USA > Rhode Island > Washington County > North Kingstown > Facts and fancies concerning North Kingstown, Rhode Island > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15
The house is a two-story gambrel-roofed structure about 20 by 36 feet on the ground. The front door which is not original is placed near the south- east corner of the house. Within the front door is a small entry opening into the great room which occupies the whole center of the house with windows on both the east and west wall. Two small rooms each about 8 feet by 10 feet occupy the north end of the house and separated from the great room by a feather-edge board partition. I believe that these rooms were part of the original plan although an old description quoted by Mrs. Griswold would indicate otherwise. The description is as follows: "The interior of the house presents those rough hewn timbers, massive beams crossing the low ceilings with the solid paneling and elaborate and inaccessible mantel pieces of the colonial period, cavernous fireplaces, grim black rafters sup- porting the gambrel roof, etc. The chief room with windows on three sides was the household chapel where the congregation frequently gathered for social worship." From Samuel Fayerweather's inventory we know that these rooms were in existence in 1781. The construction and the feather- edge paneling indicate that they were there much earlier.
The old fireplaces and chimney are gone although the stones of which the chimney was constructed are in the yard. The placing of the old beams and general construction show that the original chimney must have been some eight feet by ten or more feet and probably was of the inside end type and was placed in the southwest corner of the building behind the stairs. We have been told that this chimney was taken out about 40 years ago to make room for a kitchen.
The foundation of the old chimney occupies a corner of the cellar and is about 12 feet by 15 feet. This base of the chimney and the new floor boards in the great room show that there was an ususually wide hearth for the main fireplace. It extended some 6 or 7 feet out into the room.
The second floor is laid out like the first with the great chamber about 20 feet square over the great room and the two small rooms across the north end of the building separated from the great chamber by the feather- edge paneling. Following a common rule in early construction the summer
II
£
of the great chamber runs across the house at right angles to the summer of the great room. A small room over the new kitchen occupies the space on the second floor formerly taken up by the old stone chimney.
In the attic of the house is a jumble of beams and bracing, some new and some old with three or four mouldering beams from the original con- struction to give us an inkling of the builder's framing.
In the old days there was a small two-story ell about 15 feet square extending from the south side of the house, but this has fallen down and only the foundation stones here and there mark its outline on the ground today.
Whenever any major repairs are made or restoration undertaken, a great deal of interesting and valuable information may be obtained from the remnants of the old construction which is now hidden by lathes and plaster, the work of later generations.
Today the old place is a veritable wreck. Windows are broken and much of the sash is in pieces. The old shingles are rotting away. Most of the windows are boarded up but this does not prevent the hands of vandals from destroying much that has through these many years withstood the rains of summer and the storms of winter. Squirrels have gnawed holes through the old boarding to give ready access to their nests. Inside the house rubbish and broken furniture, the work largely of marauders, covers the floors, with a great cavernous hole to the cellar making unsafe nearly half of the floor of the great room. The old gardens are filled with under- brush and woods hide the old trees in McSparran's orchard which sheltered his gardens from the north winds. Marks of the hurricane of 1938 abound.
However, in the midst of all this wreckage and desolation that hide the whilom beauties of this place in the days of the Reverend Doctor, enough remain so that we may picture it as it was, and, under the guidance of a careful and sympathetic hand it may yet be restored to its original character preserved for further generations to walk in the gardens where the McSpar- ran feet have trod and to again see the old Glebe House as he knew it.
ELMGROVE-THE FIRST CEMETERY IN NORTH KINGSTOWN-IN ALLENTON
ANNA STANTON NUGENT
TN OLDEN times, there were no cemeteries, only private burial lots on nearly every farm. As land changed owners. these burial lots became neglected and grew up to brush, briers and trees. Cattle roamed over them. It was Dr. George E. Church of Wickford, who was not only a great physi- cian but a great public servant, interested in many outside activities, who first called to the attention of the town the neglected condition of these cemeteries and advocated purchasing a tract of land to be used for burial purposes only. Later, Robert Rodman and other public-spirited men gave support to Dr. Church's idea. An organization was finally formed, a charter obtained, land was purchased and the Elm Grove Cemetery became a reality, about 1850.
