It did not take long after Bristol was settled in 1669 for its new inhabitants to take advantage of the unusually deep harbor in the Narragansett Bay with which it was blessed. There would be times in Colonial America when Bristol was among the four busiest ports in the colonies.
Much of that bustle took place in the notorious “Triangle Trade,” centered around the importing of slave labor from West Africa. Slave trade was introduced in Rhode Island around 1700 and the colony soon took the lead in the unsavory industry in the Americas and Bristol led the way in the colony. Rhode Island sloops would carry horses, livestock and finished goods such as rum to Africa where they would be used to purchase human beings who were shipped to the Caribbean and exchanged for sugar and molasses and coffee destined for Bristol.
The prosperous seaport was a natural target for the British during the American Revolution and the first attack came on October 7, 1775. For the better part of four years the town would be plagued by the British. It is no wonder that the harried citizenry got together after the Revolution on July 4, 1785 to stage the first of what is today America’s oldest continuous Fourth of July celebration.
With the war in the past, Bristol shipping picked up almost immediately, reaching greater heights than ever before. When America went to war with England again in 1812, this time Bristol retaliated with privateers looking to menace British shipping. One brigantine, the Yankee, made six forays during the war and captured British property estimated at over a million pounds sterling.
In the 1820s legal slave trade was finally on the decline and many of Bristol’s fleet turned to fishing and whaling. By the end of the 1800s the town’s reputation in the slave trade was receding and its exploits on the high seas were celebrated in a wholly different endeavor - America’s Cup yacht racing. After beginning his career in designing steam-powered vessels, including the nation’s first torpedo boat, Bristol native Nathanael Herreshoff turned his talents to creating the largest, most expensive and most powerful yachts on the water. From 1893 until 1920 Herreshoff produced a succession of undefeated America’s Cup defenders. The tradition of building Cup contenders continues in Bristol to this day and the America’s Cup Hall of Fame is located here.
Our walking tour will begin on the historic waterfront, now revitalized as an entertainment and hospitality center, and fan out along Hope and High streets, where the many finely crafted 18th and 19th century homes and public buildings are testament to the wealth that once flowed across Bristol docks...
East Greenwich, bounded by the Narragansett Bay to the east and rolling coastal hills to the west, rests in the geographic center of Rhode Island. This was Pequot Indian land until King Charles II bought it in 1644. The General Assembly incorporated the town in 1677 and granted land to 48 men who served during King Philip’s War, one of the most overlooked, yet bloody, conflicts to have occurred on American soil. The town took its name from Greenwich, England in County Kent.
Greenwich developed as a trade center for the surrounding farms and was vibrant enough to be selected county seat in 1750 and the state General Assembly met here from 1750 until 1854 on a rotating basis with other four Rhode Island government seats. Over the decades light industry, mostly textile related, began mixing in with the commerce from the sea.
Our walking tour of downtown East Greenwich will find a bit of history preserved from the 1700s, the 1800s and 1900s, a bit of maritime history, a bit of military history, a bit of ecclesiastical history, and we’ll start in the center with a bit of governmental history...
For most of its time after settlement in the early 1700s Kingston was known as Little Rest. No one really knows why. An early theory maintained that troops rested here while fighting in King’s Philip’s War in 1675. In Colonial times as many as five taverns operated here so there was ample opportunity for a little rest in the village for travelers.
The Washington County government set up here in 1752 and Little Rest joined the five-town rotation of the Rhode Island Assembly. Still the village remained clustered around its traditional core. After 1840 few buildings were added and when the village name was changed in 1885 to Kingston the population was still less than 300.
A few years later the school that is now the University of Rhode Island arrived but it developed to the north of Kinston Village. Walking down Kingstown Road you won’t even know it is there. In Rhode Island: A Guide to the Smallest State, compiled during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Kingston is described as “a quiet town with a wide main street, untouched by commercialism, and lined with elm trees, some of which are from 150 to 200 years old.”
That description would apply to our walking tour, except that there are more cars on Kingstown Road and the trees are 80 years older...
Shortly after Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts for his liberal religious beliefs, Anne Hutchinson suffered the same fate in Boston. On his recommendation Hutchinson and her followers purchased Aquidneck Island from the local Indians and settled at the northern end of the island in an area known as Pocasett in 1636. Her little band too experienced a rift and in 1639 a group led by William Coddington and Nicholas Easton moved south to form Newport.
Blessed with one of the deepest natural harbors in the country Newport was an established shipbuilding center within a decade. Over the next hundred years more than 150 wharves would be constructed and the bustling seaport was handling as much trade in rum, candles, fish, silver and, yes, slaves, as the leading American ports of Boston and New York and Charleston.
