, the town was formed by the Houston and Texas Central Railway in 1871. The area around Giddings became home to a large number of Wendish families who immigrated to Texas from Germany in the mid-nineteenth...
A group of almost six hundred Wends, under the leadership of their pastor Johan Kilian, made the journey from central Europe to Lee County in search of religious and economic freedom, and to escape Prussian insistence that they speak German. Wends (also called Sorbs)...
As in nearby Fayetteville, German immigrants eclipsed the earliest Anglo settlers in the 1840s, and were, in turn, supplanted by Bohemian Czechs in the mid-1850s. The original settlement of Townsend sent more than fifty men to the Battle of San...
Fayetteville was platted in 1850 on a grid pattern of twenty-eight blocks with a town square at the center and three state or county roads radiating from the square. The town today closely resembles the original plat as there has been only minimal growth....
La Grange, the county seat of Fayette County, is on the Colorado River at the site where it was crossed by the La Bahía Road (the coastal Camino Real). By 1831 a small community had developed around the site and a town was platted in 1837. That...
The area was settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Germans, Austrians, and Bohemians (Czechs), bringing a culture of food (sausages, smoked meat, kolaches, and beer) and music (“Tex-Czech” polka bands) that is still richly observed. Schulenburg was founded...
Colorado County, one of the Republic of Texas's original counties, was formed in 1836 and organized a year later. Members of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists settled here in 1823 along the banks of the Colorado River at the site of a former Native...
In March 1848, Bellville, named for early settler Thomas Bell, was platted and became the center of county government. The town still serves as an agricultural trading center, as it has for much of its history. The courthouse square is dominated by the blocky...
Established after independence in 1836, Austin County is named for Stephen F. Austin. San Felipe was the Anglo-American seat of government and where Stephen F. Austin brought the first 300 families to colonize Texas under a contract with the Mexican government...