12
--
-
COCUMCUSSOC
Unpublished. All Rights Reserved.
This story of Cocumcussoc was written for the Kent County Woman's Club by J. Earl Clauson and is pub- lished with the consent of Mrs. Clauson.
THE reason why my name suggested itself for this talk was, I fancy, because I have said, and somebody overheard me say, that I consider Cocumcussoc the most interesting house historically in the United States. It may be that such a statement includes too much landscape-that I might have said the most interesting in its associations with colonial history. Super- latives are always dangerous, and it is enough for this occasion to speak of it as a romantically interesting spot of great historic value.
You will see at Cocumcussoc a large wooden farmhouse, consisting of a main building and an ell set close to the ground, with a veranda facing the east and the north cove of Wickford Harbor. The view from the ve- randa is marvelously beautiful at all times, but especially when it is first struck by the rays of the sun rising beyond Conanicut and Portsmouth across the bay, or when the waters of the cove are reddened by the dying day.
To the right as you look eastward from the veranda is the ancient village of Wickford set in its elms, above which rises the steeple of the Baptist Church. To the left are the wooded shores leading down to Quonset Point. Rabbit Island lies in the immediate foreground, and some distance below it Cornelius Island.
In the dooryard of Cocumcussoc, a few yards from the veranda, is a spot known as the Great Grave. This is supposed to be the exact spot where forty white men who died of their wounds after the Swamp Fight in December, 1675, were buried. One of them was a scion of the house which established Cocumcussoc-Richard Updike, grandson of Richard Smith, the settler. A bronze tablet on a great boulder marks the spot.
One morning last winter Mr. Austen Fox, master of Cocumcussoc, called my attention to the landscape along the north shore of the cove as seen through the living room window. He remarked that he found a measure of satisfaction in the thought that it was practically unchanged from the time when Roger Williams looked on it from about where we stood.
It is a difficult matter to recreate the past. Yet if we are to accept a statement by Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts the countryside here- abouts, quite aside from the artificial changes man has wrought, was very different from what we are likely to fancy it. Winthrop, quoting in his journal November 5, 1634 what John Oldham, who had ventured with a brig into these waters and carried back to the Puritan colonists 500 bushels of Indian corn, had told him, said:
"The country on the west of the bay of Narragansett is all champaign for many miles, but very stony and full of Indians."
"All champaign" means all open land, bare of trees. The Narragansetts were gardeners. They raised not only corn, but beans and other crops. If trees stood in the way of their planting operations they were either cut or burned down. Also, living along the shore as thousands of them did, it is
13
-
conceivable that they removed trees to deprive enemies of a screen for attack. Their canoes, to judge by what Williams said of their manner of making them, were manufactured in the forest some distance back from the shore.
As to the stones Winthrop speaks of, they are still here, and there is plenty of testimony about the Indians. There are many different estimates, but that the country was peopled almost beyond our power to believe there is testimony. Washington County's population today is about 30,000, in- cluding such centers as Westerly and Wakefield. Williams says the Narra- gansetts could raise about 5000 fighting men.
Assuming that for one fighting man there would be four non-combat- ants, women, children and the aged, this would mean an Indian popula- tion of 25,000, very little different from today. Another seventeenth century writer says the Narragansetts numbered 30,000 men. Presumably he cal- culated all of their subordinate tribes.
But taking Williams' estimate and Winthrop's note it becomes possible to picture a fairly treeless shore and Indians everywhere. They lived out of doors so that they must have always been in sight, fishing, digging clams, making wampum or arrowheads, the women scratching the corn rows with crude stone hoes, naked children playing games. There must have been little clumps of their huts all along the shore near every spring. Williams said you would run into a dozen villages, some large, some small, in a twenty-mile walk.
I am trying to give you this picture because it must have been what Richard Smith, the first settler-or so we always have believed-saw when he came here.
It was not unknown land when he arrived. The Dutch had settled New Amsterdam in 1623 and were trading vigorously for furs to the east- ward, with a port at Charlestown and perhaps as early as 1637 another at Dutch Island. The Puritans were reaching out for trade on their own account
A main traveled trail, the Pequot Path, followed roughly the line of the present Post Road from New London, at the mouth of the Pequot River, as the Thames was called in colonial times, northward to the head of Narragansett Bay and beyond. No doubt it had known several pairs of white feet before Richard Smith's first trod it.
