The year? 1938. The weather? The worst you’ve ever seen. The hurricane that hit Rhode Island shook the coast to its core, wreaking havoc on its beaches. Watch Hill was no exception.

Watch Hill in Westerly, RI, one of Rhode Island’s finest beaches, is best known for its fancy houses, quaint town area, and the occasional Taylor Swift sighting. But Watch Hill’s history begins much earlier than modern pop stardom. In 1845 the now-called Watch Hill Inn was built, and later in 1868 the hotel Ocean House followed. In 1867, the beach welcomed a carousel, and it still runs today. In fact, you can still take a ride on the carousel. A large number of homes were built around the beach to provide accommodations for tourists and residents. A beach guide published by railroad and passenger companies from around Rhode Island makes mention of, “great hotels and the ornate villas,” by Watch Hill, a clear sign of the beach’s popularity. Such hotels and villas exemplify the wealthy status associated with Watch Hill. While the beach had its fair share of day trippers, those who permanently resided at Watch Hill were known to be from wealthy families, and so the beach became known for its patrons’ statuses. Even on the drive around Westerly one can see the beautiful waterfront mansions of Watch Hill’s residents.

Watch Hill’s natural aspects helped make it the perfect summer locale. The same railroad company guide published on Watch Hill claimed that Watch Hill’s natural advantages were well known even in colonial times, stating that, “Even in those early days of Indian and colonial wars this locality had attained a fine reputation for healthfulness of situation, beauty of surroundings, and delightful natural attractions generally.” In addition to Watch Hill’s natural disposition, industrialization and modernization played their part on the coast. The famous carousel on the beach became powered by water as of 1897, a clear sign of the industrialization of Rhode Island throughout the late 19th century. But nature overpowered modern technology when disaster struck in 1938.

The hurricane hit the coast hard. The Watch Hill Inn, Ocean House, and the carousel both suffered extreme damage, but ultimately remained standing. The hurricane ruined several seats on the carousel, but since 1938 the carousel has gone through several restoration efforts and is visitable to this day. The Watch Hill Inn as well as the Ocean House lasted through the hurricane, and are now luxury hotels for Watch Hill’s visitors.

Today, Watch Hill beach is still regularly visited by locals and tourists alike. Popstar Taylor Swift’s lavish mansion sits alongside the coast, and diehard fans of Swift visit the beach, hopeful to spot the star. But celebrities aside, Watch Hill is a poignant example of continuity in Rhode Island history. From the early beginnings during colonial Rhode Island to its carousel and clambake days to its new ‘Taylor Swift era,’ Watch Hill remains a staple location in Rhode Island for summer relaxation.

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Around Elizabeth’s home at Westport Harbor, just down the shore from the lifesaving station, the winds were high and people were preparing for a storm, but most were not too worried. However, by late afternoon the storm surge was reaching dangerous levels. Elizabeth saw the wind and water sweep the house next door away and across the street, and soon after, the elements burst into her own home. “The water was so deep that the furniture was floating around in the living room,” Elizabeth remembered. “We went upstairs and looked out the windows at the storm and saw some of the other houses knocked over by waves and disappear.” Elizabeth and her housekeeper, Mary, decided they needed to leave before their own home met the same fate. They burst out through the garage door and were immediately swept away by waves. The tide was so extreme that it carried Elizabeth across Westport Harbor all the way to the Acoaxet Golf Club, making her dodge furniture and debris in the waves for over half an hour before depositing her on dry land. Mary, unable to swim, disappeared into the ocean. Elizabeth’s house also did not survive the storm. In fact, the Hurricane of ‘38 destroyed almost every building on East Beach and Horseneck Beach. Only three structures survived intact. One of these buildings, remaining standing today, is the Horseneck Point Lifesaving Station. The station was established in 1888 by the Humane Society of Massachusetts as part of a network of lifesaving stations around the coast, built to aid boaters in peril. In that era, systems of navigation were unreliable and ships, mostly powered by sails, were at the mercy of the weather, making shipwrecks a serious problem. Each lifesaving station was equipped with a lifeboat and other emergency gear, and managed by a keeper who hired and trained a crew for rescues. The Horseneck Point Lifesaving Station’s best-remembered keeper was Frederick Burdon “Burt” Head. Burt was an experienced mariner who’d been living on East Beach for years in an old bowling alley he converted into a boarding house. In addition to working as keeper, Burt ran a business guiding and lodging duck hunters. At the height of his business, Burt says he’d host as many as 150 gunners each hunting season, and sometimes shoot up to 86 ducks in a day himself. By the time of the 1938 hurricane, the Horseneck Point Lifesaving Station had been decommissioned and converted into a restaurant that served beachgoers in Westport Harbor’s growing tourism industry. The station’s new owners had built around the original structure, putting up a number of additions to accommodate their business, but throughout the years, the lifesaving station’s original core structure remained intact and withstood the hurricane. In 2007, the Westport Fishermen’s Association leased the building and restored the lifesaving station to its original appearance and turned it into a museum. Today, the museum houses a replica of an original lifeboat once used at lifesaving stations to rescue distressed sailors, though rarely in weather as bad as the hurricane the station miraculously survived.

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Boston wasn’t the only place to throw a tea party! Here, on March 2, 1775, Providence residents protesting the Tea Act threw 300 pounds of British East India Company tea into the Providence River. Finding inspiration in Rhode Island’s founder Roger Williams, residents sent their tea into the river and their spirit of protest across the Atlantic Ocean to King George. The Market House changed that day and hasn’t stopped. Following the event, the Market House quartered French soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and by the middle of the 19th century, it served as Providence’s City Hall before overcrowding necessitated a larger space in present day downtown.