During the American Revolution the British wasted no time securing Newport and its fine natural harbors. When hostilities erupted, Captain James Wallace controlled Narragansett Bay with a small force that remained in place until driven away in April 1776 by fire from shore batteries. General Henry Clinton would not leave for three years and in that time som e400 houses - almost half the town - were destroyed for firewood and other uses.
The Newport harbor was essentially closed for the entire Revolution, and the seaport never regained its prominence as a shipping center. The population cascaded from 11,000 in 1775to barely half that a year later. The population scarcely rose again by 1870. The factories and warehouses that were built elsewhere during the Industrial Revolution proved to be a blessing for Newport. In the 1840s when wealthy Southern planters sought relief from humid Lowcountry summers they found retreats in a place progress had passed by - Newport. For the next century America’s wealthiest families beat a summer path to Newport and in their wake came artists and theologians and writers and architects. The Newport “cottage” was the symbol of America’s Gilded Age.
Our walking tour will begin on the fringes of this opulence and work down to the historic waterfront where the sea has shaped Newport for the better part of 400 years...
Roughly translated from the Narragansett dialect as “the place by the waterfall,” Pawtucket is one of two Rhode Island cities - Woonsocket is the other - to retain its native place name since its settlement -. It is an appropriate honorific as those falls have played the critical part in the city’s growth since that beginning.
Thick stands of timber and rocky hills prevented the Rhode Islanders who followed Roger Williams from spreading out to the north after the 1630s. It was not until 1671 that Joseph Jencks, Jr., a blacksmith, became the first European to move into what would become Pawtucket. He eyed the falls where the Blackstone River narrows before reaching the tidal flow of Narragansett Bay as a source of power for his forge. He crafted plows, scythes and other iron household items and was successful enough that other smiths soon set up shop along the Blackstone.
Pawtucket became a manufacturing center and a favorite stopping place for travelers on the Boston Post Road through the colonies. During the American Revolution the forges churned out ammunition and muskets for the patriot cause. In 1789 Moses Brown, of the influential Providence Brown family, became interested in the machine manufacture of thread and he chose the falls in Pawtucket as the site for his first mill. A power spinning-frame had been invented in England some years before enabling fine English cloth to gain a stranglehold on the world market. Power spinning had been attempted unsuccessfully in New York and the English, desperate to keep the technology looked on its island, passed laws rendering the divulgence of its secret almost on a par with treason.
However, a young farmer newly arrived in America named Samuel Slater had been a master mechanic in Nottingham and just happened to have full knowledge of the spinning frame committed to memory. He contacted Brown and together they commenced the Industrial Revolution in America with the first successful spinning mill just downstream from Pawtucket Falls.
With its fortunes cast as an industrial town Pawtucket now grew rapidly. New streets were built and rapidly filled in with houses, factories and shops. But the jurisdiction under which the town grew was always a bit murky. The Blackstone River was the Rhode Island-Massachusetts boundary line until 1862 and the community grew up as two different units on either side of the river. The west side began as part of Providence and the east side as part of Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Pawtucket, Massachusetts was established in 1828 while on the Rhode Island side the community was part of New Providence that had broken off in 1765. For many years this was the largest community in the United States operating under town government. It was not until 1886 that Pawtucket filed its city charter and not until 1899 that the border dispute with Massachusetts was finally settled and included cession of the Pawtucket area to Rhode Island.
Our walking tour of downtown Pawtucket will take in both sides of the historic Blackstone River and see what remains of this important American industrial city. We’ll start down by the river where there is an unusual city hall and those mills that Samuel Slater carried around in his head...
What do you do if you are a 30-year old Oxford, England-educated minister and you sail across the Atlantic Ocean to practice your religious beliefs in the way you desire and you discover the new boss is the same as the old boss? Well, if it is 1636 and the Massachusetts Bay colony and you are banished for your “newe and dangerous opinions against the authorities” like Roger Williams you go and live with a people who know nothing about such authority. And when you get lucky enough to be given some land on a navigable harbor you name your new settlement in gratitude “for God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress.”
Williams made only civil laws for his new town. Each person would have the right to worship without interference or regulation by the state. Despite its welcoming disposition Providence grew slowly, due in large part to its topography. Williams’ land was dominated by hills that would in the future draw comparisons to the beauty of Rome and the splendid city that grew on its seven hills. But in the beginning it impeded farming and instead the early days found Providence a shipping and shipbuilding town. Trade was especially brisk between Providence Harbor and the West Indies in rum and molasses and slaves.
