Before Europeans arrived, the Pocasset people fished and farmed along the eastern shore of the Sakonnet River in what is now Tiverton. Forests, swamps, and streams provided fresh water, game, wood products, berries, and winter shelter. In 1651, Richard Morris of nearby Portsmouth purchased the Nannaquaket peninsula from its native inhabitants. There is no evidence of Morris settling here, so he may have used the peninsula to grow crops and graze animals. In 1659, Morris’ claim was recognized as legitimate by Plymouth Colony, which at that time included the Tiverton area as part of its holdings.
Strapped for cash by King Phillip’s War (1675 – 1676), Plymouth sold a tract of this land in 1679 for £1100 to the Proprietors of Pocasset. The “First Division” of the Pocasset Purchase created thirty large lots, with the northernmost edge close to the present-day Fall River-Tiverton border and the southern boundary at the Tiverton-Little Compton line.
Edward Gray (1667 – 1726) held nine shares along the southern boundary of this purchase. The 237-acre tract now known as Pardon Gray Preserve passed to Edward’s grandson, Pardon Gray (1737 – 1814), who farmed the property. During the Revolutionary War, Pardon Gray became a Colonel in the Rhode Island militia, and he was placed in charge of the local commissary, which he ran from his home. Colonel Gray supplied 11,000 militia and Continental troops stationed at Fort Barton prior to the Battle of Rhode Island in 1778. Marquis de Lafayette briefly used a house nearby as his headquarters. Pardon Gray died at the age of 78 in 1814, and he is buried alongside his wife, Mary, in the family cemetery.
The West family owned most of the property throughout the 19th century, along with land slightly north on the other side of Main Road, where Samuel West (1774 – 1838) built a house around 1800. Samuel’s father, the first of three Samuels, graduated from Harvard in 1754 and entered the ministry in 1761 in New Bedford. He became active in politics and was a member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the United States Constitution. He retired from the ministry in 1803 and lived at his son’s Tiverton property until his death in 1807.
The second Samuel West was a physician, as was his son, the third Samuel West (1806 – 1879), an 1831 Harvard Medical School graduate. He began his practice in New Bedford, but moved to Tiverton after his father’s death to take over his practice. Samuel built the existing farmhouse not long before his death in 1879. After Samuel’s death, his brother John sold most of the family land to Samuel Hathaway, who came here from Illinois to run the farm in the late 19th century.
The Matta family, which owned the property in the 1990s, agreed to sell the land to a developer who planned to build 110 homes, each on a two-acre lot. The project was delayed by lack of access to water and adequate sewerage and by the expense of road construction. Meanwhile, Tiverton’s 1997 Comprehensive Land Use Plan included guidelines for the preservation and conservation of the natural and cultural characteristics of the town.
Four citizens—Joe Bossom, Stephen Barker, Mary Wehle, and Martin VanHof—began to meet informally to produce plans, goals, and objectives for the conservation of Tiverton’s natural environment. They were soon joined by a fifth member, Allen Smith. The group needed to act quickly to preserve the Pardon Gray property from development. They created the Tiverton Land Trust, a private organization committed to protecting Tiverton’s rural character by conserving open space, agricultural lands, and wildlife habitats. With the help of Louise Durfee, the group wrote grant applications, secured tax exempt status, and tapped local and state resources to raise $1.2 million to purchase the entire 237-acre property on March 31, 2000.
Each September, the Tiverton Land Trust celebrates the preservation of Pardon Gray Preserve by sponsoring A Country Day at Pardon Gray, an old-fashioned country fair complete with tractor pulls, crafters, pony and hay rides, live entertainment, kid games, a petting zoo, great grilled food, and lots more. Fees are kept low so that the event is affordable for all families. Thanks to the Tiverton Land Trust and its supporters, Pardon Gray Preserve will remain in its natural state in perpetuity.
]]>In June 1830, the residents of Tiverton gathered for the annual town meeting, an opportunity for the freemen of the town to participate in local government. Included on the day’s agenda was a proposal to create a town farm as a refuge for the destitute and mentally ill. The creation of this “asylum for the poor” made Tiverton one of the first towns in Rhode Island to adopt a new approach to caring for local paupers.
Before the creation of poorhouses, town farms, or asylums, many communities auctioned off the poor, encouraging affluent residents to place bids for their labor as indentured servants. By the mid-1800s, the shift from farm to factory work created a new group of landless, jobless, and itinerant poor—too many to be absorbed into the traditional system. Towns viewed poor farms as a modern, humane way to combat poverty, drunkenness, and deviation from social norms, while allowing people to earn their own keep. Town leaders hoped to reform the poor through labor, while decreasing the burden on taxpayers. Spending on poor relief was often the single largest item in town budgets.
