Wickford, Rhode Island

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Wickford is a small village in the township of North Kingstown, Rhode Island named after Wickford in Essex, England. Wickford is located on the west side of Narragansett Bay. The village is built around one of the most well-protected natural harbors on the eatern seaboard, and features one of the largest collections of 18th century dwellings to be found anywhere in the northeast. Today the majority of the village's historic homes and buildings (most in private hands) remain largely intact upon their original foundations.

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 Williams' purchase, Richard Smith, a religious dissident from Gloucester, England who had originally settled in the Plymouth Colony's town of Taunton, established a trading post on Narragansett Bay near the mouth of Cocumscussoc Brook. In 1637, 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. This house was also heavily fortified, and thus became known as Smith's Castle.

During 1651 Smith purchased Roger Williams' trading post, and continued expanding his holdings over the years - building what came to be called the Cocumscussoc Plantation. Smith's plantation 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 called King Philip's War. One of the homes that went was Smith's Castle, which burned to the ground in 1676. Two years later, Richard Smith Jr. built a new home on the old foundation. Retaining the name "Smith's Castle," this structure remains standing today and is one of the area's most visited historic sites.

Following King Philip's War, Wickford grew steadily as a port and shipbuilding center. To this day, the waterfront remains very active and hosts, among other fine vessels, the Dutch sailing yacht Brandaris.

In 1755, painter Gilbert Stuart was born at Saunderstown, on the southern outskirts of Wickford, in a snuff-mill that still stands and is open to the public in season. Other famous residents have included novelist Owen Wister, who for decades summered in a home just to the south of the village. Wickford was also home to Paule Stetson Loring, artist for Yachting Magazine and other publications, and longtime editorial page cartoonist for the Providence Journal. A popular urban legend maintains that novelist John Updike hailed originally from Wickford - but this is not the case. Updike was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Updike did, however, use Wickford as the model for the fictional village of Eastwick in his novel, The Witches of Eastwick (Knopf: 1984).

The Wickford Art Festival - held in July of every year since 1962 and hosted by the Wickford Art Association - is one of the leading such events on the eastern seaboard, attracting hundreds of prominent artists and thousands of spectators from across the country and around the world.