The Quonset hut was born in North Kingstown, and so was the painter whose George Washington is on the dollar bill. This map of North Kingstown prints Wickford and the Wickford Historic District, Davisville with Camp Endicott and the Seabee Museum, and Casey Farm, along with the Hamilton Mill Village Historic District, the Poplar Point Lighthouse, the Plum Beach Lighthouse, Blue Beach, Compass Rose Beach and Stony Lane.
North Kingstown is in Washington County, on the west shore of Narragansett Bay.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Blue Beach and Compass Rose Beach comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Stony Lane, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 58.3 square miles, 14.8 of them water. Camp Endicott, the Poplar Point Lighthouse and the Hamilton Mill Village Historic District are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. North Kingstown had 27,732 people at the 2020 census.
Cocumscussoc and Wickford
Roger Williams and Richard Smith set up trading posts near Wickford around 1637, on land that had long been home, fishing ground and hunting ground to the Narragansett people. Smith built a fortified house, known as Smith’s Castle, and later bought Williams’s post; Williams sold it to pay for his trip to England to win a charter for Rhode Island. The Smith’s Castle that stands today at 55 Richard Smith Drive was built in 1678 by his son and is one of the oldest houses in the state, a National Historic Landmark as the Cocumscussoc Archeological Site. The colonial government founded Kings Towne in 1674, and in 1723 it split into North Kingstown and South Kingstown, with North Kingstown, holding the earliest settlements, keeping the 1674 date.
Wickford grew steadily as a port and shipbuilding village, and Lodowick Updike, Richard Smith’s grandson, developed much of it between 1709 and 1715; for a time it was called Updike’s New Town. It’s built around what its page calls one of the best protected natural harbors on the eastern seaboard, and it holds one of the largest collections of 18th-century houses in the Northeast, most of them still on their first foundations. The Old Narragansett Church, founded in 1707, is the oldest Episcopal church building in the northeastern United States, the village page says. In 1776 the “Wickford gun,” a single cannon the General Assembly gave the town, helped turn back a British raid. The Wickford Art Festival has been held every July since 1962, and John Updike used Wickford as the model for the village in The Witches of Eastwick.
Saunderstown
Gilbert Stuart was born on December 3, 1755, in a house built in 1751 in Saunderstown, where his father ran a water-powered snuff mill in the basement, which its page calls the first in America. The family moved to Newport when he was six. The Gilbert Stuart Birthplace and Museum opened in 1931, with working snuff and grist mills, a fish ladder and 23 acres of trails, and it shows his famous unfinished portrait of George Washington, the one on the one-dollar bill. Nearby, Casey Farm stretches 300 acres across the neck between the Narrow River and the West Passage, and its land hasn’t been divided in 300 years. Daniel Coggeshall built the main house in the second quarter of the 18th century; it passed to Silas Casey when he married Coggeshall’s daughter, and six generations of Caseys are buried there. Historic New England has owned it since 1955 and runs it as a working farm with a Saturday farmers market.
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: Wickford, Allenton, Annaquatucket, Belleville, Davisville, Hamilton, Kiefer Park, Lafayette, Mount View and Allen Harbor.
Streets and roads: Park Rd, Callahan Rd, Davisville Rd, Sanford Rd, Rocky Rd, Krzak Rd, Allegra Ln, W Allenton Rd, Plain Rd, Waldron Ave, Neck Rd, Hill Rd.
More street names, A to Z
Gilbert Stuart Dr, Griffith Rd, Mill Rd, Plantation Ln.
Quonset Point and Davisville
The Navy bought Quonset Point in 1939 and built Naval Air Station Quonset Point. In 1942 it opened a huge training camp next door at Davisville, Camp Endicott, which gave more than 100,000 men of the Navy’s Construction Battalions, the Seabees, their construction training during World War II. The Quonset hut was designed and made at Davisville, a light, prefabricated building of corrugated steel that a team could put up in a day with hand tools; about 170,000 were built during the war. A part of Camp Endicott joined the National Register in 1978, but the camp is now mostly demolished. A few of its surviving huts were moved to the Seabee Museum and Memorial Park, which former Seabees built themselves in the 1990s on 6.5 acres with the old concrete chapel and seven vintage huts. In 2024 the National Park Service named North Kingstown a World War II Heritage City. The Navy left in the 1970s and 1990s, and today the land is the Quonset Business Park, where Electric Boat has a hull-fabrication plant.
The lighthouses and the mill village
The Poplar Point Lighthouse, built in 1831 at the southern point of Wickford Harbor, has a stone keeper’s house and a wooden tower that its page calls the oldest surviving wooden lighthouse tower in the United States. It went dark in 1882, was sold at auction in 1894 and joined the National Register in 1988. Out in the bay, the Plum Beach Lighthouse is a sparkplug light finished in 1899 and shut off in 1941 after the first Jamestown Bridge opened. The Friends of Plum Beach Lighthouse took it over in 1999, restored it in 2003 and relit it, paid for in part by a license plate showing the light. On the Annaquatucket River near Bissell Cove, the Hamilton Mill Village Historic District keeps two wooden mill buildings and a row of workers’ houses along Boston Neck Road, and its main mill, built in 1853, has a double clerestory roof its page says no other surviving mill in the state has. It joined the National Register in 1983.
This map of North Kingstown is a good choice for an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a bay town. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call North Kingstown home, from Wickford to Davisville, 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 North Kingstown map.
Sources
- North Kingstown, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Wickford, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Smith’s Castle, Wikipedia
- Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, Wikipedia
- Casey Farm, Wikipedia
- Camp Endicott, Wikipedia
- Quonset hut, Wikipedia
- Davisville, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
- Seabee Museum and Memorial Park, Wikipedia
- Quonset Point, Wikipedia
- Poplar Point Light, Wikipedia
- Plum Beach Light, Wikipedia
- Hamilton Mill Village Historic District, Wikipedia
