Imagine a stereotypical small farm with a few chickens pecking around the yard, the sun shining on their bright red feathers. This image is close to the reality in Little Compton today, but for a few decades the town was the center of an international poultry industry built upon a local chicken known as the Rhode Island Red.
The qualities that made this bird so popular didn’t occur by accident. Little Compton farmers bred the Rhode Island Red in response to a need for a meatier bird with more reliable egg laying capacities. Their success was the result of effective crossbreeding and innovations in hen-raising.
The story begins far from Little Compton in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Local farmer William Tripp bought Chittagong chickens from a New Bedford sailor to breed with his own stock. These Asian chickens had the brilliant feathers and reliable egg laying for which the Rhode Island Red would become famous. This early form of the famous chicken developed a reputation among local farmers, and Isaac Wilbour, of Prospect Hill Farm, stopped by to see what all the fuss was about.
Wilbour bought a few of Tripp’s marvelous hens and cross-bred them with local roosters, resulting in healthy, meaty hens with a prodigious egg-laying capacity. By the 1890s, Wilbour’s farm became the first large-scale poultry business in the world, exporting 150,000 dozen (1.8 million) eggs per year. To understand the scale of this operation, most other farmers at the time had fewer than 500 hens, compared to Wilbour’s 5,000. Other Little Compton farmers soon followed suit, and the town became the international poultry capital.
In 1898, Wilbour also had the honor of naming the breed during a visit to his farm by two professors from the Rhode Island Agricultural Experiment Station - now the University of Rhode Island.
This dominance did not last. By the early twentieth century, New England poultry farming, unable to compete with other areas of the country where feed and transport costs were lower, began to decline in favor of dairy farming. However, the Rhode Island Red and the techniques used to raise it continue to have a beneficial impact on New England farming. Today, most eggs with brown shells are produced by descendants of Little Compton’s Rhode Island Reds.
In 1925, the Rhode Island Red Club erected this monument, anchoring an internationally important chicken to the town where it was developed. However, some controversy over its placement exists. The monument is in Adamsville on land donated by Deborah Manchester, nowhere near the Tripp or Wilbour farms in Little Compton. The monument has more to do with a culture of poultry fancying in the area than with the farmers who bred the chickens.
In 1954, the same year that the Rhode Island legislature voted the Rhode Island Red the state bird, the Rhode Island Red Club and local residents installed a plaque at the location where William Tripp raised his famous chickens. You can still see the plaque, at the intersection of William Sisson Road and Long Highway.
Both monuments are fitting testimony to an international poultry sensation whose chicks and eggs were shipped all over the world from Little Compton.
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]]>Built in 1905, the Spite Tower’s history is clouded by legend. Dr. John Hathaway and his second wife, Claudia Church, built this unique structure for reasons that have been debated for decades.
Late in the eighteenth century, the Church brothers—Samuel, Ebenezer, and Nathaniel—came to Adamsville to open a store and saltworks. The brothers became successful pillars of the community, and their children carried on the Church name.
In 1905, Thaddeus Church bequeathed Samuel’s eighteenth century home to his great-niece, Claudia, and her husband, Dr. Hathaway. This new edition of an old Adamsville family, made comfortable though personal and inherited success, moved into the Church house and built what is now called the Spite Tower.
In perhaps the most common version of the story, John Hathaway and his good friend Abraham Manchester became embroiled in an unknown dispute. Abraham, as a responsible proprietor, chose to sleep in his store as he had since youth. His sisters, Deborah and Lizzie, placed in a window of their home a white cloth or napkin whose fluttering signaled to Abraham that meals were ready. Legend says that Hathaway built the tower in the line of sight between the Manchester store and home to “spite” his former friend and spoil his dinner.
In another version of the story, Dr. Hathaway and Abraham Manchester fought over money. In his will, Thaddeus Church gave $25,000 to Deborah Manchester, which led to rumors of unrequited love between Thaddeus and Deborah. However, Dr. Hathaway had little reason to feel that his wife was slighted by Thaddeus, since she received the family home.
Perhaps the most we can say of these legends is that they make good stories.
The final version of the story of the Spite Tower is the simplest and most likely: John Hathaway chose this location for his tower because that’s where the well was. This is supported by the building itself, which is in fact a water tower. It has three stories, from top to bottom: the well house, a water tank, and living quarters for the Hathaways’ chauffeur.
As a recent owner of the Spite Tower explained, it was “nothing more than a problem of hydraulics. The well was deep and they had to make the tower tall in order to get the water out.”
Some people might be disappointed to learn that the tower was not built for love, money, or spite. But this elaborate well tower retains its name, in spite of history.
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]]>Jane Tobes, possibly an enslaved woman, admitted that she brought rum to the men working in the fields, enticing them to neglect their work and get drunk. So, on July 7, 1772, the judge of the Tiverton Court, Job Almy, laid down the law: “I do sentence her to be whipt ten lashes on her Naked back well laid on.”
Shortly after Almy’s pronouncement, the crack of a whip sounded as a man lashed Tobes’ back while she stood topless, tied to the stone whipping post that stood in what is now a parking lot.
By 1838, Rhode Island had replaced corporal punishment like whipping with a plan for its first state prison. But according to local lore, the scourging of women ceased in Tiverton decades before, when a group of the town’s women engaged in civil disobedience to save one of their own from sharing the painful fate of Jane Tobes.
There are a couple of versions of the story, but both of them involve Isaac Wilbour, a Quaker from Little Compton. Wilbour is still the only person from Sakonnet to serve as Rhode Island’s governor, from 1806 to 1807, which allows us to date the supposed events.
In one version of the story, Governor Wilbour was on his way home to Little Compton when he happened upon the scene of “a woman, her back bared, tied to the whipping post,” while a sheriff read the sentence. In another version, it was Wilbour who read the court’s decision that “the condemned prisoner shall be tied to an upright post and flogged.”
In both versions, a mob of enraged women surrounded the condemned, demanding she be set free without being whipped. Wilbour pondered a moment, and then judiciously said, “But ladies, if it happened there should be no ‘upright post’ then how could the law be carried out?” Taking his hint, the women worked together to pull down the whipping post, leaving it lying in the dirt.
If the story is true, we might hope that the whipping post and it intended purpose disappeared forever, but a 1957 photograph shows it standing here, against the clapboard shingles of the John Almy House, which bore a plaque reading, “Whipping Post 1719—1812.” In 1957, Almy’s house was razed for the parking lot of the new Gray’s Ice Cream, and the whipping post disappeared.
Don’t be fooled by the granite obelisk across the street that looks something like the genuine article. Some local people believe that a history-minded person rescued the real whipping post from oblivion as a landscaping stone, wrapped it in burlap, and buried it near Four Corners. When word of the hiding place got around, the people who wished to preserve the post dug it up and hid it elsewhere.
Maybe the whipping post will reappear one day, perhaps in the corn crib at the Chace-Cory House, or leaning against the wall at Gray’s, as if waiting in the long line to place an order. Or maybe the people who preserved it will present themselves for the credit they deserve. Perhaps Jane Tobes would prefer that it remain hidden, just as she hid the scars on her back.
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