Although the freemen of Tiverton favored establishing a town farm, locating funds and deciding on suitable property was a complicated task. More than a year passed before the appointed committee purchased sixty acres of farmland from the Gray family for $4,300. The town purchased livestock for the farm and gave the committee authorization “to finish the house standing on said farm, in a good and plain manner.” By 1832, the town farm was ready for occupants.
Life was not easy for inmates. Burdened with endless chores, they raised pigs and cattle, and cultivated corn and other “grain, roots and vegetables and provisions.” Inmates lived under the strict supervision of the farm’s caretaker who lived onsite to discipline and reform the poor. Annual inspections by town officials and written accounts submitted by the Overseers of the Poor ensured that the caretaker and inmates managed resources for the benefit of the town. The overseers expected the farm to be self-sufficient, with inmates raising enough food to feed themselves.
In 1886, the Overseers of the Poor ceased keeping records for the farm, marking the beginning of a slow transition from a strictly regulated poor farm to a refuge for the elderly and disabled. A 1910 Department of Commerce report indicated that town farm housed only eight inmates, mostly single men and women, who lived in the house that the Overseers of the Poor acquired nearly a century earlier.
Ruth Manchester, a lifelong resident of Tiverton, recalled playing with the caretaker’s children and visiting the farm’s kitchen for cookies and other baked treats as a child in the 1920s. Although the town farm still ran a small dairy—selling milk to Ruth’s family and other Tiverton residents—it was no longer the agricultural venture of earlier decades. With the establishment of the Social Security Act in 1935, other options became available to those, particularly the elderly and indigent, who had once found themselves at the mercy of the Overseers of the Poor. Tiverton’s Town Farm continued to operate until 1955, when it became a private rest home, which operated until 1982.
Although a small cemetery with the unmarked graves of inmates is nearby, the house is gone and only the names of the Overseers of the Poor are preserved in Tiverton’s town records. The names and identities of those who lived and worked on the farm are lost to history.
]]>It was the Golden Era of soccer in the United States, and there was no question about the top team, the Fall River Marksmen. The 1923-24 Marksmen team was a dominant force in the American Soccer League during a time when southeastern New England was known as the “Golden Crescent” of American soccer, encompassing Pawtucket, Fall River, and New Bedford.
Harold Brittan, who netted 15 goals from the striker position, and Bill McPherson, who had an incredible 366 appearances for the Marksmen during his career, led the team in scoring. With Ned Tate from South Shields, England, at fullback, and Findlay “Lindy” Kerr from Scotland as goalkeeper, the Marksmen defense habitually held opponents scoreless, generating an astonishing fourteen clean sheets that season.
The Marksmen completed the historic 1923-24 season with the first “double,” winning the American Soccer League and capturing the National Challenge Cup by defeating the Vesper Buick team in St. Louis. The majority of the Marksmen’s games that season took place at their home field in Tiverton, Mark’s Stadium, named for the team’s owner Sam Mark.
In 1922, Sam Mark (born Sam Markelevitch, in Fall River) bought the Fall River United of the American Soccer League and renamed them the Marksmen. Fall River already had a long history of championship soccer teams. In the late 19th century, the Fall River Rovers dominated play, winning the American Cup in 1888 and 1889.
Sam Mark built the Marksmen a stadium just over the Fall River border in north Tiverton. In Massachusetts, regulations derived from Puritan strictures, known as Blue Laws, restricted a number of activities on Sundays including the playing of sports and the purchase of liquor. By building his field in Rhode Island, where Puritan ideas never held sway, Sam Mark circumvented these laws.
The Marksmen eventually won the American Soccer League title seven times, including four consecutively, and the National Challenge Cup an incredible four times. In 1930, the Marksmen became the first American team to complete a domestic treble, meaning they were champions of America’s top-tier league, and won the National Challenge Cup and the Lewis Cup.
The following year, in a blunder reminiscent of the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, Sam Mark moved the Marksmen to New York and renamed them the New York Yankees. Unlike Ruth’s Yankees, the team faltered almost immediately and the following year Mark merged the Yankees with the Providence Goldbugs and a team from New Bedford, which became the new home of his team, now called the New Bedford Whalers.
