Locals call it C-Town, and from May through October it fills with visitors headed for the breachway and the beaches. This map of Charlestown prints Charlestown Beach, Little Nini Beach and the Kimball Refuge, along with Quonochontaug on the shore, Carolina up on the northern line, Fort Ninigret, the Sheffield House, the Frosty Drew Memorial Nature Center, the Shannock Historic District and Kings Factory Road.
Charlestown is in Washington County, on Block Island Sound between Westerly and South Kingstown.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Little Nini Beach and the Kimball Refuge comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Kings Factory Road, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 59.3 square miles, with 36.8 of them land and the rest water. Fort Ninigret and the Sheffield House are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Charlestown had 7,997 people at the 2020 census.
Niantic and Narragansett land
People lived on Fort Neck long before Europeans arrived, and around 1620 many Niantic people, cousins and allies of the larger Narragansett tribe, settled there to grow corn, make wampum and trade with Dutch and English colonists. Their sachem by the 1630s was Ninigret, and the fort, the pond and the wildlife refuge carry his name. Fort Ninigret, on Fort Neck Road, was a fort and trading post, and its page says most historians believe the Dutch West India Company or Portuguese explorers built it before 1637; a European sword and a cannon were found near the site in the early 1920s. At its dedication as a monument in 1883, Commissioner George Carmichael Jr. called it “the oldest military post on the Atlantic coast.” That year the state reshaped its earthen banks, under the direction of the commissioners of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, planted evergreens and set an iron fence along the old lines. Fort Ninigret joined the National Register in 1970, and the state and the Charlestown Historical Society care for it today.
Charlestown is the headquarters of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and the home of its reservation. In 1983 the federal government recognized the Narragansett as a tribe again, and the Narragansett Indian Reservation holds 1,800 acres of trust land in town.
In 1660 a company organized in Newport bought the land called Misquamicut, which took in today’s Westerly, Charlestown, Richmond and Hopkinton. Charlestown separated from Westerly and was incorporated in 1738, named for King Charles II, and in 1747 Richmond was split off along the Pawcatuck River.
Quonochontaug
Quonochontaug, or Quonnie, is three small beach communities, West Beach, Central Beach and East Beach, between Ninigret Pond and Quonochontaug Pond. In the 1880s Thomas Edison put money into an iron mining venture here, pulling iron from the black sand on the beach with magnets, and it failed after cheaper iron was found. On Beach Road in Quonochontaug stands the Sheffield House, a gambrel-roofed farmhouse with a big stone chimney, probably built between 1685 and 1713 by Joseph Stanton, son of one of the area’s first settlers. The farm passed in 1753 to Nathaniel Sheffield, who had married Rebecca Stanton. The house is said to be the oldest home in Charlestown, its page notes, and it has stayed relatively unaltered; it joined the National Register in 1976. Fans of The X-Files may know Quonochontaug as the place where Fox Mulder’s family had a summer home.
Ninigret Pond is the largest of the nine salt ponds along southern Rhode Island, and people harvest oysters and quahogs in it; a breachway ties it to Block Island Sound. The Frosty Drew Nature Center and Observatory, named for Edwin “Frosty” Drew, has a 24-inch telescope installed in 2021. The town page places it in Ninigret Park, the old Naval Auxiliary Air Station Charlestown, which now has sports fields, tennis courts, a bike track, two troll sculptures by Thomas Dambo and the town’s big events, including the Charlestown Seafood Festival each August.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Places: Cross Mills, Carolina, Kenyon, Quonochontaug, Arnolda, Fort Ninigret, Columbia Heights, Shady Harbor, Charlestown Beach and East Beach.
Streets and roads: Burdickville Rd, Columbia Heights Rd, Shannock Rd, Brook Rd, Sanctuary Rd, Hill Rd, N Niantic Dr, Cove Rd, Pequot Dr, Ram Island Rd, Fort Ninigret Rd, Beach Rd.
More street names, A to Z
Burlingame State Park, Charlestown Beach Rd.
Carolina and Shannock
Up on the Pawcatuck, the village of Carolina straddles the line with Richmond. A wooden dam and a gristmill went up there in 1802, when the place was called Nichols Bridge, and a cotton mill followed, with most of its buildings in Richmond and some of its workers’ houses across the river in Charlestown. Rowland G. Hazard bought the mill in 1843 and named it the Carolina Mills Company for his wife, Caroline Newbold Hazard, and the village took the name too. In 1877 John W. Hoxie started one of the first trout farms in America on White Brook, north of the village.
Shannock is another mill village on the Pawcatuck, mostly in Richmond, with a stretch on the Charlestown side. The Carmichael plant and the Columbia Narrow Fabrics Company complex anchor it, and its worker houses sit close to the road, most of them built in the second half of the 19th century; the Shannock Historic District joined the National Register in 1983.
Around Charlestown
Burlingame State Park lies entirely inside Charlestown, 3,100 acres of rocky woods around Watchaug Pond, with 755 campsites. Along the shore, town beaches such as Blue Shutters, which sits at the end of East Beach Road in Quonochontaug, share the coast with state beaches like East Beach and the Charlestown Breachway. Charlestown Beach, Little Nini Beach and the Kimball Refuge are all named on the map.
This map of Charlestown belongs in an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a coastal town that’s home to the Narragansett Indian Tribe. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Charlestown home, from Quonochontaug to Carolina, 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 Charlestown map.
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