The names printed on this map of Exeter read like a tour of its old farms and mills. The map shows Austin Farm Road and the Austin Farm Road Agricultural Area, Lawton’s Mill, the Simon Lillibridge Farm, the Tomaquag Indian Museum, Dawley Memorial Park and the Fisherville Brook Preserve, with Exeter and Austin by name.
Exeter is in Washington County, and it reaches from the Connecticut line east to North Kingstown.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Dawley Memorial Park and the Fisherville Brook Preserve comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Austin Farm Road, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 58.4 square miles, all but 0.7 of them land. Lawton’s Mill and the Austin Farm Road Agricultural Area are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Exeter had 6,460 people at the 2020 census.
Exeter’s beginnings
Native Americans lived here before King Philip’s War, and in the 1660s Wawaloam, a woman leader of Narragansett and Nipmuc descent, made her home in what’s now Exeter. The town was formed in 1742 from the western part of North Kingstown and named for Exeter, the county town and cathedral city of Devon in England.
The Tomaquag Indian Museum tells that longer story. Anthropologist Eva Butler and Princess Red Wing, a Narragansett and Wampanoag woman, founded it in 1958, and it’s led by Indigenous people. It tells the history and culture of the Narragansett, Niantic, Wampanoag and Nipmuck through ash splint baskets, locally made dolls, archives going back to the 1880s, and the stories of figures such as Princess Red Wing and Ellison “Tarzan” Brown Sr. Its grounds hold a wetu, the traditional domed house, and a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans and squash. It stands where the Dove family’s Dovecrest Restaurant and Trading Post once was, and the Doves gave their property to make a permanent home for the museum. In 2016 it won the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Its page says that as of November 2024 the museum was moving to the University of Rhode Island campus in Kingston.
Mills and farms
Lawton’s Mill, also called the Albro Mill, stands on Ten Rod Road. Its wood-frame mill building went up around 1820, and its page calls it one of a very small number of mill buildings from that period left in Rhode Island. The property also keeps an 18th-century house, a 19th-century barn, and the dams and waterways that ran the mill, including a dam and raceway several hundred feet north of the building. It joined the National Register on June 27, 1980.
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: Austin, Fisherville, Liberty, Horn Heap, Millville, Pine Hill, Tripps Corner, Black Plain and Gardners Corner.
Streets and roads: Black Plain Rd, Hill Rd, Stony Ln, Ten Rod Rd, Ada Rd, Teft Hill Rd, Nooseneck Hill Rd, Sheffield Hill Rd, Mail Rd, Hall Rd, Hallville Rd, Glen Rock Rd.
More street names, A to Z
Kingston Rd, Liberty Church Rd, Liberty Rd, Lily Pond Rd, Main St.
The Austin Farm Road Agricultural Area runs north from Austin Farm Road to the town line, between Interstate 95 and Austin Farm Pond, and it has changed little since the late 1800s, even with the highway beside it. John Austin built up a farm complex here in the 19th century that’s still in use, and he built or kept up a schoolhouse from 1860 and a chapel from 1892; an older farmhouse on the land predates him. The district joined the National Register in 1977.
The Simon Lillibridge Farm, at 75 Summit Road, is the last 38 acres of a 200-acre farm Simon Lillibridge bought in the 1810s. The house may have been built by Lillibridge or may already have stood when he bought the land; its hand-hewn beams and Georgian details suggest parts of it date to the 18th century. A barn, a shed, a wagon shed, an outhouse and a family cemetery stand with it, and the land was farmed until about 1935 before becoming a summer place. It joined the National Register in 1978.
Around Exeter
Exeter shares the Arcadia Management Area with Richmond, Hopkinton and West Greenwich; at 14,000 acres, its page calls it the state’s largest recreational area, with old logging roads and trails for hiking, riding and fishing. On a hill in town, Yawgoo Valley opened in the 1965-66 season as “Rhode Island’s first chairlift served ski area,” and its page says it’s the only ski resort still running in the state, with 14 trails and a summer water park. Dawley Memorial Park and the Fisherville Brook Preserve are named on the map too.
This map of Exeter makes a fine piece for an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a quiet Washington County town of farms, mills and woods. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Exeter home, from Austin Farm Road to Ten Rod Road, 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 Exeter map.
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