But Mark’s Stadium still had some magic left. Fall River’s Ponta Delgada team, playing in Tiverton, won numerous National Amateur Cup titles in the 1940s and 50s. Mark’s stadium was torn down in the late 1950s and replaced by a drive-in movie theater and a restaurant operated by the Ponta Delgada Club. Today, Mark’s Stadium is only a large empty lot, and the Ponta Delgada club is closed. In 2009, the sports website Bleacher Report named Mark’s Stadium the 8th most important soccer site in the United States.
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]]>Strike! Strike! Strike!
It was a warm summer day in July of 1904, and tensions were running high in Fall River, Massachusetts. Earlier in the month, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association had announced a 12.5% wage cut in all of the conglomerate’s mills. Now, after two weeks of unsuccessful negotiations between the Association and union locals, a city-wide strike was looming on the horizon. The question dominating everyone’s thoughts -- would the operatives across the border in Tiverton’s Bourne Mill join their Massachusetts colleagues in the strike or prove loyal to their employer?
Founded by a group of Fall River textile magnates in 1881, the Bourne Mill complex was constructed at the southern end of Cook’s Pond, joining several other mills already using the pond as a source of water for the mills’ steam engines. This location, however, placed the mill just over the state border into Rhode Island, resulting in the peculiar situation where several of the mill’s structures physically bridged the border. Beginning modestly with a single, five-story granite mill finished in 1883, the Bourne Mill complex eventually expanded to include more than twenty buildings of brick and granite.
Unlike all of the other mills in Fall River, Bourne Mill operated on a unique financial model where employees were involved in a profit-sharing initiative. Under this plan, if the mill made a profit and paid dividends to investors, “faithful” employees also received a biannual dividend that was calculated as a percentage of their wages. The impetus for this innovative strategy came from Jonathan Bourne -- the namesake of the mill and one of the founding investors. Bourne made his fortune in the whaling industry and was accustomed to the “lay” system used on whalers where all of the crew received a percentage of the profit at the end of a successful voyage. At Bourne Mill, this initiative was intended to both increase productivity and bolster employer-employee rapport.
As the New England textile industry began to face increasing pressure in the early twentieth century from southern mills, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, like other northern mill conglomerates, confronted the challenge of cutting costs in order to continue turning a profit. Introducing more efficient, Northrop automatic power looms that required less supervision was one way that many mills began to adjust to the increasingly competitive environment. In 1898, Bourne Mill purchased a number of Northrop looms, allowing the mill management to reduce the number of weavers in half. Despite the mill operatives’ opposition, the Northrop looms were an inevitable part of progress in the textile industry. Two years after Bourne Mill purchased its first automatic looms, it embarked on a major expansion of its weaving facilities, constructing a new, sawtooth-roofed, granite weave shed that allowed it to double the number of Northrop looms in operation.
In addition to the introduction of the Northrop automatic looms, relationships between the mill corporations and the mill operatives were further strained by a general “slowdown” in the northern textile industry in first years of the twentieth century. In this charged environment, the 12.5% decrease in wages proposed by the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association was a flashpoint. On July 25th, over 25,000 Fall River textile workers -- and most of the employees of Tiverton’s Bourne Mill -- walked out of the mills. Despite its fifteen years of successful operation, the Bourne Mill’s profit-sharing initiative had not generated enough employee goodwill to keep the mill in operation. Like the mills across the border in Fall River, Tiverton’s Bourne Mill would remain closed for the next six months. It was not reopened until after the union locals successfully negotiated for only a 7.5% wage decrease in January of 1905.
Although the Fall River textile industry seemed to recover rapidly from the effects of the 1904 strike, this conflict prefigured the eventual end of the New England cotton manufacturing industry. Northern mills simply could not compete with southern mills’ lower labor costs, newer equipment, and better access to raw cotton. Bourne Mill continued to operate though the 1940s, with World War II providing the mill with a major production boost.
In 1953, the mill was sold to Berkshire-Hathaway, a textile conglomerate formed by Warren Buffett in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Berkshire-Hathaway, realizing that the textile industry was abandoning New England, decided to divest themselves from the mills they had recently acquired . Bourne Mill, along with six other Berkshire-Hathaway mills, closed in 1961.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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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]]>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.
]]>This site, the former Whitridge Hall, served as the launching pad for a memorable show business career. In the 1950s, a summer theater troupe called this building home. The troupe hired an 18-year-old actor named Charles Nelson Reilly, who made his professional debut here as the detective in a play called “Broken Dishes.” Reilly became a show business star who regularly appeared on TV in the 1960s and 70s, but he never forgot his acting debut at Whitridge Hall.
