Map of Burrillville, Rhode Island in 2026

The penny arcade beside Spring Lake Beach in Burrillville opened in 1930, and it still opens every summer. Spring Lake Beach is printed on this map with White Mill Park, the Buck Hill Management Area, the Moses Taft House and Victory Highway, and the old mill villages show up as the Harrisville Historic District and the Oakland Historic District, with Pascoag and Harrisville by name.

Burrillville is in Providence County, in the northwest corner of Rhode Island, where the state meets Connecticut and Massachusetts.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Spring Lake Beach and the Buck Hill Management Area comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Victory Highway, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 57.2 square miles, 55.6 of them land. The Bridgeton School and the Moses Taft House are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Burrillville had 16,158 people at the 2020 census.

North Glocester

English colonists settled this corner around 1662 as part of Glocester, and John Smith and the Saulsbury family were among the first. On November 17, 1806, the Rhode Island General Assembly let the people of North Glocester elect their own officers, and Burrillville became a town of its own, with Joktan Putnam as its first town moderator. It was named for James Burrill Jr., the state’s attorney general, who later served as chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and as a United States senator. The new town covered about 60 square miles, and boundary disputes with Massachusetts and Glocester trimmed it by the middle of the 19th century.

The mills and their villages took shape in the 19th century, among them the Harris mills and the village of Harrisville and the mills at Mapleville and Oakland. The town’s villages include Glendale, Harrisville, Mapleville, Nasonville, Oakland and Pascoag, and Burrillville is now part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor.

Pascoag

Pascoag is the principal village, named for the Pascoag River, and its name probably comes from an Algonquian root; Roger Williams wrote down the Nipmuc word for snake as “askug.” The village sits on the river where it leaves the Pascoag Reservoir, and the river drops 60 feet through the village, which gave early industry plenty of power. A sawmill was running in the village center in the first half of the 18th century, and in the 19th century Pascoag became a textile town, which it stayed until after World War II. From 1891 into the 1930s the Woonsocket and Pascoag Railroad ran trains here. The Pascoag Grammar School on Sayles Avenue, built in 1917, was first the town’s high school, then an elementary school until 1995, and now holds condominiums. H. P. Lovecraft set part of his 1925 story “The Horror at Red Hook” in Pascoag.

Harrisville and Oakland

Harrisville was once called Rhodesville, after the 18th-century privateer Captain William Rhodes, and it takes its present name from Andrew Harris, a 19th-century manufacturer. Much of the village makes up the Harrisville Historic District on the National Register. Oakland grew up in the 19th century around a stone mill near where the Chepachet and Clear rivers meet; the mill now stands only as ruins. Most of Oakland’s houses were built for mill workers, with several grander ones built for mill executives, and most of the village is in the Oakland Historic District. Every day at 5 p.m., a whistle sounds from the Oakland-Mapleville Fire Department.

Old houses and a schoolhouse

The Moses Taft House, at 111 East Wallum Lake Road, is a Cape built in 1786, a well-kept example of early Federal building with a five-bay front and a big central chimney. Moses Taft, an early owner, farmed and ran a gristmill nearby on the Clear River. The house was restored in the 2000s and joined the National Register in 2009. The Bridgeton School, at 16 Laurel Hill Avenue, is a wood-frame schoolhouse that George W. Spaulding designed and that went up in 1897. It taught Burrillville children until 1966, came back as a kindergarten in 1970, and after it closed in 1995 it passed to the Burrillville Historical and Preservation Society. Its page calls it the best preserved of the town’s late 19th-century school buildings.

Around Burrillville

Edmund Reed opened the Spring Lake Arcade by the beach in 1930, and its page says it’s believed to be the oldest penny arcade business in America. The building was rebuilt after 1998, and about half of its games are antiques, some going back to the 1920s, including rifle ranges, pinball and skee-ball. It opens in summer. White Mill Park and the Buck Hill Management Area have their places on the sheet as well.

Henry Francis Walling, born here in 1825, became a civil engineer and cartographer, drew at least 50 town maps around Massachusetts, served as that state’s Superintendent of the State Map, and joined the newly formed United States Geological Survey in 1883. Ted Carter, raised in Burrillville, became a naval flight officer whose 2,016 carrier-arrested landings are, his page says, the record among all active and retired U.S. naval aviation designators, and he went on to lead the Naval War College and the Naval Academy. Oscar Lapham, born here, served Rhode Island in Congress from 1891 to 1895.

This map of Burrillville would look right in an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a northern Rhode Island town built village by village around its mills. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Burrillville home, from Pascoag to Harrisville, and it shows the town as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Burrillville map.

Sources

• Burrillville, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• James Burrill Jr., Wikipedia
• Pascoag, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Pascoag Grammar School, Wikipedia
• Harrisville, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Oakland, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Moses Taft House (Burrillville, Rhode Island), Wikipedia
• Bridgeton School, Wikipedia
• Spring Lake Arcade, Wikipedia
• Henry Francis Walling, Wikipedia
• Ted Carter, Wikipedia
• Oscar Lapham, Wikipedia