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King Tom Farm

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House, c. 1923. 4740 Old Post Rd.

Situated along one of the best-preserved stretches of the stone wall-lined and treeshaded Old Post Road, King Tom Farm has been an important Native American site, a summer estate, a potato farm, and a vacation facility, tracing many of the significant changes in Charlestown over the past two centuries. The site is interesting for its sheer variety of structures: a shingled Colonial Revival main house, several agrarian dependencies (including a large potato barn and a gristmill), and a number of small rental cottages spread out over a landscape that was originally part of the Narragansett tribal lands. The farm is named after an early sachem of the tribe, Oxford-educated Thomas Ninigret. His sister, Esther, was crowned queen of the Narragansett people here in 1770, on what is now called Coronation Rock, behind an earlier mid-eighteenth-century “English” homestead built by King Tom himself. This burned in 1922, and the present Colonial Revival house was built in its place.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Fort Ninigret
Cross Mills Center
First Baptist Church of Charlestown
Wilcox Farm
Royal Indian Burial Ground of the Narragansett

Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "King Tom Farm", [Charlestown, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-CH3.

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