Smith came from Gloucestershire in England. He was a family man of settled life, more than 40 years old, when he yielded to an urge to come to America. A Puritan, he is supposed to have become increasingly dis- gusted with the trend of religious affairs in the homeland.
He was one of the original purchasers of Taunton in 1637, and in 1638 was made a citizen of Newport. He came to Rhode Island and built at Cocumcussoc, according to generally accepted belief, in either 1637 or 1639. The difference whether it is one year or the other makes is, that if it was in 1637 North Kingstown is the second oldest settlement in the state; if 1639 Portsmouth is the second.
Uncertainty as to the year exists because Roger Williams made an affidavit in 1679 saying that about forty years earlier Smith had settled . among the thickest of the Indians, at Wickford. But among the British Colonial Records there is an affidavit of Williams' precisely similar except
14
that it says forty-two years. Moreover in the copy owned by the Rhode Island Historical Society there is an erasure between the words "forty" and "years" as if the word "two" had been rubbed out.
If Williams said "about forty-two years" he was naming a precise time. If he said "about forty" he meant either more or less.
Is is usually difficult and frequently impossible to settle such questions as that after lapse of three centuries. They are the life-blood of antiquarians.
If Smith settled in Wickford in 1637 why did he become a citizen of Newport in 1638? Or why does his name appear among lists of office holders in Portsmouth after 1640? Also in 1645 Smith was an office holder in New Amsterdam.
Is it possible that after being here a brief time he moved from Rhode Island, or perhaps spent some years in New Amsterdam, where he cer- tainly was in 1646 and 1648, that Roger Williams' trading post was where Cocumcussoc now is instead of two miles north of there, as has been be- lieved, and that the property Williams sold Smith for fifty pounds in 1651 when Williams needed mony to go to England to fight for the charter of Rhode Island was Cocumcussoc?
The Williams trading post generally is placed two miles further north, where the Fones house now stands. But Sidney S. Rider, who is never to be disregarded, in a note published in 1883 says: .
"Whilom we went to Wickford for therin lay the lands staked out by Miantonomi for a trading house for Roger Williams. It was along the bands of the Cowcumsquisset as so Williams calls the place by the name of the brook. Hereaway too was the famous hostelry or Block House built by Richard Smith."
These are questions of academic interest. We do not know that Smith came to Cocumcussoc and built a block house. It is a tradition that he floated materials across from Taunton, which if trees were scarce near the water would be easier than dragging them from the forest.
Francis Brinley in a panrphlet published in 1689 says: "Richard Smith purchased a tract, erected a house for trade and gave free enter- tainment to travellers, it being the great road of the country."
This house was known variously as Smith's Blockhouse and Smith's Castle. It actually was a blockhouse, being according to one account fifty feet square, two stories high, with walls of rough stone two feet thick.
Probably nearby there were enclosures for sheep and cattle, with guarded passage to the house. There was good grazing in the open country if the Indians left the animals alone. Mrs. Smith had brought with her a recipe for Cheshire Cheese, and as order was established began to use it, with the result that for a great many years the Cheshire cheese from Cocumcussoc was widely famous.
The present house comprises materials which were in the original blockhouse, but how much is not known, nor whether any of the original walls are standing. Also in it, no doubt, are fragments of Roger Williams' 'trading post.
Smith's Blockhouse is said to have been burned by the Indians after the Swamp Fight. If that is true the original walls of rough stone must before 1675 have been replaced with wood or perhaps sheated in wood, and in fact Gysbert Op Dyck, who became Smith's son-in-law, is said to
15
20- العدد
1
L
-
V
COCUMCUSSOC
.
.
have done precisely the latter thing, transforming what had outlived its usefulness as a fort into an English type dwelling house.
But in making repairs now and then, especially in restoring the great fireplace in what Mrs. Fox aptly calls the fireplace room, charred timbers were found which looks as if they might have been in place when the In- dians set their torches to the house. They are still there behind a curtain of bricks.
