Little Compton

Little Compton sits out on its own peninsula between the Sakonnet River and the open Atlantic, closer in spirit to a working farm town than to the yacht-club version of coastal Rhode Island most visitors expect. There’s no real downtown, just a green with a white 1832 meetinghouse, a burial ground with headstones dating to the 1670s, and the Commons General Store, which locals treat less as a shop than as the town’s living room. Lia and I bought sandwiches there and ended up chatting for twenty minutes with the owner about which farm stands were worth the detour that week — information that, she made clear, wasn’t printed anywhere.

Sakonnet Point and the working harbor

We drove out to Sakonnet Point, a small, unglamorous harbor where lobster boats and a handful of charter fishermen work out of weathered shacks, with none of the polish of Newport thirty minutes north. A rocky breakwater curls out into the Atlantic, and we walked it as waves broke over the far end, salt spray drifting back at us, while a couple of locals cast for striped bass off the rocks without paying us any mind at all. It felt like the kind of spot that exists specifically because it hasn’t been discovered.

Sweet corn and stone walls

Little Compton’s real currency is agriculture — this stretch of the state has some of the richest farmland in New England, and the stone walls dividing pastures here were mostly stacked by hand in the 1700s, still standing without mortar centuries later. We stopped at a roadside stand for corn that had clearly been picked that morning, and Lia, who is generally unimpressed by corn, admitted it was the best she’d had outside of a Mexican street cart, which from her is close to a five-star review.

Getting There

T.F. Green International Airport (PVD) is about fifty minutes northwest. From Providence, it’s roughly an hour’s drive south via Route 24 and Route 77. A car is essential — there is no public transit here, and half the point is the unmarked back roads.