Map of Johnston, Rhode Island in 2026

In one corner of Johnston a schoolhouse and a farm both go back to the 1790s. This map of Johnston prints them, the Belknap School and Mathewson Farm. The map prints the Pocasset Worsted Company Mill, the Brown Avenue Historic District, Snake Den State Park, Johnston Memorial Park, the Johnston Historical Society and the Lymansville Company Mill too, from Graniteville to Hughesdale, with Brown Avenue and Central Avenue among the roads.

Johnston is in Providence County, on the western side of Providence.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Johnston Memorial Park and Snake Den State Park comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Central Avenue, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 24.4 square miles, 23.7 of them land. The Belknap School and Mathewson Farm are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Johnston had 29,568 people at the 2020 census.

A farm town set off from Providence

English settlers farmed this country in the 17th century, and on March 6, 1759, it separated from Providence and became a town. It took the name of Augustus Johnston, the colony’s attorney general at the time, a Newport lawyer who helped revise Rhode Island’s laws and worked to start a smallpox inoculation hospital. His story turned later: he served as a stamp distributor under the Stamp Act in 1765, was burned in effigy, and as a Tory left Rhode Island during the Revolution. The town kept his name.

The town’s first house of worship was the Baptist Meeting House in Belknap, built in 1771. During the Revolution, Rhode Island’s only gunpowder mill was built in Graniteville, and in 1779 the town gave a dinner for General John Sullivan as he left Rhode Island to fight in New York. In 1791 the Providence and Norwich Turnpike, today’s Plainfield Pike, was chartered through the town.

Belknap

The Belknap School, also called the District No. 8 School House, stands at 509 Greenville Avenue. The first school on the site went up in 1790 and was the town’s first school. The building there now dates from 1892 and held classes until 1938, then served as an American Legion hall from the late 1940s until 1998. The Johnston Historical Society bought it in 2002, and it joined the National Register in 2010.

A little way along at 544 Greenville Avenue is Mathewson Farm, what’s left of Belknap’s farming days. William Mathewson started the farm in the 1790s, and his descendants worked it until the 1940s. Its farmhouse from the late 18th century still stands with a barn from the early 20th century, a henhouse and a silo, and the farm joined the National Register in 2001.

Brown Avenue and Snake Den

The Brown Avenue Historic District takes in about a mile of farm country along the middle of Brown Avenue, which runs between Hartford Avenue, US Route 6, and Greenville Avenue. It has five farmsteads whose houses date to the late 18th century, with the Dame Farmstead at the center, and it joined the National Register in 1973. Part of the district lies inside Snake Den State Park, about 1,000 acres on Route 6 that take their name from a fissure on the grounds like a small canyon. The park keeps a working farm, Dame Farm, and the Steere family cemetery. The Steere and Dame families owned the land before the state bought it in 1969 from the Palazzi family, who had kept the farm in a condition dating back to the 18th century. The state’s parks division has its headquarters in the old Palazzi farmhouse, and walking trails cross the fields year-round.

Graniteville and the mill villages

Graniteville had a large granite quarry in the 1800s, and in 1822 the columns for the Providence Arcade were cut there; the village’s page calls the Arcade the first indoor shopping mall in America. The village sat on the Providence and Springfield Railroad, and since 1943 a World War II memorial has stood there, with a memorial service for the area’s veterans each year at the Graniteville Baptist Church.

Hughesdale, in the town’s southeast corner near Central Avenue and Atwood Avenue, is named for Thomas Henry Hughes, an Englishman who came to Johnston in 1849 and in 1850 started what came to be called the Hughesdale Dye and Chemical Works, on Dry Brook. A mill village grew around it, with a post office in Hughes’s store from 1876 and the Hughesdale Congregational Church the year after. His house, built in 1845, is on the National Register.

The Pocasset Worsted Company Mill, at 75 Pocasset Street, is four connected brick buildings from 1897 to 1902, set on the Pocasset River. The company was Johnston’s largest employer in the early 20th century, and the buildings made textiles until 1989; the complex joined the National Register in 2006. The Lymansville Company Mill is printed on the map too. It stands just over the line at 184 Woonasquatucket Avenue in North Providence. Its oldest part, a brick spinning and carding building, went up in 1884, the year the company was founded, and it joined the National Register in 2012.

Around Johnston

The Clemence-Irons House, built by the farmer Richard Clemence in 1691, is a rare surviving stone-ender, a house type that started in the west of England and was common in colonial Rhode Island. Historic New England owns it and opens it as a museum on Saturdays in summer and early fall. Many Johnston families have Italian roots: in 2000, 46.7 percent of residents said they were of Italian heritage, which the town page calls the highest share of any municipality in the country, and the town has a sister city in Panni, in Apulia. People from Johnston include Joe Mazzulla, head coach of the Boston Celtics, the hockey executive Lou Lamoriello and the magician Mat Franco.

This map of Johnston is a good choice for an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a town of farms, quarries and mill villages. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Johnston home, from Belknap to Hughesdale, 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 Johnston map.

Sources

• Johnston, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Augustus Johnston, Wikipedia
• Belknap School, Wikipedia
• Mathewson Farm, Wikipedia
• Brown Avenue Historic District, Wikipedia
• Snake Den State Park, Wikipedia
• Graniteville, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Hughesdale, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Pocasset Worsted Company Mill, Wikipedia
• Lymansville Company Mill, Wikipedia
• Clemence-Irons House, Wikipedia