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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“Young man, if you don’t get out you’re going to end up with a little round hole in the middle of your forehead.”

The words were polite and calm, but ominous, spoken to a youthful group of summer people during a late night visit to Briggs Beach during Prohibition, according to local resident Howard Huntoon.

Little Compton’s fourteen beautiful miles of coastline have long attracted tourists and sun bathers, but during Prohibition, the beaches also provided a convenient route to smuggle illegal alcohol. “Rum running” became an important way for locals to earn money, especially during the early years of the Great Depression.

Although the rum runners broke the law, their friends and neighbors usually looked the other way and even lied to local enforcement agencies to protect this income stream. Seasonal residents returning for the summer sometimes found cash in their mailboxes, payment for the use of their empty barns and land as hiding places for illegal booze.

Prohibition banned alcoholic drinks from 1920 until 1933, the result of the passage of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Most residents of Little Compton didn’t support Prohibition, and some took advantage of the demand for liquor to earn much-needed money for their families. Eleanor Simons, the daughter of Little Compton farmer John Flores, remembered her father’s secret rum running:

“I think people didn’t want anybody to know but I think they survived better because of it. Dad’s farm wasn’t as profitable to carry us through.”

The potential profits also enticed businessmen from other areas of the East Coast to set up shop. Manuel Avila came to Little Compton after Prohibition closed his bar in New Bedford, looking for a place with less of the competition and violence that was associated with the illegal liquor trade. In Little Compton he became a central figure in rum running.

Avila kept a safe house on Amesbury Lane where his trusted runners could eat, wash, and rest. In 1927, he bought the old Cornell farmhouse on Adamsville Hill. The house became the center of operations for his “gravel business,” a cover for his rum running. Located uphill from the Westport River, the house allowed for secret liquor deliveries at night and there were numerous places where the booze could be quickly hidden on the farm.

Today, the rum runners are often portrayed as exciting figures—cowboys on boats—but rum running required rough edges and desperate deeds, more than the romantic stories indicate. Rum runners faced the constant threat of being arrested or shot, either by the Coast Guard or by their rivals. Smuggling liquor during Prohibition was a dangerous, illegal business in an economically desperate time.

Many people also remember the Little Compton rum runners as farmers and fishermen, husbands and brothers. Manny Avila was known as a strong family man. His godson, Barry Federman, remembered Manny and his wife Nettie as “very fine, generous people, some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet.”

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The Chace-Cory House, built around 1730 by Benjamin or Abner Chace, witnessed the passing of many Tiverton generations by its front door. Once a lonely house, it has seen nearly 300 years of change at Four Corners. Its floorboards are well-worn by the pacing of more than 100 years of anxious wives, widowed by the sea, if only temporarily.

In 1816, Andrew Cory and his school teacher wife, Jane Gray Seabury, bought the house. Jane had lived here with her parents as a young woman, running a school in the “old chamber,” which extends intact over the kitchen pantry. Andrew Cory lived a life at sea, eventually taking command of the New Bedford Whaler Isaac Howland in 1845 at the age of fifty-five. Despite his time at sea, Andrew and Jane managed to have nine children, although only seven survived childhood.

Andrew and Jane’s eldest child, Edward, followed in his father’s wake. He shipped from New Bedford on whalers that took him as far as Australia where, in 1842, he met Mary Ann Bamford, an orphaned 19-year-old woman sent from England as a child upon the death of her parents. The two wed in Australia, shipping back to Tiverton where they raised a large family of their own. Edward inherited the house from his father in 1866.

Late in his career as a whaler, Edward Cory went missing during a planned two-year voyage. Three years passed with no word of him, then four and five. The orphaned Mary must have passed many anguished hours wondering about Edward’s fate, finally preparing for life as a widow.

But six years after sailing from New Bedford, Edward returned. While pursuing a whale, it dealt him a near-fatal injury, and Edward spent three years convalescing in China before regaining enough strength for the long voyage home.

Edward and Mary Ann’s eldest son, Edward Joseph Cory, inherited the house, and he too tried his hand at whaling, until the industry died out in the early twentieth-century. He turned to fishing the local waters, shipping his fresh catch from Newport to New York aboard the Fall River Line steamships.

In 1962, Edward Joseph Cory, Jr., sold the old house to another man of the sea, J. William Middendorf. A veteran of the United States Navy, Middendorf served as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1973 and Secretary of the Navy from 1974 to 1977. In 1964, Middendorf donated the house to the Tiverton Historical Society, which moved here from its original headquarters at Whitridge Hall.

Carlton Brownell, a Little Compton resident and history teacher in the Tiverton Public Schools, led the restoration effort. The grounds of the Chase-Cory House contain an unusual 19th-century washhouse, a corncrib reassembled here in 1976, original stonewalls, and a privy. Brownell, who dedicated his long life to the preservation of local history, died at age 95 in February 2013.

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In the early 1900s, Tiverton was well-known for the stench of rotting fish. One local writer described the odor wafting from the menhaden factories along the Sakonnet River as “Rhode Island’s most famous smell. Even the strongest and bravest were known to wilt before it.”

Much of the stink emanated from the Menhaden Fishing Company across the river in Portsmouth, but Tiverton fishermen owned most of the steam boats that supplied that plant and others with millions of the fish, processed for fish oil and fertilizer. Menhaden—known locally as pogy—comes from the Narragansett word munnawhatteaug, and pogy from the word pauhagen. Both loosely translate to “fertilizer.” Pogies are likely the fish that Squanto taught the Pilgrims to bury alongside their corn seed.

In the days of sail, small pogy works consisting of a few iron boilers dotted the Tiverton shore from Stone Bridge to Fogland. Fishermen used seines—nets weighted at the bottom and buoyed at the top –to snag the menhaden feeding in Mount Hope Bay. One quadrant of Tiverton’s town seal shows a blue shield with a gold seine net stretched across it, evidence of the town’s past as a fishing village.

After the Civil War, the seven Church brothers dominated the menhaden trade. Two foundation holes at the northern edge of “The Gut,” where Sin and Flesh Brook flows into Nannaquaket Pond, mark the locations of the house where the brothers grew up and the “seine house” where they stashed their first nets for trapping pogy. The brothers banded together to charter a business in 1870, built the Menhaden Fishing Company plant in 1878, and for decades employed hundreds of workers processing menhaden and food fish shipped fresh via steamer to New York.

The town put the bridge in Bridgeport in 1883, when it built a wooden span to the northern tip of Nannaquaket Neck, where Nathaniel B. Church built a huge house that later served as a convent before being replaced with a modern mansion. Crews have replaced the bridge to the neck several times since, most recently pouring a concrete span atop granite pillars in 1958.

Some of the pogy fleet plying the bay at the turn of the 20th century tied up to the piers behind the “Bridgeport Block,” a ramshackle building sided in weather-beaten shingles that housed a half-dozen families and George Manchester’s general store. A sign outside the store read: “Old Trust is dead/Poor Pay killed him.” The Manchester family razed that building around 1900 and replaced it with a big shellfish processing plant that grew into Manchester Seafoods, where “Rhode Island’s most famous smell,” the scent of fish being processed, lingered into the 1980s.

Today, Menhaden have declined in numbers to as little as 10% of historic levels, a result of unrestricted industrial fishing. Plants process the fish into products from chicken feed to pet food. Locally, menhaden are popular bail for striped bass. The Manchester Seafood building hit the real estate market in 2012 with an asking price of $1.75 million. A realtor described the site as a “unique waterfront opportunity” with “approvals in hand for Inn and Spa.” Without a buyer soon for this abandoned building, it might also become endangered.

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