By Rosemary Enright and Sue Maden.

Jamestown in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was, according to a contemporary journalist, “the liveliest, the noisiest, and the most hilarious summer city on the Rhode Island coast.” These essays capture both the excitement and the concerns of people living through the period of immense and rapid change that occurred between the introduction of the steam ferry to Newport in 1873 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.