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Cross Mills Center

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The rubblestone Cross's Hall and Store ( CH1.1; 1855, later porch addition; 4459 Old Post Road), and the unadorned clapboarded First Baptist Church of Cross Mills ( CH1.2; 1873; 4403 Old Post Road), with a gable entry vestibule and louvered belfry, are the best examples of the spartan civic buildings which survive from Cross Mills's nineteenth-century architecture. The District 2 Schoolhouse ( CH1.3; 1838; 4417 Old Post Road), with its double entrances on either side of a shuttered central window, is stylistically in keeping with this plainness but was not originally located in the village, having been moved with its original foundation materials from a site north of Post Road in the Quonochontaug area in 1973 and restored.

Adjacent to the dock facilities on Ninigret Pond is the Ocean House ( CH1.4; 1848; 60 Town Dock Road), a large Greek Revival building, now much altered. It once served as a public meeting hall, and those who illegally opened graves at the Royal Indian Burial Ground ( CH15) in the nineteenth century were tried here. In its later use as a summer hotel, its most notable resident may have been the post–Civil War governor of Georgia, Rufus Brown Bullock. He initiated the Ocean House Regatta, famous for several decades around the turn of the twentieth century. On the village side of the Ocean House along Town Dock Road are the gabled Captain Taber House ( CH1.5; c. 1840; 20 Town Dock Road) and the Cross House ( CH1.6; c. 1850; 10 Town Dock Road), both, in their modest size and nominal classical detailing, in keeping with the mid-nineteenth-century date and scale of the village.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "Cross Mills Center", [Charlestown, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-CH1.

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