Newport Historical Society

January 14, 2012 at 11am

Discover Colonial Newport. Hear stories of revolution, struggles for religious liberty and remarkable entrepreneurship among Newport’s diverse people. $12 per person, $10 Newport Historical Society members. Weather dependent; reservations suggested. Departs from Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street. 401-841-8770

January 15, 2012 at 11am

Souls and Stones Tour. Explore the Common Burying Ground, view the remarkable gravestones that make this cemetery a work of art and learn about select colonial-era and 19th century residents who helped shape Newport’s history. $12 per person, $10 Newport Historical Society members. Weather dependent; reservations suggested. Departs from Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street. 401-841-8770

January 16, 2012 at 11am

Road to Independence. Riots and rebellion, enemies and allies! Hear stories from the years surrounding the American Revolution in Newport. $12 per person, $10 Newport Historical Society members. Weather dependent; reservations suggested. Departs from Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street. 401-841-8770

February 4, 2012 at 11am

Newport’s Buried History. Discover the early history of Newport’s people of color, enslaved and free. Visit the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House and the colonial African burying ground. $12 per person, $10 Newport Historical Society members. Weather dependent; reservations suggested. Departs from Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street. 401-841-8770

St. Mary's Church, image from the NHS Collections

Thursday February 2, 2012 at 5:30pm 

Colony House $5 General Admission, $1 NHS members

New England was inhospitable territory for Catholics from the colonial era until the Civil War. In colonial Massachusetts priests who entered the territory would be subject to imprisonment. In the nineteenth century, a Jesuit was tarred and feathered in Maine, a convent near Boston was torched, and another nuns’ residence in Providence narrowly escaped attack. Newport, by contrast, accepted Catholics just as it had accepted Jews, Quakers and Baptists before them. Dr. Quinn will explain how, from 1780 when French troops landed in Newport to aid with the Revolutionary War, through the following decades when the Irish settled, Newport proved to be an oasis of tolerance for Catholics in New England.

John F. Quinn is Professor of History at Salve Regina University, where he has taught since 1992. He specializes in Irish and Irish-American History. His publications include Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002) and articles in the New England Quarterly, the Catholic Historical Review, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and the Newport Historical Society’s journal Newport History.

Thursday January 19, 2012 at 5:30pm

Colony House, Washington Square

$5 per person, $4 for active duty military with ID, and $1 for NHS members. RSVP to 401-841-8770.

Everyone has a few old books. But are they valuable? Dust off those books and join the Newport Historical Society for The Value of Books with Ray Rickman.  

During this interactive program, Rickman will discuss what makes a book valuable. Using an Antiques Road Show-format with books brought by audience members, Rickman will provide information and insights about what types of books have the highest retail value and he will offer complimentary estimates of the books’ value. Guests can bring up to three books.

Rickman is a long-time rare book dealer and former host of “Bestsellers” on Rhode Island Public Television. He is the founder of The Rickman Group, which raises money for nonprofits, including the Gloria Gemma Breast Cancer Research Foundation. A former State Representative, he often lectures throughout the Rhode Island community on a range of cultural topics pertaining to American literature and African American history.

Thursday January 26, 2012 from 1pm-2pm

Thursday February 23, 2012 from 1pm-2pm

$10 per person, free for NHS members

Winter is the perfect time of year to research the Newport history questions that have been on your mind. Whether you would like to know more about your house’s history or discover your family genealogy, the Newport Historical Society’s library can help.

This January and February, the Newport Historical Society will offer two library workshops to help acquaint you with its collections. Learn how to research the history of your house, family, neighborhood, or any period from Newport’s history from the Historical Society’s expert staff. The workshop will introduce you to the NHS library holdings and help you identify research strategies.

Reservations required as space is limited. 401-846-0813

December 3, 2011, December 10, 2011 and December 17, 2011 at 11:30am

Hear the unique history of Newport’s oldest house museum and learn how 18th century residents made their way through the winter. Step back in time to December 1760 and meet a costumed living history interpreter portraying mid 18^th century Newport resident Ann Howard.

This tour departs from the Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street, Newport, RI. Admission costs $15 per person, $10 for NHS members, $5 for children ages twelve and under. Reservations required. 401-841-8770.

Fridays & Saturdays November 18, 2011 – December 23, 2011 at 4:30pm

Celebrate the authentic history of winter holiday traditions on the Holiday Lantern Tour. Stroll Newport’s streets and hear stories detailing the diverse ways that colonial residents celebrated—or didn’t celebrate—the holiday season and visit the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House’s first floor.

$12 per person, $10 for NHS members, $5 for children ages 12 and under. Departs from the Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street, Newport, RI. Reservations encouraged as space is very limited. 401-841-8770.

Abigail and John Adams portrayed by Patricia Bridgeman and Thomas Macy.

In April of 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail from Philadelphia, “You bid me burn your letters. But I must forget you first.” Thomas and Martha Jefferson burned all their personal letters. So did George and Martha Washington. But whenever John and Abigail Adams were apart, they continued a steady conversation through letter writing, and kept every single letter. These letters are now a priceless treasure of American history. Today, over 230 years later, we can still listen to their conversation, share in their thoughts and desires, and get to know them as real people, not just as words in a history book.

Love Letters will focus on the most intimate correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, beginning at the very start of their relationship in 1759 and continuing through the Second Continental Congress until 1778 when John prepares for his first trip abroad. Following the presentation, the living history interpreters portraying John and Abigail, Patricia Bridgeman and Tom Macy, will answer audience questions.

