Our Fall 2021 Newsletter is now available for download. Don’t miss the committee reports of all the things that we’ve been working on while at home. And take a look at the donations that made over the past year, we value everyone’s efforts to keep Jamestown history preserved.
In May of 1776, the Americans hastily built an earthwork battery in a large field on the west side of the Beavertail peninsula on Conanicut Island. British diarist Frederick Mackenzie later described the fortification as a “Battery or Redoubt with 4 embrasures” facing the West Passage of Narragansett Bay.
The JHS volunteers gather on the patio at the Baldwins to celebrate another great year with wine and appetizers.
Golf became popular in the United States in the late 1880s and Jamestown’s summer residents were among the earliest enthusiasts.
Over the years, Jamestown has had three golf courses: the Conanicut Golf Club (1895-1904), Jamestown Golf and Country Club (1902-present), and the Beaver Tail Country Club (1926-1944).
The September exhibit in the JHS library display case features Jamestown’s many resort hotels and the room keys they used. The earliest full-service hotel was the Bay View, opened by William Knowles, one of the last sail ferry captains, in 1882.
The early 1840s in Newport saw the rise of the “estate era” in gardening. Large tracts of land were purchased by people of means wanting to display their wealth by surrounding their estates with European style landscaping.
Cedar Cemetery tour was offered by the Jamestown Historical Society on Saturday, October 2, 2021 and introduced some of the men and women buried there.
Ellen Tucker, the eldest child of Pardon and Sarah Waite Tucker, was born three days after Christmas in 1847 at the Hutchinson farm on North Road.
Behind the circulation desk of the Jamestown Philomenian Library are two square rigged ship half models. The half hull models are on loan to the Library from the JHS collection.
Sign up if you do not want to become a member at this time, but would like to receive the JHS public announcements, articles, and news updates. Members do not need to sign up here as they will automatically receive all this and invitations to members-only events as well when they join. The JHS will never share the email addresses in our database.
The Jamestown
Historical Society
PO Box 156
Jamestown, RI
02835