Lincoln people know the big glacial boulders around Olney Pond, and they know Great Road, the old highway along the Moshassuck River. This map of Lincoln prints Great Road and Angell Road, Lincoln Woods State Park and Chase Farm Park, and the historic districts that tell the town’s story: the Lonsdale Historic District, the Saylesville Historic District, the Great Road Historic District, the Albion Historic District and the Old Ashton Historic District. The Lime Kilns, the Jenckes House and the Captain Wilbur Kelly House Transportation Museum are on it too, from Albion down to Manville.
Lincoln is in Providence County, on the west bank of the Blackstone River north 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 Chase Farm Park and Lincoln Woods State Park comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Angell Road, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 18.9 square miles, 18.2 of them land. The Lime Kilns and the Jenckes House are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Lincoln had 22,529 people at the 2020 census, and it borders seven other Rhode Island cities and towns, tied for the most in the state.
From Smithfield to Lincoln
Lincoln was settled in the 17th century as part of the Louisquisset grant, and it was part of Smithfield until 1871, when it was split off as a town of its own and named for Abraham Lincoln. Central Falls was part of Lincoln until it split off in 1895. In the late 19th century Lincoln grew into an important mill town, with textile factories along the Blackstone River, and its villages still carry those names: Manville, Albion, Lime Rock, Lonsdale, Fairlawn, Quinnville and Saylesville. The town lies in the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor.
Great Road and the stone-enders
Great Road dates to 1683, and its historic district page calls it Rhode Island’s oldest highway; in colonial times it was the main link between Providence, Hartford and Worcester. The Great Road Historic District follows about 0.6 of a mile of it beside the Moshassuck River, between Breakneck Hill Road and Front Street. Along the way are the 1812 Moffett Mill, the Israel Arnold House and Hearthside, built in 1810 for Stephen Smith, who started the mill next door the next year. The district joined the National Register in 1974.
Its best known house is the Eleazer Arnold House, a large stone-ender, the house type with exposed fieldstone end walls that came from the west of England and was used mostly in northern Rhode Island. Tree rings confirmed its 1693 date. It’s a National Historic Landmark, owned by Historic New England and open on weekends. Not far off, on Great Road in Saylesville, the Friends meetinghouse built in 1703 and 1704 is one of the oldest surviving Quaker meeting houses in New England. Stephen Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, married Anna Smith there in 1755, and Elizabeth Buffum Chace, the Quaker abolitionist, belonged to the meeting from 1836 to 1841. Friends still meet there for worship every Sunday morning.
Lime Rock and the kilns
Limestone has been quarried at Lime Rock since the 17th century, and it still is. The Lime Kilns are the remains of three colonial kilns, all that’s left of what their page calls one of the oldest lime processing operations in North America. They stand off Louisquisset Pike, Sherman Avenue and Dexter Rock Road; the largest, nearly 20 feet across, is near the Community College of Rhode Island’s Flanagan campus. The kilns joined the National Register in 1984. So did the Jenckes House at 81 Jenckes Hill Road, a small center-chimney house built in the 18th century by a member of the Jenckes family. The town’s Register list names two Jenckes houses, the other on Old Louisquisset Pike.
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: Lime Rock, Albion, Lonsdale, Manville, Quinnville, Saylesville Highlands, Sayles Bleachery, Blackstone River and Moshassuck River.
Streets and roads: Church St, Hill Rd, River Rd, George Washington Hwy, Rocky Rd, Lonsdale Ave, Maple Ave, Southwick Dr, Twin River Rd, Lincoln St and Blackstone River Bikeway.
Mill villages on the Blackstone
The Old Ashton Historic District, along Lower River Road, holds the site of Lincoln’s first textile mill, started in the 1810s, with the workers’ houses its owners built, now set apart from the mill site by a stretch of the Blackstone Canal. The one building near the mill site is the house Wilbur Kelly, one of the mill owners and once a merchant ship’s captain, built in the 1820s. Today it’s the Captain Wilbur Kelly House Transportation Museum, which tells the story of the region’s transportation, and the spot is a stop on the Blackstone River Bikeway with signs about its history. The district joined the National Register in 1984.
Saylesville grew around the Sayles Bleacheries that William F. Sayles started across from Bleachery Pond. His son Frank Sayles built much of the village as housing for the workers and managers, and the village’s page says the company varied where similar houses stood, to avoid the identical rows of other mill villages. By the 1920s Frank Sayles had made it one of the largest textile finishing businesses in the world, and William Sayles paid to build Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket. Lonsdale, which spans the river into Cumberland, keeps its mill housing along Front, John, Lonsdale and Main Streets; William Blaxton settled in the area in 1635. Up the river, Albion takes its name from the oldest name for Great Britain, and the Albion Mill, powered from a dam built in 1916, is now condominiums. Manville’s row houses for mill workers, from the early 1900s, are still known in the village as “the Brick Blocks.”
Lincoln Woods
Lincoln Woods State Park covers 627 acres around Olney Pond, about four miles northwest of Pawtucket, and it’s known for its giant glacial boulders and stony ground. The state bought Quinsnicket Pond and 71 more acres in 1908, and the park was founded on February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth; until the 1940s most people called it Quinsnicket. There’s a freshwater beach, trails for riders, bikers and hikers, boating, skating and fishing, and the park is known for bouldering. H. P. Lovecraft spent summer days walking in the park and wrote long letters about it, and in 2011 part of the film Moonrise Kingdom was shot there. Lincoln is also home to Amica Mutual Insurance, and to people such as the major league pitcher Clem Labine, the actor and songwriter Eddie Dowling and the novelist Sarah MacLean.
This map of Lincoln is a good choice for an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a mill town on the Blackstone. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Lincoln home, from Albion to Manville, 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 Lincoln map.
Sources
- Lincoln, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Great Road Historic District, Wikipedia
- Eleazer Arnold House, Wikipedia
- Saylesville Meetinghouse, Wikipedia
- Lime Rock, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Lime Kilns (Lincoln, Rhode Island), Wikipedia
- Jenckes House (Jenckes Hill Road), Wikipedia
- Old Ashton Historic District, Wikipedia
- Ashton Historic District, Wikipedia
- Saylesville, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Lonsdale, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Albion, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Manville, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Lincoln Woods State Park, Wikipedia
