Chepachet

Chepachet sits in Glocester, in the wooded northwestern corner of Rhode Island that most visitors never bother to reach, closer in feel to rural Connecticut than to the coastal image most people carry of this state. Lia and I drove out on a fall Saturday specifically for the antiquing, and the village center — a handful of old buildings along a bend in Route 44 — delivered more than we expected from somewhere this small.

Brown & Hopkins Country Store

Brown & Hopkins claims to be the oldest continuously operating country store in the United States, trading from the same building since 1809, its wood floors worn into a soft groove down the center aisle from two centuries of foot traffic. Inside, dozens of independent dealers rent booth space selling everything from Civil War-era postcards to mid-century kitchenware, and Lia spent almost an hour working through a case of antique buttons while I got distracted by a shelf of old topographic maps of exactly the region we were standing in.

Durfee Hill and the Glocester woods

Just outside the village, the Durfee Hill Wildlife Management Area covers a stretch of hardwood forest and wetland that gets genuinely quiet once you’re a quarter mile off the road, a rarity in a state this densely populated. We hiked a loop trail there in early afternoon, the leaves just starting to turn, and didn’t pass another person the entire way — a strange, welcome contrast to how crowded Rhode Island’s coastline gets in the same season.

Getting There

T.F. Green International Airport (PVD) is about forty minutes southeast. From Providence, it’s a thirty-five-minute drive northwest on Route 44. A car is essential — this is Rhode Island’s most rural pocket, with no public transit reaching the village.