Through the centuries, Jamestown's approximately 26 miles of rocky coastline have been a lure for fishermen. From the late 19th century until World War II, the southern part of the Beavertail Peninsula was primarily a private playground for outdoorsmen.

Many were guests of clubs and camps that were established chiefly for fishing. Often, these organizations came complete with a clubhouse and outbuildings, ensuring guests could fish and be comfortable at the same time.

Located several hundred yards from the lighthouse, the Beavertail Fishing Club was one of the most elaborate of the sportsmen associations. Not only did the establishment contain a clubhouse, it boasted a dining room, sleeping accommodations, and a stable.

A little less glamorous was Peckham Camp. In the 1910s, Peckham Camp consisted of seven cottages, each rented for $100 for the "season" of four months. An advertisement describes them as: "Bungalows fitted only for camp life. Most all cottages have large pleasant rooms, with broad verandas, hot and cold water, set tubs, open fire places, and are heated by steam or hot air."

The bungalows at the Peckham Camp continued to be leased each summer until the beginning of World War II. The same families returned year after year, and in some cases, generation after generation.

On Dec. 4, 1941, the U.S. Army established Fort Burnside. The 185-acre fort occupied the entire Beavertail Peninsula, including Peckham Camp, which the family sold to the government for $15,500 in 1943.

Prior to WWII, strategic Harbor Entrance Command Posts (HECPs) were built to protect US coastlines. Fort Burnside was the designated post for Narragansett Bay. Posing as a large seaside cottage, an observation building monitored all the comings and goings of military shipping, all while keeping a watchful eye to the horizon for enemy attacks. Additional structures were built to hold top-secret equipment with advanced radar. In 1945, the military installation was renamed the Naval Radio Station Newport. Over the next two decades, 25 radio antennas were erected, each connected to one or more of 30 transmitters, making Beavertail a Navy communications hub.

In 1980, the land was declared surplus and became Beavertail State Park.

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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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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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Native peoples had already lived on the land near Mashapaug Pond for many centuries when Roger Williams arrived in Providence in 1636. The pond’s very name comes from two Algonquin words: ‘massa’ and ‘pug’, meaning ‘large standing water’. In Pre-Contact time the pond provided local Narragansett, with a wealth of resources. Families built weetooash, or temporary dome-shaped homes, on the shores of the pond for summertime usage as they fished in the pond and gathered plants and herbs from its sandy banks. Nearby, gardens of squash, corn, melons, and sunflowers flourished. Along with daily lifeways such as hunting, fishing, gathering the Narragansett enjoyed the pond for community celebrations that included storytelling, dancing and drumming.

Although native families were displaced from around the pond as Providence’s Euroamerican community expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of them managed to retain their connection to the land. Tall Oak Weeden, who shares both Pequot and Wampanoag ancestry, recalls visiting family members who lived near the pond. In the early twentieth century, his great-grandfather had moved from Connecticut to Providence, settling in the ethnically diverse community of West Elmwood. Beautiful cherry trees and small gardens once filled the neighborhood, and in their free time, his family members enjoyed fishing and ice skating at the pond. The Pond Street Baptist Church served as an important space for the Native American community to come together. To Tall Oak Weeden, “It was like the Indian town reconstituted itself in a sense, from the original Indian town that was there that the settlers felt needed to be moved.”

By the 1960s, new development, such as the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, again forced Native American families away from the pond. The Pond Street Baptist Church relocated, and the neighborhood of West Elmwood, where African American, Native American, and Euroamerican families had lived side by side, was bulldozed. Contamination of the local environment, through Gorham’s pollution and storm water runoff, also had a direct impact on Native American families’ ability to interact with the pond.

Mashapaug Pond continues to be an important site of memory for the Indigenous community including the Narragansett, Wampanoag and other local tribes of the southern New England region. The Rhode Island Indian Council and the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum serve as important spaces for community life and cultural preservation keeping these memories alive through programs, exhibits, books and other cultural education opportunities. As such, memories of the community’s connections to Mashapaug Pond are preserved. The name of the pond, and nearby street names such as Niantic, Algonquin, and Narragansett, serve as testimony to the deep connections that Native Americans have to the region.

In September of 1936, the editorial in Narragansett Dawn, a monthly publication by and for the Native American community of Rhode Island, ended with the statement: “Rhode Island Knows Now - THE NARRAGANSETT STILL EXISTS!” Although weetooash no longer dot the shores of pond and the lush gardens are gone from the vacant lots in West Elmwood, the Narragansett presence still exists near Mashapaug Pond as well.

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