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Friday, July 8, 2022

Lost Mill Towns of Exeter, Rhode Island (Part I)

[This post originally appeared in the March 2021 edition of The Hinterlander, the monthly newsletter of the Western Rhode Island Civic Historical Society]

This is the first in a series of articles for The Hinterlander I am writing in connection with the “Lost Mill Towns” project. This study seeks to identify and describe the so-called “mill towns” that once dotted the western Rhode Island landscape – hamlets and central places with one or more mill seats that typically produced flour, lumber or snuff in the 1700s and various textiles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these communities have either vanished or only exist today as a cluster of mill houses. The mills themselves have either been reduced to ruins or repurposed into residences or commercial space, with very few still operating as manufactories.

This month the focus is on Exeter -- specifically the area of Exeter east of the New London Turnpike, which roughly bisected the town when it was constructed in 1815.

Exeter and surrounding towns, from James Stevens, “A topographical map
of the state of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations,” 1831

Exeter saw little significant settlement before the early 1700s, as the area that would become Exeter was both still part the town of Kingstown and also in a parcel known as the “Vacant Lands.” According to Cole’s History of Washington and Kent Counties, “it was not until a long time after the great swamp fight that the town could boast of a settler.” This was because the land that would become Exeter traditionally had been recognized as belonging to the Narragansetts, and was also claimed by the colonial charters of both Connecticut (1662) and Rhode Island (1663). After Connecticut nominally recognized Rhode Island’s claim in 1703, Rhode Island surveyed the Vacant Lands between 1707 and 1709. It was only in 1709 that the Narragansett’s claims were extinguished by agreement with the tribe and the General Assembly, and that white settlers could obtain legal titles to purchase land there. 


In 1723 Kingstown was divided into North and South Kingstown, and in 1742 the western section of North Kingstown petitioned the General Assembly to become the town of Exeter.


Exeter never spawned a “central business district” like Wickford, Wakefield, or Westerly, or even anything like a Carolina or an Alton. However, like the rest of rural Rhode Island, wherever there was water power, mills were established by the early nineteenth century and small communities arose in their vicinity. According to the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission’s 1976 study, Exeter’s “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development as a remote community [was] economically dependent on family farms and small manufacturing enterprises that dotted the town’s numerous streams...” In eastern Exeter, the main sources of water power were the Queen and the Chipuxet Rivers and the Woody Hill, Sodom, and Fisherville Brooks.


Besides the RIHPHC study and National Register of Historic Places Nomination Forms, another excellent source of information for “lost mill towns” are nineteenth century maps, which identify mill seats, farms, houses and other buildings that have long since departed the landscape. James Stevens 1831 map of Rhode Island lists numerous mills and factories in the eastern section of Exeter, some of which are described below, based on the aforementioned studies by the RIHPHC and NRHP, but for others there is no other information than their names appearing on the 1831 map. 


In the Mail Road District, along Mill Road was the site of a 19th-century gristmill, known as Wilcox’s Gristmill by 1855. Along Slocum Road, Dorset Mills were first built on Yorker Mill Pond in 1846. By 1870 they were operated by one E. F. H. Babcock. [This mill complex is still extent; more on this in later post]


Four small mills were built along a one-mile stretch of the Sodom and Fisherville Brooks. At Fisherville, a gristmill was in operation before 1795, and between 1826 and 1836, a textile mill was erected on the site that “manufactured jeans and check flannel as well as warp, yarn, and twine.” Schuyler Fisher owned the Fishervllle Factory, the Sodom Factory (located a mile to the west on Sodom Brook), and the Lawton mill (see below), about one mile to the north of the Sodom Factory on the Fisherville Brook. In 1857, Fisher sold his mill interests to the Hall family. The complex at Fisherville consisted of “the factory, several houses, a store, and a boarding house. The mill was destroyed by fire in 1873, and was never rebuilt. By 1895 only two dwellings remained.”


At Hallville, the first of two textile mills “was erected between 1814 and 1825 by Beriah Brown and produced wool yarn.” In 1825 the site consisted of the mill, the mill waterways, “a dwelling house and several other buildings.” By 1827, tax records listed the property as a cotton factory. Ownership passed into the hands of the Hall family in 1835. It was during their tenure that the mill complex was expanded and the area became known as Hallville, consisting of the mill, a store, a post office and four dwellings. The mill burned down in 1872 and was never rebuilt.


The Dawley Mill was originally built “as a gristmill between 1846 and 1854 by John C. Dawley,” who resided nearby. His house survives as the only standing structure in Hallville. In 1854, John Dawley sold his operation to the Halls, who converted the factory to the manufacture of jeans. It too was destroyed by fire in the early 1870s.


Probably the most iconic mill building still standing in Exeter is Lawton’s Mill, located on Route 102. A “dwelling, a sawmill, and a grist mill had been erected on the property by 1768.” Another dwelling and a blacksmith shop had been added when Samuel Bissell of North Kingstown purchased the property in 1799. Bissell built a snuff mill there, which was converted into a cotton mill by G. Palmer, Jr. and Allen Bissell in 1825. The property also contained a fulling mill when Thomas Albro purchased it from Caleb Bissell in 1831. Albro's grandson Thomas A. Lawton acquired the mill property a year later and held it until his death in 1870. Though Lawton referred to this as his “Albrow Mill estate,” maps call the site “Lawton's Mill” or “Lawtonville.” Various specialized cotton-manufacturing operations such as “fulling, finishing, warp-yarn spinning,” were carried on there until at least 1849. By 1870 the mill had been converted to a sash and blind factory and a shingle and planing mill, which operated until it was sold to Russell Grinnell in 1912. Grinnell turned the entire property into a “gentleman’s farm” and manufacturing at the mill ceased for good at that time.


At Exeter Hollow, “William Green built a sawmill, a nail factory and a triphammer,” utilizing the water power provided by the Queen’s River. In 1846, a cotton mill was constructed by C. Green near Edwards Pond. By 1850, Exeter Hollow had a school, a store and post office and eight to ten houses; a tannery stood just north of the village. The mill burned in 1874 and was not replaced; “the only above-ground remains today are a series of exposed foundations.”


It would appear that most of Exeter’s small mill-owners in the eastern section of the town, which by the 1870s consisted primarily of the Hall family of Hallville and the Greens of Exeter Hollow, did not have the financial resources to recover from the fires that struck their operations in the 1870s, and textile manufacturing never returned to this section of Exeter.


The RIHPHC study of Exeter notes that the timing of this demise is reflected in the types of domestic architecture found in the town, “That certain sorts of properties are not found in the inventory is, of course, also a reflection of this rural community’s heritage -- the lack of major Victorian structures, for example, is an indication of the lack of economic activity in Exeter during the late nineteenth century.” By the time Victorian structures were in vogue, Exeter’s manufacturing and building boom was over.


[Note: the images below did not appear in the original version of this article]


Compare the map from 1830 above with the map from 1895 below (the available scan for 1870 unfortunately is too difficult to read at higher magnification). 

By 1895, nearly all of the mills operating in 1830 in eastern Exeter were gone nearly twenty-five years

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Bibliography

Atlas of Southern Rhode Island 1895. Everts & Richards, Philadelphia, 1895.

Exeter, Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission (1976)

J. R. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties (1889)

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Forms for Fisherville (1980), Hallville (1980), Lawton Mill (1980), Sodom Mill (1980)

James Stevens, “A topographical map of the state of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations,” 1831 https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:ht250326t

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