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King Tom Farm

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House, c. 1923. 4740 Old Post Rd.

Situated along one of the best-preserved stretches of the stone wall-lined and treeshaded Old Post Road, King Tom Farm has been an important Native American site, a summer estate, a potato farm, and a vacation facility, tracing many of the significant changes in Charlestown over the past two centuries. The site is interesting for its sheer variety of structures: a shingled Colonial Revival main house, several agrarian dependencies (including a large potato barn and a gristmill), and a number of small rental cottages spread out over a landscape that was originally part of the Narragansett tribal lands. The farm is named after an early sachem of the tribe, Oxford-educated Thomas Ninigret. His sister, Esther, was crowned queen of the Narragansett people here in 1770, on what is now called Coronation Rock, behind an earlier mid-eighteenth-century “English” homestead built by King Tom himself. This burned in 1922, and the present Colonial Revival house was built in its place.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "King Tom Farm", [Charlestown, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-CH3.

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