The first settlement, "Smith's" became the stopping place of every traveller along the Pequot Path and as other settlers came it became the center of political and social activities for a wide countryside. Williams for three years dated his letters either Narragansett or Cawcumquissick, to 1651, when he sold out. The great founder of Providence held month- ly religious services at Smith's. So did William Blackstone, the recluse of Study Hill, Cumberland, who once a month or so rode his mouse-colored bull down the trail and at Smith's held the first Church of England ser- vices in Rhode Island, if not in New England.
These exercises were directed largely to converting the Indians. Smith extended his land holdings by entering into agreements with the red men which there is no reason to believe they understood at all, and eventually had a tract nine miles long and three miles wide. One instance of how business was done was his bargain for a lease of. 1000 years of a certain tract of land, payment to be one red honeysuckle every midsummer's day, when lawfully demanded.
A good many settlers after reaching America developed a craze for large landholdings. Four to six years after this first appearance at Cocum- cussoc we find Smith and family in what is now Newtown, Queens Bor- ough, New York City, engaging in a land speculation with some Taunton friends. An Indian outbreak drove him back to New Amsterdam. While there, Gysbert Op Dyck, who had migrated from Germany in 1638, court- ed and married Catherine, Richard Smith's youngest daughter. A con- temporary description says her "cheeks shone rosy red through the snow white skin."
The long, bitter and complicated controversy between Rhode Island and Connecticut over ownership of the Narragansett Country found Smith siding with Connecticut, which he believed would best serve his private interests. His blockhouse became the capitol of the disputed lands.
It was within his strong walls that the King's commissioners met to take testimony, sailing over in a sloop from Newport, and the expeditions sent out from the Bay Colony to settle differences with the Indians made "Smith's" their headquarters. The officers were entertained in the house, the men were quartered on the grounds. It would have been a busy, pic- turesque scene on any of these occasions, with the corseleted soldiers, the stacked flintlocks, the campfires, and a fringe of sullen, suspicious Indians watching every movement with well-founded doubts.
Richard Smith senior died in 1664. He is buried on the farm. Over his grave is a rough stone marked simply, "R. S. died 1664." In St. Paul's Church, Wickford, is a mural tablet erected by Daniel Burkley Updike, his descendent, which recites the outstanding facts of his life and closes with the words of Roger Williams.
17
1
1
"In his own house with much serenity of soul he yielded up his spirit to God the father of spirits in peace."
Williams may have been a little rhetorical in use of the phrase "in peace" because the Rhode Island-Connecticut controversy was at its fiercest and a couple of warrants had been issued against Smith during the year or so before he died. And while we are speaking of that conspiracy to wipe out Rhode Island entirely let us look at one picture, very briefly.
It is 1683, nearly twenty years after the death of Richard Smith and the very year of the death of his friend, Roger Williams. Smith's son Richard has inherited along with the estate his father's adherence to Con- necticut. The King's Commissioners from the United Colonies met in the blockhouse and displayed their customary arbitrary spirit toward the little Rhode Island Colony.
The Rhode Island Legislature spurned their show of authority. As- sembling here in Wickford, with a troop of horses and a sergeant at arms, they march up the lane, as West Main Street then was called, and so to Smith's, where the sergeant sounds his trumpet and reads a proclamation ordering the Royal Commissioners to discontinue keeping court in any part of the Rhode Island jurisdiction.
For the moment anyway the order stuck. The King's Commissioners, - albeit highly indignant, adjourned to Boston to pursue their deliberations.
Smith willed his Wickford house and lands to his son Richard. Cath- erine Op Dyck was dead, but her children were remembered. Richard the son was thirty-four when his father died. He left no children on his death in 1692 and Cocumcussoc passed into possession of Lodowick Updike-the spelling had been changed-eldest son of Catherine Smith Op Dyck.
Between the deaths of the elder and junior Richard Smiths Cocumcus- soc saw its most exciting days. This was during the great Indian uprising known as King Philip's War.
You are not interested in questions of right or wrong as regards that savage and costly struggle, but in the part played in it by Cocumcussoc. Rhode Island, you will remember, had been denied membership with the United Colonies so at the outset it was not actively engaged in the war. Later it was drawn in against its will and became in fact the greatest sufferer.
