West Warwick grew up around the mills of the Pawtuxet River, and many of them are still standing. This map of West Warwick prints Arctic, Phenix and Birch Hill, the Lippitt Mill, the Crompton Mill Historic District, the Centreville Mill, the Valley Queen Mill and the Royal Mill Complex, Riverpoint Park, the Silas Clapp House, the West Warwick Public Library, the Benny Magiera Memorial Ice Rink and Wakefield Street.
West Warwick is in Kent County, on the Pawtuxet River between Coventry and Warwick.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Riverpoint Park and Birch Hill comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Wakefield Street, and the Census Bureau puts the town at 8.1 square miles, 7.9 of them land. The Lippitt Mill and the Silas Clapp House are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. West Warwick had 31,012 people at the 2020 census.
The youngest town
West Warwick became a town in 1913, which makes it the youngest in Rhode Island. Before that it was the busy, industrial western end of Warwick, on the western bank of the Pawtuxet River, and the town page says it split off because local Democratic politicians wanted their own power base apart from the Republican farm country to the east. Its villages are still the old mill villages of the Pawtuxet River Valley, where some of the earliest textile mills in the United States went up along the north and south branches of the river: Arctic, at the center, where most of the town offices are; Centerville; Clyde; Crompton; Harris; Lippitt; Natick; Phenix, in the northwest corner, which became a largely Portuguese neighborhood in later years; River Point, where the branches meet; and Westcott, which grew up as housing for the River Point mill workers. Birch Hill was once a village of its own across the river from the Clyde print works, and by the end of the 1800s people counted it part of Clyde. Robert E. Quinn, governor of Rhode Island, and Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, are among the people the town page lists.
Lippitt and Centreville
The Lippitt Mill at 825 Main Street is a cotton mill built in 1809, and its page counts it the third oldest in Rhode Island, after Slater Mill and the Slatersville mills. Christopher Lippitt, a Revolutionary War officer who had commanded a regiment at Trenton and Princeton, founded the Lippitt Manufacturing Company with his brother Charles and four partners. After the War of 1812 the company got through hard times by selling yarn to weavers in the Vermont prison, and it grew into a large business run by several generations of Lippitts. The firm of B. B. and R. Knight, the makers of Fruit of the Loom, bought it in 1889, and a lace works ran there from 1925 into the early 1970s. The mill joined the National Register in 1973 and kept working until 2010, about 200 years in all.
The Centreville Mill, at 3 Bridal Avenue, sits on a site used for textile work since 1794, only four years after Samuel Slater’s mill started up in Pawtucket; its oldest surviving buildings on the east bank date from the 1860s, and it joined the Register in 2005. In Crompton, the Crompton Mill Historic District keeps the raceways dug in 1807 and the stone Mill No. 1 of the same year, which its page says is believed to be the oldest stone mill building in the state. The Providence Manufacturing Company and the firms after it put up most of the brick buildings in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and cotton was processed there until 1946. The district joined the National Register in 2006.
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: Arctic, Centerville, Clyde, Crompton, Lippitt, Natick, Phenix, Harris and River Point.
Streets and roads: Sunrise Ave, Woodside Ave, Central St, N Pleasant St, Fairview Ave, Enfield Dr, Natick Rd, Lombardi Ln, Hay St, River Ave, W Warwick Ave, Queen Ave.
More street names, A to Z
Aldrich St, Centerville Rd, Dawes St, Greenbush Rd, Keyes Way, Lee St, Legris Ave, Marco Dr, New London Ave, Oak Dell Cir, Pepin St, Pulaski St, Tiogue Ave.
River Point
The Valley Queen Mill at 200 Providence Street is a five-story stone mill that the Greene Company built in 1834 for coarse cotton cloth. B. B. and R. Knight bought it in 1888 and enlarged it, and since 1931 it has been the home of the Original Bradford Soap Works, which still makes bar soap there. It joined the National Register in 1984. Its page says the workers struck there on January 23, 1922, following the Royal Mill’s workers, who had walked out over an attempted 20 percent wage cut, and the strike spread through the valley into the 1922 New England Textile Strike.
Next door, at 125 Providence Street on the South Branch of the Pawtuxet, the Knights built the Royal Mill of local granite in 1890 to a design by the mill engineer David M. Thompson, and it became one of the largest of the company’s 22 mills. It was rebuilt in 1920 with the twin stone towers it has today. After years standing empty, it was renovated from 2004 into 250 apartments, its old stone dam now produces hydropower, a skybridge links it to the Ace Dye Works lofts across the river, and a public walking path runs along the riverfront. It joined the National Register in 2004.
The Silas Clapp House
Out on East Greenwich Avenue, Silas Clapp built a two-and-a-half-story Federal house and farmed the 100 acres around it. It was long dated to 1804, but newspapers found inside its walls, dated as early as 1797, suggest it’s a few years older. It has a fanlight over the center door and a big central chimney, more usual in older Georgian houses, and Clapp’s descendants kept it until the 1880s. It joined the National Register in 1973. The West Warwick Public Library and the Benny Magiera Memorial Ice Rink are on the map too.
This map of West Warwick works in an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a river valley that played an important part in the early textile industry. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call West Warwick home, from Arctic to Phenix, 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 West Warwick map.
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