Brown University held its first classes in Warren, and Massasoit’s village of Sowams stood here before that. This map of Warren prints the Warren Waterfront Historic District along the river, East Warren and Touisset, Jamiel Park, the Haile Farm Preserve, the Maxwell House Museum and Schoolhouse Road.
Warren is in Bristol County, on the east bank of the Warren River across from Barrington.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Jamiel Park and the Haile Farm Preserve comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Schoolhouse Road, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 8.6 square miles, 6.2 of them land. The Warren Waterfront Historic District and the Warren United Methodist Church and Parsonage are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Warren had 11,147 people at the 2020 census.
Sowams
Long before the town, this was Sowams, a Pokanoket village on a peninsula, one of more than 60 settlements under the sachem Massasoit, whose lands reached from Plymouth to the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins of Plymouth Colony first came here in July 1621, and two years later Winslow and John Hampden saved Massasoit’s life, winning an ally and a lifelong friend. By 1632 the colonists had a trading post on the Kickemuit River, swapping English goods for furs. In the winter of 1636, when Roger Williams had been banished from Salem and fell ill on his way south, Massasoit took him in at Sowams until he recovered, and Williams went on to found Providence Plantations.
Massasoit and his eldest son, Wamsutta, sold the land that’s now Warren, with parts of Barrington, Swansea and Rehoboth, to Plymouth settlers, and English settlement began east of the village in 1653. Warren came over to Rhode Island from Massachusetts in 1747 and was named for Admiral Sir Peter Warren, the British naval hero of the victory at Louisbourg in 1745. Barrington was part of it until 1770.
A college and a harbor
Brown University began in Warren in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and it enrolled its first students here in 1765. The town page says that, unlike Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn and Columbia, it welcomed students of every faith, following the example Roger Williams set when he founded Rhode Island. The college moved to Providence in 1770.
By the middle of the 1700s Warren was known as a whaling port, and shipbuilding grew into an important trade. After the Revolution, trade came back and Warren’s yards became famous for their fine vessels, crewed and commanded mostly by Warren men, which sailed in whaling, merchant service and the West India trade. Chase and Davis built three well-known ships here: the clipper Lookout and the clipper bark Gem of the Sea, both in 1853, and the clipper bark Mary Ogden in 1854. As whaling faded, the town turned to textiles, and the Warren Manufacturing Company put up Warren’s first cotton mill in 1847. Waterfront businesses such as Blount Marine, Blount Seafood and Dyer Boats are still here. The town page lists Luther Blount, who started Blount Marine and two cruise lines, and F. Nelson Blount, who founded Blount Seafood and collected steam locomotives, among its notable people.
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: East Warren, Beach Terrace, Laurel Park, Maxfields Corner and Touisset Highlands.
Streets and roads: Birch Swamp Rd, Bushee Rd, Wood St, Market St, Franklin St, Vernon St, Cutler St, Main St, Adams Ln, Sachem St, Parker Ave, Denver Ave.
More street names, A to Z
Asylum Rd, Barden Ln, Beach St, Chace Ave, Elm St, Homestead Ave, Laurel Ln, Paul Ct, Point Farm Rd.
The waterfront
The Warren Waterfront Historic District is the town’s center, bounded by the Warren River on the west, Belcher Cove on the north, Federal and Main streets on the east and Campbell Street on the south. It’s been the heart of Warren since the mid-1700s, and it holds the town’s main civic buildings and houses in the revival and Victorian styles of the 1800s. It joined the National Register in 1974 and was enlarged in 2003. Inside it, at 27 Church Street, the Warren United Methodist Church began in 1789 under the Rev. Daniel Smith as the first Methodist congregation in Rhode Island and the second in New England. Its Greek Revival church, with a full temple front, was built in 1844 by Perez Mason, an architect from Fall River, and the Italianate parsonage followed in 1858. Both joined the Register in 1971. The East Bay Bike Path passes through town too.
The Queen of Baseball
Lizzie Murphy, probably born in Warren in 1894, quit school by 12 to work as a ring spinner at the Parker Woolen Mill and played ball in her spare time with the Warren Silk Hats and the Warren Baseball Club. She turned professional by 17, billed herself as “The Queen of Baseball,” and played first base for seventeen years. In 1922, in a charity game at Fenway Park, she became the first woman to play against major league players, and her page says she was the first person of either sex to play on both American and National league all-star teams. She came home to Warren when she retired in 1935, and in 1994 she joined the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame. The town page also lists the poet Hezekiah Butterworth, who wrote books for young people. The Charles W. Greene Museum and the Maxwell House Museum can be found among the streets of town.
This map of Warren fits an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a small harbor town with a long story. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Warren home, from East Warren to Touisset, 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 Warren map.
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