In the 1870s, a group of Tiverton residents chartered Whitridge Hall “for the purposes of religious, charitable and literary culture, and the promotion of liberal religious thought.” According to an anonymous writer in 1884, “The hall is of unusual beauty and capacity for the purpose for which it is intended and used, viz., lectures, concerts, social parties, &c., and has a fine piano.”
The hall drew its name from philanthropist Thomas Whitridge, who grew up in the William Whitridge Estate, a 1770s house that still stands on Stone Church Road in Tiverton.
Whitridge’s father served as town doctor, and three of his brothers followed their father into medicine. Thomas moved to Baltimore, where he built a fleet of ships and became one of the nation’s largest importers of coffee, amassing the fortune that he used to endow Whitridge Hall in his hometown.
Three denominations used the hall’s Bowen Chapel for services. Episcopalians and Catholics used it as temporary space while building nearby churches, and Unitarians regularly held services here into the early 1900s.
Two famous New Englanders delivered sermons here: Julia Ward Howe and Edward Everett Hale. Howe, on a visit to Washington, D.C., woke on a gray November morning in 1861 and quickly scratched out the words that were forming in her head, and earned instant fame as the lyricist for the Civil War standard, “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Hale, a prominent Unitarian minister and theologian, is best known today for his 1863 short story, “The Man Without a Country,” whose protagonist is sentenced to lifetime exile aboard U.S. naval vessels for shouting, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" during the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Hale’s story was adapted to film several times, most recently as a 1973 made-for-TV movie. Hale’s Matunuck, Rhode Island, home is now a museum.
The town’s first public library blossomed inside Whitridge Hall, growing in just 20 years from a few donated books in 1881 to 4,000 volumes. Local service groups such as the Grange and the nascent Tiverton Historical Society met often in Whitridge Hall, and the building briefly became a dance hall in the 1960s.
Eventually, many of the groups and churches Whitridge Hall once hosted found space of their own. The library moved to a fieldstone building on Highland Avenue bequeathed by a former school teacher, Lydia Essex; and the Historical Society moved its headquarters to the 1730s Chase-Cory House, freeing Whitridge Hall for conversion into the apartment house you see today.
The pulse of Tiverton beat through this building for nearly 90 years, and the town still struggles to replace its function as a center for the community.
]]>On the night of July 9, 1777, a young Rhode Island militia officer named William Barton and a small raiding party slipped through British defenses on the Portsmouth shore and carried away General Richard Prescott—wearing nothing but his nightclothes.
Colonel Barton was second-in-command of the fort at Tiverton Heights, a small foothold against the British forces that occupied Aquidneck Island across the Sakonnet River. That spring, Rhode Island’s General Assembly declared it a disgrace that no attack ``hath, as yet, been made against the enemy.’’ The assembly set bounties on the capture of British soldiers, from $20 for a private to $1,000 for a general.
Barton opted to go after the big prize, the officer in charge of 4,000 British and Hessian soldiers occupying Newport. His plan was so bold that it bordered on foolishness. Besides the troops under his command, Prescott was on an island, protected by a squadron of warships.
On July 3, Barton asked the regiment at Tiverton Heights to undertake a hazardous mission. According to lore, every man stepped forward. He selected forty strong rowers, including Thomas Austin, who carried the scars of 300 lashes on his back, ordered by Prescott after Austin refused the use of his oxen to haul British cannon.
On July 4, 1777, they launched three whaleboats into the Sakonnet for a roundabout trip across Mount Hope and Narragansett Bays before doubling back toward Portsmouth, their oars muffled with sheepskin. They rowed between two British warships, passing so near to one of them that the oarsmen could hear the watch on deck calling out the time.
Finally, the boats crunched ashore at Portsmouth. The men’s feet smudged the dew in the fields as they hiked to the farmhouse of Mr. Overing, where Prescott spent his nights, crossing a creek then cutting through the edge of an orchard hoping to avoid detection.
Led by African-American Guy Watson, who may have been Barton’s slave, the men kicked in the door and stormed into Prescott's chambers. The raiders led the partially-clothed general back across the fields, sat him in a whale boat and rowed him across the bay. The daring raid had succeeded.
The General Assembly made good on its $1,000 reward, a prize that Barton divided among his men. Continental Congress voted to present him “an elegant sword,” even though Barton wrote that he preferred cash. The sword is now in the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society. The fortification at Tiverton Heights now bears his name, Fort Barton.
