House tour featured Conanicut Park
Written by Veronica Bruno for The Jamestown Press, September 25, 2025
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Visitors had the opportunity to take a stroll back in time as they walked through three Victorian cottages built in 1874 during the Jamestown Historical Society’s annual tour of hallowed homes.
The 2025 edition illustrated the thriving summer colony known as Conanicut Park. The homeowners at 900, 887 and 883 East Shore Road, three of the first cottages built for the development, opened their doors Saturday to provide the blast from the past.
The 600-acre colony, with Conanicut Park Hotel as the bustling centerpiece, was redeveloped after the hotel was razed in 1909. Farmland and spacious lots became the foundation for Victorian cottages with gingerbread trim and deep porches.
The tour offered visitors a way to honor that architectural legacy and Victorian craftsmanship.
Carolyn Goodrich, owner of the Worth Cottage at 900 East Shore Road, toured her neighbor’s house at 887 East Shore with her daughter, Erica Wright. They talked about the preparation that went into getting their home ready weeks ahead of the tour. Wright, who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, grew up in the Worth Cottage, which Goodrich said got some TLC due to the tour’s influx of guests to the house built by Charles Worth.
“This is the first time I’ve ever done this sort of thing,” she said. “It was a great motivator to get some things done that I had put off doing.”
The Worth Cottage, 1.5 stories tall, has a flat-roofed piazza that wraps the northern side with particularly narrow staircases inside. Despite the historic, architectural continuity the stairs provide, Goodrich said there is still moaning about them.
“My family complains about my stairs because they’re very narrow and very steep,” she said.
“It has a nice history,” Goodrich said.
She also joked about its size, adding, “so I call it the shack in the neighborhood, surrounded by all these big monsters.”
Also touring 887 East Shore was the next-door neighbor, Ted Walls, owner of the Brazier Cottage at 883 East Shore, which is described as a “2.5-story tall and narrow tri-gabled house with wide bracketed eaves or extended roof rafters, and tall narrow windows.”
Walls said his children, 9 and 11, helped get the Brazier property ready for visitors. The sibling, a boy, was even “excited about it” the night before like a kid on Christmas Eve.
Walls pointed out the subtle difference in the molding and window styles with his home, which has maintained much of its original design. The original wraparound porch has been rebuilt after it was removed in the middle of the 20th century.
Walls said the visitors who stopped by his home had diverse interests for seeing the historical properties.
“Some families just have to kind of have this type of cultural input into their lives, coming because they truly have an interest in history,” he said. “Some people were just coming from neighborhood interests.”
Jennifer Cloud welcomed guests to the Chapel House at 887 East Shore Road, which included a charming sign inside to commemorate the cottage’s name. Despite the name, the property was never used as a church. The name stems from the lancet windows that permeate throughout the house.
“Everyone always thinks it’s a chapel,” Cloud said.
The Chapel House was a summer home built by Charles Worth and later christened by the Mitchell sisters, who found the windows charmingly ecclesiastical.
Cloud, who grew up in Jamestown, treasures the continuity of the historical property. Its unique Gothic form reflects the fact that Worth’s base of operations was at Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard. Cloud’s home is “much like an Oak Bluffs cottage there,” according to the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission.
“If I ever sell my house, I’ll probably never go by again, because I’m afraid somebody will take it down,” she said.
Cloud said her own finishing touches included changing the kitchen into a library nook.
“There were no bookcases,” she said. “I asked my mom, and she made that her project.”
Cloud also added a kitchen where the garage had been. Most of the original doors, colors and windows, however, have remained intact.
“The colors always worked,” she said. “I’m not going to change it.”
Cloud said her favorite element of the house includes the places where light spills through the tall Gothic windows, “the sunnier parts,” she described. In fact, it was the tall windows that drew her to the property in the first place. Cloud said she also likes how the historical property sits in a proportional footprint in contrast to some of the mansions that are being erected in Jamestown.
“It just seemed like a cottage,” she said. “Like a cottage that would fit me as a single person.”
