things to do in little compton rhode island

No grueling hills, no nerve-racking traffic, and definitely no boring miles. Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the US, but its quiet back roads, coastal scenery, and relatively flat terrain make it one of the best states for exploring by bike. I loved our ride and recommend booking a tour with Little Compton Adventures to anyone looking for a unique way to experience Rhode Island! Why book a Rhode Island bike tour Dan is the founder of Little Compton Adventures, a tour company that offers biking tours in southeast Rhode Island and beyond.ĭan has lived in Rhode Island for over 35 years and not only knows the best cycling routes on quiet, scenic roads but also the best little hidden gems and interesting facts from Rhode Island’s 400+ year history. Jenkins has mastered the place as thoroughly as any Wilbor.This summer, I had the pleasure of joining Dan on one of his Rhode Island bike tours along the backroads of rural, coastal (and beautiful!) RI. For $7.50 each the docent-manager, Marie Jenkins, brought us in, locked the door and led us through the main house for more than an hour. My wife Yvonne and I were the only customers for two hours. So far off the Beaton path, it draws few visitors, a boon for us on a Saturday afternoon. The museum is accessible all year, from 1 to 5 three or four days a week-more often in summer. O'Toole traces the lives of 350 slaves and indentured servants residing in Little Compton. We were astonished to see Victorian era quilt to which each quilter contributed a square, and signed it.Ĭurrently, the Wilbor House's main exhibition illustrates research that the museum's director has collected in an ambitious and surprising new (June, 2016) book, 'If Jane Should Want to Be Sold.' In its self-image, Rhode Island long saw itself as a bastion of abolition, but Marjory O'Toole's three-year examination of slavery and indentured servitude in Little Compton is a stunning eye-opener. In the barn and the main building, the Little Compton Historical Society, headquartered there, has amassed a vast collection of, it seems, every conceivable tool and device that folks used brim cleaning their teeth to milking their cows, and they are displayed in setting characteristic of their time. Little Compton's most acclaimed artists, Sidney Burleigh, brought It ashore in 1906 and made it his studio.

Among other structures is an old cat boat, Peggotty, once a small gaff-rigged sail boat that ferried produce and eight or ten passengers across the Providence River to Aquidneck Island, site of Portsmouth, Middletown and Newport. An old sign in the shed, which might have been posted where you might see a Rotary sign today, proclaims Little Compton the Poultry Capital of the World. So celebrated is this hen that it is officially memorialized with a monument in a village nearby, the town's only creature, human or bird, so honored.

They conceived the Rhode Island Red Hen, which lays only. Indeed, Little Compton and Wilbor family farmers may well have been the American colonies' first masters of genetic engineering. This is cedar-shingled, pine farm house primarily, with eight outbuildings including a vast barn, a replica of a one-room community school house and a shed for feeding and nurturing chickens. But we found a reason in the little heralded Wilbor House Museum, the core of which one Samuel Wilbor built in 1690 and that generations of Wilbors (and Wilburs, and Wilbers and other descendants of their English forbear Wild Bore, or Boar) expanded so that each section is characteristic of design and lifestyles of each of its centuries, evolving, for example, from chamber pots to an outhouse, to primitive indoor plumbing-a well under the house from which the cook could pump water directly into the kitchen sink. Little Compton is so remote, 20-some miles east of Fall River, MA, out on a peninsula on the Atlantic, without hotels and scenery mainly of 100 miles of early settler-built stone walls, that you need a real reason to go, a funeral perhaps.

Things to do in little compton rhode island