Pardon Gray Preserve has about 160 acres of mixed hardwoods that, when added to the adjacent Weetamoo Woods and Pocasset Ridge, is a highly valuable continuous canopy forest region. Within this forest are significant stands of a rare “coastal oak–holly” forest type, sometimes referred to as maritime oak holly.

While native holly is widespread in the southeastern United States, it only grows in southern New England along coastal areas. In scattered areas of this region a combination of climate, soils, and maritime conditions result in a particular mix of holly and oaks that is globally rare. The American holly tree (Ilex opaca) is the signature species of this natural community. It is the only native broadleaf evergreen tree in New England, and graces our otherwise drab winter forests with its glossy green foliage and red berries.

When the Pilgrims landed the week before Christmas in 1620 on the coast of what is now Massachusetts, the evergreen prickly leaves and red berries of the American holly reminded them of the English holly (Ilex aquifolium), a symbol of Christmas for centuries in England and Europe. Wild holly was widely gathered as a Christmas green, though in recent times it has been replaced by nursery grown horticultural varieties.

Oak–holly forests are oak-dominated with a prominent sub-canopy of American holly. Because of its slow growth and relatively short stature, holly is seldom dominant. It is rather an understory component, blending between the shrub layer and the sub-canopy. Oak–holly typically mixes with other forest types, often at the upper edge of forested wetlands such as red maple swamps. Upslope it often grades into oak–heath forest, which is precisely the situation at Pardon Gray Preserve. It is found along the corridor of forested wetland adjacent to the stone wall that borders the open field, and then fades into the drier, oak–heath forest found on drier soils higher up, east of the Ridge Trail.

Other trees typical to oak–holly forests include red, black, scarlet, and white oaks; black and yellow birch; sassafras; black cherry; American beech; tupelo; American hornbeam; and eastern hophornbeam. The understory includes a diverse shrub layer of sweet pepperbush, high bush and low bush blueberries, black huckleberry, wild red raspberry, sheep laurel, bayberry, and arrowwood viburnum. There is also a great diversity of woodland wildflowers and ferns to be found in the herbaceous layer on the forest floor.

Pardon Gray Preserve was protected primarily because of its assemblage of natural communities, as well as the ecological importance of the large regional forest of which it is part. All the forests of the Pocassetlands region are secondary growth, meaning they have been cut multiple times since European settlement. While some patches were suitable for small farm plots, rocky, glacial soils resulted in pasturing and wood lots for most of this area. The 1938 hurricane leveled essentially all large trees in this region, so the oldest trees in the Sakonnet forests are in the 100-125 year range.

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A tall man in a long, dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat walked the 2,000 feet across Stone Bridge from the Portsmouth shore to the Tiverton side, where a toll keeper waited to collect his fare. The man passed the money to the keeper, William Cranston, and remarked: “It is a cold blustery day.”

The Stone Bridge keeper’s house provided a warm refuge from the chill of that day, December 20, 1832, but the man declined Cranston’s invitation to come in, saying he was bound for Fall River.

“I shut the gate about sundown,” Cranston later testified, when the man, the Reverend Ephraim Avery, stood trial for the murder of Sarah Maria Cornell, a pregnant Fall River mill worker, whose body was found at sunrise on December 21, hanging from a pole on Job Durfee’s farm.

“There is a way by which passengers can get round the gate at night, after it is closed,” Cranston said. “They have to get down the wall on the beach just where the tide flows, and step up the other side; I sometimes look to see if any people have left tracks passing that way.”

On the morning after the tall man crossed the bridge, Cranston saw tracks “fresh and distinct” in the sand, leading around the toll gate toward the Portsmouth side.

It’s not surprising that Tiverton’s Stone Bridge played a key role in the salacious Avery-Cornell murder trial. For more than 150 years, Stone Bridge acted as a funnel through which anyone traveling across the Sakonnet River on foot, horseback, wagon—or later, automobile and street car—had to pass.

From the 1680s until 1795, when the Rhode Island Bridge Company built a wooden bridge here, a ferry shuttled goods, horses, wagons, and people across the Sakonnet River. The first bridge lasted two years before a high tide swept it away. The rebuilt bridge lasted one year, and ferry service resumed for a decade until subscribers raised $80,000. In 1810, travelers began to cross the new bridge constructed of 280,000 tons of stone at a cost of more than $200,000.

The Great Gale of September 1815 bit a 200-foot chunk out of the bridge, and a gale in 1868 caused a similar breach, prompting the state to take control of a new, toll-free bridge in 1871. The free bridge became a popular spot for hooking striped bass, blue fish, and shark, with one reported landing of a 500-pounder.

Trolley cars from the Newport and Fall River Street Railways began crossing the bridge in 1898, which required replacing the old wooden draw with iron and steel strong enough to hold 20 tons.

On the Tiverton side of the bridge, a village of stores, fish markets, and blacksmith shops blossomed. For more than 100 years, a succession of inns at the foot of the bridge served weary travelers and hosted milestone celebrations for town residents until the 1980s, when the Stone Bridge Inn was razed.

The last car crossed the Stone Bridge on May 6, 1957. The Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in `54 weakened the bridge’s approaches and caused service interruptions, leading to construction of the steel Sakonnet River Bridge about a half-mile north of the Stone Bridge. The Sakonnet River Bridge served from 1956 until its replacement was completed in 2012. After almost 150 years of free crossings over the Sakonnet River, tolls may be imposed on the new Sakonnet River Bridge.

Finally, despite testimony that the Reverend Ephraim Avery crossed the bridge into Tiverton, met with Sarah Maria Cornell, and crossed the bridge back to Portsmouth on the night of her murder, he was found not guilty.

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