Watch Hill — Rhode Island

A moneyed seaside village at Westerly's southern tip where Gilded Age mansions look down on a beach and a carousel that's been spinning since before any of them were built. Lia and I splurged on ice cream, rode the world's oldest carousel like a couple of ten-year-olds, and didn't regret a cent.

Watch Hill sits at the very southwestern corner of Rhode Island, a summer colony of shingled mansions perched above Block Island Sound that’s been drawing wealthy families since the 1800s and has, remarkably, resisted turning into a theme-park version of itself. Lia and I drove down from Westerly proper on a whim, half expecting a velvet-rope kind of place, and instead found a compact, walkable village center with a genuinely public beach and a Main Street of small shops that doesn’t feel gated off from anyone who shows up.

The Flying Horse Carousel

The centerpiece, and the reason most people actually detour here, is the Flying Horse Carousel, built around 1876 and recognized as the oldest continuously operating carousel in the United States. The horses hang on chains rather than fixed poles, which sends them swinging outward as the ride spins up — an old design that makes it feel more like flying than any modern carousel does. Lia insisted we ride it twice, and the operator, a teenager who’s probably worked there every summer of high school, told us the horses’ real horsehair manes and tails, along with the agate marble eyes, are original and irreplaceable, which explained the “children only” sign we’d both been mildly offended by until then.

The historic Flying Horse Carousel with its swinging chain-hung horses in Watch Hill, Rhode Island

The lighthouse and the point

We walked out past the mansions to Watch Hill Light, a granite lighthouse built in 1856 marking the entrance to Fishers Island Sound, with a small museum in the old keeper’s house that’s open a few afternoons a week. From the bluff beside it, the view stretches across to Fishers Island and, on a clear day, Montauk Point at the far tip of Long Island — Lia counted three different states’ worth of coastline from one spot, which felt like a fitting way to end an afternoon in a village this compact.

The granite Watch Hill Lighthouse overlooking the water at the tip of Rhode Island

Getting There

The nearest airport is Westerly State Airport, a small regional field, though most visitors fly into T.F. Green (PVD) near Providence, about an hour northeast, or Providence-area travelers can also reach it via I-95 south to Route 1. A car is essential for the drive in, though Watch Hill village itself is small enough to explore entirely on foot.