Following the war, the economy shifted from maritime endeavors to manufacturing, particularly machinery, tools, silverware, jewelry and textiles. Providence boasted some of the largest manufacturing plants in the country, including Brown & Sharpe, Nicholson File, and Gorham Silverware, and at one time was America’s ninth-largest city. The city’s manufacturing boom lasted into the 1920s but was crippled when the nation spiraled into economic depression in the 1930s. The Great Hurricane of 1938 flooded the city and destroyed more businesses. Today, the city that once fashioned itself the “Beehive of Industry” is home to eight hospitals and seven institutions of higher learning, which has shifted the economy into service industries.
Our downtown walking tour will visit the city’s arts district and financial district and governmental center. We’ll walk along Benefit Street where more than 200 restored houses, taverns and other buildings constructed by sea captains and shipbuilders have created the “Mile of History.” But first we’ll start where Roger Williams himself did, on the site of the original Rhode Island settlement, along a narrow strip of land between the river and the hills...
Slatersville is acknowledged as the first planned industrial village in the United States. Ten years after helping to establish the first successful spinning mill in America in 1793, Samuel Slater was eager to set out on his own. His brother John scoured the countryside for a location for the new enterprise and settled on Branch River where a few water-powered mills were then in operation. What the new site did not have, however, was people.
Workers would have to be imported to the remote location and so the Slaters would construct not only a new stone mill in 1807 but homes nearby for their workers, stores where they could buy supplies and eventually a meetinghouse where they could worship. This “mill village” model came to be known as the Rhode Island System and proved that manufacturing could thrive outside establish population centers: “If you build it, they will come.”
John Slater managed the mill and the surrounding village as it expanded until his death in 1845; Slatersville remained in the family until 1900 when it was sold to James R. Hooper. Hooper bleached and dyed cloth for a while and in turn sold the village to Henry P. Kendall in 1915. Kendall’s was more interested in preserving the village than wringing profits from the mill. He fixed up and landscaped many of the workers’ homes and crafted Slatersville in the image of a postcard New England town.
Most of what we see on our walking tour of this pioneering American mill village is a testament to Henry Kendall’s vision nearly a century ago, a foresight that enables us to look back more than 200 years...
This land was originally part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, known as Pocasset and home to the Wamponoag-Pocasset tribe. The Wamponoag-Pocassets were the Indians of Pilgrim fame who helped the English settlers survive the harsh early days and participated in the first Thanksgiving dinner.
Things were not so civil a half-century later when the warrior Metacom, given the English name Philip by his tribal chief father, led a rebellion against the British. he was aided in his cause by his widowed sister-in-law, Weetamoo, that translates roughly to “sweetheart.” During the King Philip War in the summer of 1675 Metacom and Weetaboo used the swamp here to hideout from British patrols. They might well have succeeded in defeating the British were it not for rival tribes in the region and on August 12, 1676 King Phillip was killed and the remnants of his tribe dispersed or sold into slavery.
Tiverton was originally incorporated in 1694, still a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. After decades of bickering over the boundary between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, a Royal Decree landed the town in Rhode Island in 1746. The next year the town was incorporated.
Tiverton was a farming community and grew with no town center; the populace migrated to scattered small villages. The Four Corners area was laid out in 1710 on an 80-acre lot around a grist mill called Nomscot, which was the also applied to the village. The locals passed a law that a tavern could only be built where there was a four-way intersection and then made sure there wouldn’t be any built not building any roads across the Eight Rod Way that had been surveyed in 1679 as a road between Sakonnet and Plymouth Colony. The village had earned a new name.
In 1974 Tiverton Four Corners was designated a National Historic District. The privately owned buildings have evolved to contain antique stores, galleries and shops which translates into abundant off-street parking and our walking tour will begin at the four corners and go both ways on Main Road...
A tavern and stagecoach stop were established here on the Post Road in 1745 and a snuff mill was built on the Saugatucket River by William McCoon around 1765. When mill owner Rowland Hazard changed the name of the village from McCoons Mill to Wakefield in the 1820s, supposedly after friends of his in England, the population was about 60. The industrial hamlet had almost as many businesses - a store, a carding mill, a grist mill, a saw mill and a blacksmith shop - as houses (9).
Through the 1800s the neighboring village of Peace Dale usurped Wakefield as the manufacturing center of South Kingstown and instead developed as a commercial center. Wakefield has remained so ever since and in 1966 the village center along Main Street (the old Boston Post Road) between Belmont Avenue and Columbia Street was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Our walking tour will explore Main Street and we’ll start at the top, at Columbia Street, and work our way down...