Adams scholars and living history performers Patricia Bridgeman and Thomas Macy have over 35 years of living history experience between them. They appear regularly at the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy, MA, and have also presented programs at the Abigail Adams birthplace, the John F. Kenney Presidential Library, Old Sturbridge Village, Minute Man National Park, and Boston’s Old State House, among many other historic sites and colleges.

Admission to this 45 minute program costs $5 per person, $1 for Newport Historical Society members. Reservations requested, persons with mobility issues should call in advance. 401-841-8770

Moveable Type, Power & Light Press

Before our era of texting and tweeting, news traveled through printed materials. To celebrate the history of moveable type and colonial-era technology, the Newport Historical Society will offer a printing exhibit in the Newport Colony House on October 15 and 16, 2011 and will host Kyle Durrie, of Power & Light Press, in the traveling exhibition “Movable Type”. 

Flyer by Power & Light Press

The exhibit, Cases and Types: The Lives and Works of Printers in Early Newport, will celebrate the history of the James Franklin Press—housed at the Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street, Newport, RI—and feature the diverse range of documents that were printed on the press. Documents include early newspapers, including two of the oldest papers in the country, Newport Mercury and Rhode Island Gazette, almanacs from the 1750s to the early 19th century, broadsides, discourses and sermons, advertisements, pamphlets and other official documents printed for the colony of Rhode Island. “This was not only the first press in the colony,” explains Allison Horrocks, Newport Historical Society intern who is preparing the exhibit, “but also the only press in the area for several decades.”

Although the press is often referred to as the “Franklin Press,” several families of note in Newport owned and used the press. This exhibit, which will include facsimile copies, offers us the chance to talk more about these families, and, in particular the widows (Ann Franklin and Ann Barber) who carried on the printing business after their husbands’ death in a time when female printers were rare, if not entirely unusual.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Newport Historical Society will host a traveling demonstration and exhibition by Kyle Durrie titled “Moveable Type.” Ms. Durrie, the proprietor of Power & Light Press, brings letterpress to the people through demonstrations of traditional hand-set letter block printing, all from a fully functional mobile print shop built into the back of an old delivery truck.  

Kyle Durrie, the proprietor of Power & Light Press, has been printing since 2006. She got her start through classes, self-study, and apprenticeships at Blue Barnhouse (Asheville, NC) and Wolfe Editions (Portland, ME). Kyle received her BA in 2002 from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME with a focus in drawing and printmaking and, in 2004, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME. She has also done residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Contemporary Artists Center (North Adams, MA), and the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum (Two Rivers, WI).

Power & Light Press is based out of Portland, OR, and is spending most of 2011 on the road with “Moveable Type”.

Cases  and Types will debut the weekend of the weekend of October 15th and October 16th. Visitors can also see the exhibit during the guided site tour of the Colony House and the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House at 11:3am on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays through October, and on Saturdays at 11:30 in November. The tour departs from the Museum & Shop at Brick Market, 127 Thames Street, and costs $12 per person, $5 for children ages twelve and under. Admission is free on October 15th, October 16th and December 1st.

Thursday, October 6^th at 5:30pm

Colony House, Washington Square

On July 29, 1778, a powerful French naval squadron sailed confidently to the entrance of Narragansett Bay, which commenced the first joint French and American campaign of the Revolutionary War. Author Christian McBurney will discuss this event and his new book, The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation of the Revolutionary War, which is the most detailed study of the joint French and American effort to capture the British garrison occupying Newport during July and August of 1778.

One of the most complex and multi-faceted events of the American Revolution, the campaign combined land and sea strategies and featured controversial decisions on both sides. McBurney will also explain why the ultimate Battle of Rhode Island, previously downplayed by historians, was a victory for the Americans and was significant in foretelling a promising future for the American army.

A graduate of Brown University, McBurney is a partner in a Washington, DC law firm. He is the author of several books and articles on early Rhode Island history, including A History of Kingston, Rhode Island, 1700–1900 and British Treatment of Prisoners During the Occupation of Newport, 1776–1779.

Admission costs $5 per person, $1 for Historical Society members with membership card. Persons with mobility issues should call in advance. Reservations requested. 401-841-8770 

Colony House, Washington Square

Clingstone and the Robinson House are Newport landmarks, one on the harbor and one in the bay. Though the properties were built during different eras they hold a family

Clingstone, image from the NHS Collections

connection. Henry Wood will present “From Protection to Nature to the Environment: Three Centuries, Two Houses, One Family”, an evening lecture that features these unique properties. 

“Quaker Tom” Robinson’s house in Newport was built in the 18th century as a merchant’s home. It provided protection from the outdoors. When it was ‘updated’ as a summer home in the late 19th century by Charles McKim it was, in contrast, opened to the outdoors and nature, adding a sweeping porch overlooking the bay.

In 1905 a Robinson cousin, Joseph Samuel Lovering Wharton, built Clingstone on one of the Dumplings off Jamestown. Clingstone was was specifically designed around the outdoors: the oceanscape and the rock itself. After being acquired by one of “Quaker Tom’s” descendants it has gradually evolved in concert with the natural environment: wind for power, the roof for fresh water, sunshine for hot water and more power, and degradation for waste. What will the next century bring?

Admission costs $5 per person, $1 for Newport Historical Society members. Reservations requested. Persons with mobility issues should call in advance. 401-841-8770

The Robinson-Wood House, image from the NHS Collections