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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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