But some Rhode Islanders were in the Swamp Fight.
Six months before the Swamp Fight, in July, 1675, Massachusetts had sent a troop of infantry and a troop of horses to Narragansett and made a forced peace treaty with the Narragansetts. The negotiations took four days. The scene of the treaty conference is likely to have been Cocumcus- soc, near which Canonicus, then dead, was said to have had his principal residence, and in the neighborhood of which Ninigret and Canonicus perhaps lived.
The treaty meant nothing in view of the impossible conditions im- posed by the whites. In November the commissioners of the United Col- onies ordered an army raised for war on the Narragansetts. In their man- ifesto occured the words:
"Forasmuch as they (the Indians) did for some days seize and keep under a strong guard Mr. Smith's house and family."
18
·
They did indeed seize the house, but left it after a few days without having done damage of any consequence. The words, however, give an idea of living conditions of the time and place.
On Friday, December 11, 1875, the army raised by Massachusetts and Plymouth arrived at Cocumcussoc, marching by way of Providence. It consisted of 650 men from Massachusetts and Plymouth. They stayed at the Smith place for eight days before the Swamp fight. It is possible to picture this large force camped around the head of the cove and on both sides of the Pequot Path, their officers probably quartered in the blockhouse, the horses staked outside with piles of hay in front of them. One of the nine companies was mounted.
1
The Connecticut force of 300 whites and 150 Indians, Mohegans and Pequots. was on its way from Hartford by way of New London. It camped on the flats along the Pettaquamscutt River at the east foot of Tower Hill.
The Connecticut men found on reaching that spot that Jireh Bull's blockhouse near the Middle Bridge Road had been burned by the Indians and ten men, five women and children had been killed. Only two garri- soned there escaped.
On the way down the Massachusetts force had destroyed Planham's village in Warwick, taking 36 prisoners. The rest had fled. Those captured probably were made slaves. A great many Indians were sent into slavery in the West Indies as a result of this war.
On the night of their arrival at Cocumcussoc, a clear, cold night, Capt. Church went out raiding and brought back 18 Indians. Monday morning another party of raiders succeeded in killing a man and woman and cap- turing four Indians alive. That afternoon a party set out to the westward and, probably near what we now call Queen's Fort, burned an Indian village of 150 wigwams, killed seven Indians and took eight alive.
The next day, Tuesday, a party of English raiders was cut off and killed by the Indians.
On Wednesday, the 16th, Cocumcussoc got the bad news from Jireh Bull's. The horse troopers had been sent down to contact the Connecticut force and brought it back. It was time to get busy.
There were a number of Indian prisoners to be disposed of. The prob- lem was solved by selling 47 for 50 pounds. On Saturday, the Connecticut force having moved up to Smith's, the army set out for the Great Swamp. They had as quide an Indian called Peter who had agreed to show them the way after being threatened with death.
Richard, one of the sons of Gysbert and Catherine Op Dyck, had joined up for the excitement. He died of his wounds in the battle and his dust is mingled with that of others in the Great Grave.
It had turned very cold, with a heavy snowfall which continued Satur- day and Sunday. By our present calendar reckoning it was December 30, and the reign of winter was established.
The most penetrating recital of that march to the swamp and back you can read is that. of Norman M. Isham in his paper dedicating the bronze tablet which marks the grave. You will find it in the Report of the Committee on Marking Historical Sites in Rhode Island. Since we are interested especially in Cocumcussoc I will content myself with recommend-
19
-
ing that paper to your notice and will mention just that part of it referring to the grave itself:
"When the column reached Cocumcussoc its first duty must have been to care for its wounded. All that could be placed in the blockhouse were there collected, and the writer in the Indian Chronicle says that General Winslow in order that the house might be thus occupied lay in a barn be- longing to the estate. Other houses were used which must have been those on the Pequot Path to the north and at Quidnessett. But even this accom- modation was bad enough. John Bool, who speaks from experience, says in a petition to the governor and the court of Massachusetts:
'After I was wounded I was carried some 20 miles in a very cold night and laid in a cold chamber, a wooden pillow, my cov- ering was the snow the wind drove in on me.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.