Even British Lt. Frederick Mackenzie gave grudging respect to Barton and his men for pulling off the capture: "The Rebels certainly run a great risk in making this attempt. They however executed it in a masterly manner, and deserve credit for the attempt. It is certainly a most extraordinary circumstance, that a General Commanding a body of 4,000 men, encamped on an Island surrounded by a Squadron of Ships of War, should be carried off from his quarters in the night by a small party of the Enemy from without, & without a Shot being fired."
]]>During August 1778, Tiverton was the fulcrum on which the American Revolution teetered. From all over New England militiamen marched along dusty roads to rendezvous at the fort on Tiverton Heights.
From Gloucester, Newburyport, and Marblehead came 265 fishermen to ferry American troops across the Sakonnet River.
From Boston came John Hancock, in command of the Massachusetts militia including Paul Revere, who wrote home, “It seems as if half of Boston was here.”
From New York came 1,000 Continental troops led by Rhode Islander Major-General Nathanael Greene, and another 1,000 led by the 19-year-old Marquis d’Lafayette.
Perhaps most importantly, from France came a fleet of twelve warships commanded by Comte D’Estaing, gun ports open, brass cannon glinting in the sun, the lead ship flying the French colors.
The French were not impressed by the American troops gathered at Tiverton. Lafayette’s aide wrote: “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle; all the tailors and apothecaries in the country must have been called out. They were mounted on bad nags, and looked like a flock of ducks in cross-belts.”
The target of this amassed force was Aquidneck Island, a short row across the Sakonnet. The British occupied the island with a garrison of 6,700 men. Their surrender might break England’s will, resulting in victory for the Americans.
D’Estaing knew that the British fleet expected reinforcements to arrive any day, which would mean certain destruction for the French ships. On the morning of August 10, D’Estaing decided to attack the enemy fleet anchored in Newport, but the British commander ordered his ships to flee. They receded toward the horizon with the French fleet after them, preparing to battle in the Atlantic.
American commander John Sullivan decided to press the land attack without French naval support. He ferried troops, cannon, horses, and supplies across the Sakonnet River, and the force of 10,000 marched toward Newport.
For days, both sides fired cannons at each other mostly without effect, while keeping an anxious eye on the sea, wondering what happened to the naval fleets that had slipped away from Newport to do battle. Whose sails would appear on the horizon?
Fog shrouded Newport on the morning of August 20, so thick it was difficult to see fifty yards. When skies cleared after noon, the sails of twelve large ships appeared. They drew nearer until a look through field glasses revealed the French tri-color flying from their masts.
But the French fleet had been crippled, not through battle with the British but by a storm at sea, and D’Estaing intended to sail into Boston for repairs.
Without support from the French fleet, many militia men wanted no part of British bullets and bayonets, and they began crossing the Sakonnet back to Tiverton in droves. The time had come to end the siege of Newport, but it would not be easy. Sullivan had to ferry nearly 5,000 men across the Sakonnet with an enemy force of 6,000 at his back.
The American retreat was defended by the Rhode Island First Regiment, a segregated unit of enslaved Rhode Islanders—African-Americans, Narragansetts, and men of mixed race—who were promised their freedom in exchange for enlisting. The solders of the 1st wore uniforms of cream-colored pants and jackets, with tall white hats emblazoned with blue anchors and topped with big blue feathers.
Twice the Hessians charged with their bayonets. Twice, in deadly hand-to-hand fighting, the 1st Rhode Island drove them back. The Hessians took on reinforcements and again attacked. With the help of reinforcements, the 1st “soon put the Enemy to rout,” Nathaneal Greene reported to General Washington, and the American forces escaped to Tiverton.
The Battle of Rhode Island resulted in a military draw. The Americans lost 30 dead and 137 wounded, while British losses were 38 dead, 210 wounded. The enemy temporarily kept their stranglehold on Rhode Island, but the underdog Americans stood toe-to-toe with the mighty British and had driven them back.
]]>The remains of Fort Barton stand on a rise 110 feet above sea level that is capped by an observation tower offering a commanding view of Narragansett Bay. During the early years of the American Revolution, the fort occupied a strategic highpoint overlooking a bottleneck of navigable water between the Sakonnet River and Mount Hope Bay, the shortest distance between Aquidneck Island and the mainland. These narrows—connected by a series of ferries and bridges from the 1680s—were the most vulnerable part of the passage for vessels plying the waters between the upper Narragansett Bay area and the Sakonnet River to Newport and the open ocean.
