Lost Rhode Island

They are no more. Bereft of life. Off the twig. Kicked the bucket. Joined the bleedin' choir invisible. Once thriving mill communities, fishing villages, railroad depots, ferry crossings, farming hamlets, mining camps and stagecoach stops, they have, like Monthy Python's ex-parrot, ceased to be, popping up now and then in the occasional road name or cemetery. They are ghost towns, and South County is riddled with them, exotic-sounding places like Tug Hollow. A national Web site, http://www.ghosttowns.com/, suggests that more than 50,000 ghost towns have disappeared over time in the U.S. Here are a few that have vanished from the maps of South County:

Scrabbletown sounds like a place where board game inventors live, but it was once a farming community in North Kingstown. Now all that's left is Scrabbletown Road and a few stone walls, cellar holes and foundations. Three miles away, our history columnist Tim Cranston lives in Swamptown, another old farming hamlet. Aside from a few crumbling clues in the weeds, not much lives (except for Tim) to tell its story.
Napatree Point in Watch Hill, the sandy comma that separates the southwestern part of Rhode Island from Connecticut, is just beach now. But grand homes and sea cottages once lined the area. They were swept away during the Hurricane of '38, although so many pieces of sea glass and pottery still wash up with the tides, some locals call it "the Kitchen." The ruins of Fort Mansfield, built in 1900, can be found at the tip of the point. The fort was a bust, another in a long line of "Only in Rhode Island" planning decisions. Just after it was constructed, the fort was declared indefensible, immediately dismantled and abandoned.
There's still a hill, and there's still a tower, but Tower Hill, South Kingstown's first settlement, is now little more than sprawl spilling off Route 1. Once visited by the likes of Ben Franklin and George Washington, today it is increasingly trafficked by people on the go, needing gas or coffee and willing to part with a few Ben Franklins and George Washingtons to get it. The Hannah Robinson Tower and Rock at the intersection of Routes 1 and 138 is not the original "tower" of Tower Hill, but for people living south of it, the view is the same now as then: the world ends here.

Know a ghost town? Know a ghost? Share your story with the Blog on the Half Shell community (one littleneck, and counting...).