Anyone who has waded the Beaver River for spring trout, or driven Route 138 past the old houses of Wyoming, knows this corner of Rhode Island. This map of Richmond prints the Beaver River and the Beaver River Preserve, the Crawley Preserve, Dawley Memorial State Park, the Carolina Village Historic District and the Wyoming Village Historic District, the John Hoxsie House and Switch Road.
Richmond is in Washington County, 35 miles south 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 the Crawley Preserve and the Beaver River Preserve comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Switch Road, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 40.8 square miles, all but 0.2 of them land. The John Hoxsie House and the Carolina Village Historic District are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Richmond had 8,020 people at the 2020 census.
An inland town of villages
Richmond began as part of Westerly. When the General Assembly organized the old King’s County into the town of Westerly in 1669, Westerly divided itself into four areas, and Richmond was one of them, alongside Charlestown and Hopkinton. It’s still mostly forest. Its page says it’s the only town in Washington County that touches neither another county nor the ocean, with Exeter to the north, Hopkinton to the west, Charlestown to the south and South Kingstown to the southeast. Instead of one center, it has a dozen villages: Alton, Arcadia, Barberville, Carolina, Hillsdale, Kenyon, Shannock, Tug Hollow, Usquepaug, Wood River Junction, Woodville and Wyoming. The state owns 2,359 acres here as the Carolina Management Area, mostly woods with some wetlands and farm fields, and manages it for wildlife.
The Washington County Fair has been held in Richmond since 1970, and the town page calls it the largest fair in the state. The architect Thomas A. Tefft and Frank J. Williams, chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court from 2001 to 2009, are among the people the page lists from Richmond, and so is the country singer Billy Gilman, runner-up on season 11 of The Voice, who comes from the village of Hope Valley, though most of that village lies in Hopkinton.
Carolina
The Carolina Village Historic District sits on the Pawcatuck River, where the village spans the town line. A mill began here in the early 1800s, and in 1843 Rowland G. Hazard bought it and called it the Carolina Mills Company after his wife, Caroline Newbold Hazard of South Kingstown; the village took the same name, and the post office was Carolina Mills until 1879. The Richmond side keeps a row of about two dozen small cottages from roughly 1840 to 1870, and among the older buildings are the Carolina School and the Carolina Free Will Baptist Church, both from 1845, an eight-sided house built for Albert Potter in 1867, and a Queen Anne house built by Ellison Tinkham, one of the mill’s owners from 1868 to 1907. The mill turned from cotton to wool in 1862 and kept running until 1930 or 1935, by different accounts. The district, 71 properties on 115 acres, joined the National Register in 1974.
North of the village, on White Brook, John W. Hoxie opened the Clearwater Trout Farm in 1877, which the village page counts among the first trout farms in America. His brother Charles started a hatchery next door two years later, the two were later run together by the Hazard family as the American Fish Culture Company, and by the early 1920s it was considered the largest fish farm in America. The Hazards sold it to the state in 1995.
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: Shannock, Alton, Wyoming, Arcadia, Tug Hollow, Usquepaug, Wood River Junction, Hillsdale, Ellis Flats, Kenyon Hill and Pine Hill.
Streets and roads: Cherry Ln, Tefft Hill Rd, Hoxsie Rd, Gardiner Rd, Crestwood Dr, Old Switch Rd, River Rd, Church St, Carolina-Alton Rd, Switch Rd and Lewiston Ave.
Wyoming
Wyoming grew up on the Wood River, which marks the town line here; most of the village is in Richmond, and a little reaches into Hopkinton. It was settled in 1757, and water power brought industry early: Brothers Cotton Mill opened on the Richmond side in 1814. The New London Turnpike, today’s Route 3, came through in 1815, and a tavern went up on the Richmond side that same year for people traveling it. The Wyoming Village Historic District, bounded roughly by Routes 138 and 3, Old Nooseneck Hill Road and Bridge and Prospect streets, covers 570 acres on both sides of the river, takes in Brand’s Ironworks, and has Greek Revival, Federal and Late Victorian buildings. It joined the National Register in 1974.
Around the map
Follow the Beaver River down the map and you’re tracing part of an 11-mile river that rises at James Pond in Exeter and runs south through Richmond to the Pawcatuck. It has three dams, and local people know it for trout in the spring. In Richmond it passes under the New London Turnpike, Old Mountain Road, Hillsdale Road, Kingstown Road, Beaver River School House Road and Shannock Hill Road. The John Hoxsie House, also called the Old Kenyon Farm, is off Richmond Town House Road just north of Pinecrest Road. John Hoxsie built its Cape-style house in 1784, and its page calls the 60-acre farmstead a rare, almost untouched example of a 19th-century farm. It joined the National Register in 1978. Dawley Memorial State Park and the Crawley Preserve are on the map too.
This map of Richmond suits an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a wooded town of mill villages and trout streams. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Richmond home, from Wyoming 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 Richmond map.
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