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Wickford is a small village in the town of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, United States, which is named after Wickford in Essex, England. Wickford is located on the west side of Narragansett Bay, just about a 20 minute drive across two bridges from Newport, Rhode Island. The village is built around one of the most well-protected natural harbors on the eastern seaboard, and features one of the largest collections of 18th century dwellings to be found anywhere in the northeast. Today the majority of the village's historic homes and buildings (most in private hands) remain largely intact upon their original foundations. ==History== Wickford is generally said to have been settled around 1637, when religious dissident and Rhode Island state founder Roger Williams bought a parcel of land from the sachem Canonicus and established a trading post there. Prior to European contact, the lands in and around Wickford had long served as dwelling, fishing, and hunting grounds to the Narragansett people, who were New England's most powerful and prominent tribe at the time when Williams found his way to their shores. At about the same time as Williams' purchase, Richard Smith, a religious dissident from Gloucester, England who had originally settled in the Plymouth Colony's town of Taunton, established a trading post on Narragansett Bay near the mouth of Cocumscussoc Brook. In 1637, Smith built what appears to have been a rather grand, gabled house on the site, which Williams in his letters described as the first English house in the area. This house was also heavily fortified, and thus became known as ''Smith's Castle''. During 1651 Smith purchased Roger Williams' trading post, and continued expanding his holdings over the years—building what came to be called the ''Cocumscussoc Plantation''. Smith's plantation became a center of social, religious, and political life in the area. During the conflict known as King Philip's War, the only incident of an individual being hanged, drawn and quartered for treason on American soil took place at Smith's Castle in 1676. Joshua Tefft, an English colonist accused of having fought on the side of the Narragansett during the Great Swamp Fight, was executed by this method. During King Philip's War, many of the homes that were built during this brief period of expansion were destroyed. One of the homes that went was Smith's Castle, which burned to the ground in 1676. Two years later, Richard Smith Jr. built a new home on the old foundation. Retaining the name "Smith's Castle," this structure remains standing today and is one of the area's most visited historic sites. Following King Philip's War, Wickford grew steadily as a port and shipbuilding center. To this day, the waterfront remains very active. Captain Lodowick Updike developed much of the early village between 1709-1715 after inheriting the land in 1692 from his uncle, Richard Smith, owner of Smith's Castle and the surrounding lands. The village was often interchangeably called "Updike's New Town" or "Wickford" in honor of English hometown of the wife of Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut.〔A history of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island: including a history of other Episcopal churches in the state, Volume 1 (D.B. Updike, 1907) pg. 329 ()〕 In 1707, the Old Narragansett Church was founded in downtown Wickford and survives as the oldest Episcopal church building in the northeastern United States. The British military attempted to raid Wickford during the American Revolution in 1776, but the "Wickford gun," a single cannon commissioned by the General Assembly for the town to defend itself, was used to thwart the invading British expedition. Later the gun was taken to Point Judith, despite local Tories attempts to disarm the weapon. There it was used to force a British ship to surrender its crew. The prisoners were removed to Providence.〔G. Timothy Cranston, The View From Swamptown, Volumes I and II April 1999 to March 2001 ()(PDF)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wickford, Rhode Island」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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