Wickford, Rhode Island

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Wickford is a small village in North Kingstown, Rhode Island named after Wickford in Essex, England. Wickford is located on the west side of Narragansett Bay, and with its cove and harbor it served as a port town during the colonial period the and American revolutionary era. Today the majority of its historic houses and buildings remain intact on their original foundations.

COLONIAL HISTORY. Wickford is generally said to have been established around 1637, when religious dissident and Rhode Island state founder Roger Williams bought a parcel of land from the sachem Canonicus and established a trading post there. Prior to European contact, the lands in and around Wickford had long served as dwelling, fishing, and hunting grounds to the Narragansett people, who were New England's most powerful and prominent tribe at the time when Williams found his way to their shores.

At about the same time as William's purchase, Richard Smith, a religious dissident from Gloucester, England who was a member of the original Taunton in Plymouth Company, established a trading post on lands near the mouth of Cocumscussoc Brook. Smith built what appears to have been a rather grand, gabled house on the site, which Williams in his letters described as the first English house in the area. Today "Smith's Castle" - the site of Smith's original fortified block house - remains one of the area's most visited historic sites.

In 1651 Smith purchased Roger Williams' trading post, and continued expanding his holdings over the years as the area then known as "Cocumscussoc" became a center of social, religious and political life in the area. Many of the homes that were built during this bried period of expansion, however, were destroyed between 1675-1676 in the conflict of King Philips War. Throughout South County, native and colonist settlements alike there destroyed in the bloody struggle for land control, with the result very little record of the earliest days of colonial Wickford exists.

PLANTATION ERA

REVOLUTIONARY ERA

EARLY INDUSTRIAL