Samuel Gorton’s beliefs were so odious to the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony - such ideas as the separation of church and state, the banning of slavery and the payment of Indians for their land - that even after he was banished from the colony he was tracked down in Rhode Island and brought back for trial. After narrowly escaping death for blasphemy he had his punishment reduced to banishment from Portsmouth (Rhode Island). He had now been tossed from Boston, Plymouth, Aquidneck and Newport. Now ensconced in the wilderness of Rhode Island, he was still hounded by Massachusetts authorities who claimed that land he had purchased known as “The Shawomet Purchase” was subject to Boston rule.
Once again the government charged him with blasphemy and once again soldiers from Massachusetts arrived and burned his home. Gorton was again imprisoned for a time and released on the condition that he leave the land that he and a band of about 100 followers known as Gortonists had purchased. So Gorton left. And sailed to England where he met an old friend, Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. With the help of the Earl of Warwick Gorton was granted a Royal Charter and received an order of “safe passage and conduct.” When he returned to Boston this time the militia now had to escort him safely back to Rhode Island and the government was ordered to never interfere with Samuel Gorton or the Gortonist’s again.
In gratitude, Gorton named his settlement “Warwick.”
Warwick developed as a loose federation of scattered villages. Most were agrarian communities tied to the sea but gradually the western section became more industrialized. Between 1920 and 1930 Warwick was the fastest growing town growing town in New England as the population jumped from 13,481 to 23,196. In 1931, after two unsuccessful attempt, Warwick became Rhode Island’s youngest city. In the next thirty years the population would nearly triple. The demand for housing and jobs levied a heavy toll on the historic Warwick building stock.
Our walking tour will explore the Apponaug Village, along the Post Road, now a busy roadway that was once an Indian path known as the Pequot Trail. The historic heart of the village, Apponaug Four Corners, once boasted two busy taverns from the 1800s and the house of Samuel Greene, the town’s most influential citizen. All are gone. To see what remains we’ll start a few steps to the east of venerable Four Corners...
The town of Westerly on the Pawcatuck River was incorporated in 1669 as the fifth town in the colony of Rhode Island. When settlers weren’t squabbling over boundary disputes with their Connecticut neighbors across the river the usual suspects of mills and shipyards sprouted on the banks. In the nine villages that came to comprise Westerly - the name is derived from its geographic position in the state - farming dominated the economy.
You can still find vestiges of pre-Revolutionary Westerly among these outlying farms but downtown there is nothing today to betray that anything existed before the middle of the 19th century, a time that coincides with the beginnings of the industry for which Westerly gained national renown. It was in 1845 that Orlando Smith discovered an abundance of granite on his farm and within short order several granite companies were organized around town. Westerly granite is fine-grained, susceptible to delicate carving, and hence, particularly well-suited for memorials. The local quarries yield four varieties of stone: a red variety commonly used for building blocks; and white, blue and pink granite usually used for monuments. Monuments crafted from Westerly granite can be found in 32 states.
Our walking tour of downtown will indeed see Westerly granite on town buildings. Perhaps because it is the Rhode Island town most closely located to New York City, Westerly has more big-city architecture than other towns its size. But before we take a look at those we’ll begin with another feature normally associated with big cities - a hundred-year old, award-winning park...
A plantation grant Richard Arnold received from the Providence Committee in the 1660s led to the European settling of the area around the serpentine Blackstone River. Unfortunately the grant didn’t come with its own police force and in the early days there were constant spats around the Massachusetts border that included kidnapping and the use of armed forces. The land would not be peaceably settled into well into the 1700s.
Beyond that, there was little reason to take notice of the farming community that took the name Woonsocket Falls, a moniker of unknown derivation but is most accepted as a translation from the Indian tongue of “thunder mist” in describing the spray from the river’s dominant falls.
That all changed in 1829 with the opening of the Worcester-Providence Canal. Suddenly the water power of the Blackstone River shifted from producing local meal and lumber to producing products - mostly textiles - for far-flung markets. By 1850 the area was teeming with factories and welcoming an influx of new workers, first from Ireland and then from French Canada. In 1888, the neighboring factory communities of Woonsocket Falls, Globe, Social, Bernon, Hamlet and Jenksville banded together to form the City of Woonsocket.
Our walking tour will visit four historic squares on both sides of the Blackstone River and we’ll start at the namesake falls where some mills remain and some have been cleared to form a visitor-friendly parking lot...