After the British occupied Newport and Aquidneck Island in 1776, Tiverton became an asylum for American sympathizers and a mustering point for Colonial forces. Construction of the fortification was a joint effort by the governments of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. On June 11, 1777, British officer Frederick Mackenzie described these efforts in his journal: “The Rebels have been busily employed in making a work on the hill above Howland's ferry where their guns have been placed all the Winter. It appears to be very extensive, and must cost them a great deal of labour, as there is little or no soil on the hill.” On June 28, 1777, the Americans erected a flagstaff at the fort and raised their colors. The following day, Mackenzie described the fort as "irregular in its figure, but very extensive. From the situation, it must be strong."
A week after the fort was commissioned, Lieutenant Colonel William Barton led a daring raid to capture British General Richard Prescott on Aquidneck Island. This exploit brought such renown that the fort at Tiverton Heights was named Fort Barton in his honor.
During 1777 and 1778, thousands of Colonial troops—including Paul Revere and John Hancock—were assembled in Tiverton for an invasion of Aquidneck Island. During the summer of 1778, 11,000 Continental troops and militia ferried across the narrows in one of the greatest massings of American soldiers during the war. With French naval support crippled by a storm, American troops fought their way back to Tiverton under the protection of the guns at Fort Barton. After this battle, most of the soldiers departed the area, leaving only a handful of men at the fort.
In 1923, Dr. Roderick Terry donated the site to the Newport Historical Society. During World War II, Tiverton Civil Defense erected a plane-spotting tower atop Fort Barton, and a continuous watch was maintained. A current Tiverton resident remembers her father volunteering four-hour shifts to spot enemy planes, whose silhouettes were painted above the tower’s windows. In 1968, the property was transferred to the town of Tiverton. Today, a park includes remains of the earthworks, an observation tower, and a nature walk through the woods to the east along Sin and Flesh Brook.
]]>In June 1830, the residents of Tiverton gathered for the annual town meeting, an opportunity for the freemen of the town to participate in local government. Included on the day’s agenda was a proposal to create a town farm as a refuge for the destitute and mentally ill.
Before the creation of poorhouses, town farms, or asylums, many communities auctioned off the poor, encouraging affluent residents to place bids for their labor as indentured servants. By the mid-1800s, the shift from farm to factory work created a new group of landless, jobless, and itinerant poor — too many to be absorbed into the traditional system. Towns viewed poor farms as a modern, humane way to combat poverty, drunkenness, and deviation from social norms, while allowing people to earn their own keep. Town leaders hoped to reform the poor through labor, while decreasing the burden on taxpayers. Spending on poor relief was often the single largest item in town budgets.
Although the freemen of Tiverton favored establishing a town farm, locating funds and deciding on suitable property was a complicated task. More than a year passed before the appointed committee purchased sixty acres of farmland from the Gray family for $4,300. The town purchased livestock for the farm and gave the committee authorization “to finish the house standing on said farm, in a good and plain manner.” By 1832, the town farm was ready for occupants.
Life was not easy for inmates. Burdened with endless chores, they raised pigs and cattle, and cultivated corn and other “grain, roots and vegetables and provisions.” Inmates lived under the strict supervision of the farm’s caretaker who lived onsite to discipline and reform the poor. The overseers expected the farm to be self-sufficient, with inmates raising enough food to feed themselves.
In 1886, the Overseers of the Poor ceased keeping records for the farm, marking the beginning of a slow transition from a strictly regulated poor farm to a refuge for the elderly and disabled. A 1910 Department of Commerce report indicated that town farm housed only eight inmates, mostly single men and women, who lived in the same house that the Overseers of the Poor had acquired nearly a century earlier.
Ruth Manchester, a lifelong resident of Tiverton, recalled playing with the caretaker’s children and visiting the town farm’s kitchen for cookies and other baked treats as a child in the 1920s. Although the town farm still ran a small dairy — selling milk to Ruth’s family and other Tiverton residents — it was no longer the agricultural venture of earlier decades. With the establishment of the Social Security Act in 1935, other options became available to those, particularly the elderly and indigent, who had once found themselves at the mercy of the Overseers of the Poor. Tiverton’s Town Farm continued to operate until 1955, at which time it became a private rest home that finally closed in 1982.
Today, a small cemetery containing the unmarked graves of inmates marks the town farm. The farmhouse where inmates lived for more than a century has been demolished and only the names of the Overseers of the Poor are preserved in the town’s records. The names and identities of those who lived and worked on the Tiverton Town Farm are lost to history.
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