Wickford

We nearly drove past Wickford entirely, tucked as it is just off Route 1 in North Kingstown, and it would have been a real mistake. This is a village of maybe a few hundred people built around a tight, sheltered harbor, its Main and Brown Streets lined almost unbroken with eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century houses — more pre-1800 buildings per capita, locals like to claim, than almost anywhere else in New England. Lia parked the car and refused to get back in it for hours, wandering in and out of gift shops and a used bookstore that smelled exactly like every good bookstore should.

The harbor and the boatyard

Wickford’s working harbor is what keeps it from feeling like a museum piece. Wooden lobster boats share the water with sailboats getting their bottoms scraped at a boatyard that’s operated continuously since the town was still a shipbuilding center in the 1700s, and we sat on a bench by the town dock eating clam cakes from a shack that fries them to order, watching gulls fight over the scraps a family two benches down had tossed them. A little swing bridge crosses the narrows into the inner harbor, and Lia liked that it still operates by hand, a harbor worker cranking it open for taller-masted boats.

Old Narragansett Church

A few blocks up from the water, St. Paul’s — known locally as the Old Narragansett Church — dates to 1707 and claims one of the oldest church organs still in use in the country, shipped over from England well before the Revolution. The caretaker let us peek inside on our way past, pointing out box pews that once seated specific families by name, a detail that made the whole colonial-village fantasy feel suddenly, concretely real rather than just picturesque.

Getting There

T.F. Green International Airport (PVD) in Warwick is about twenty minutes north. From Providence, it’s a straightforward twenty-five minute drive south on Route 4 and Route 1. A car makes the visit easiest, though Wickford itself is entirely walkable once you’ve parked near the harbor.