As of December 2011 about 2,400 objects, and 1,500 photos are available in this database. 

Artifact collections that are represented include Fine Art (drawings and paintings), Clothing, Furniture, Toys, and some Needlework. 

Users can search by keyword, or by a myriad of other terms including object name, year range, title, artist, photography studio, material, associated people, subject terms, and local terminology (such as “Forty Steps” or “Rough Point”).  You could even search by NHS object number, if you happen to have it.

As we continue to refine and validate our data, more of our collections will appear. As always, however, if you are doing research, you will get your best information by contacting us.

This catalog was developed with support from:

The van Beuren Charitable Foundation

The Alletta Morris McBean Charitable Trust

The Newport County Fund of the Rhode Island Foundation

The Bay and Paul Foundations

many charitable individuals

Interior image from the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station complex, 1943 (From the NHS Collections)

December 7th marks the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor;  the effect of this event on Newport’s vast Naval presence was immediate. Long time Naval War College professor Admiral William Satterlee Pye (1880-1957) was immediately placed in command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet after the swift dismissal of Admiral Kimmel following the Japanese bombing. Pye was succeeded by Admiral Nimitz, and then returned to Newport to serve as President of the War College until 1946. Sudden changes also occurred at the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station complex on Goat Island, Rose Island and Gould Island. Women civilian workers were aggressively recruited and hours of operation increased to 24 / 7.  By 1944 the Torpedo Station employed a total of 14,122 workers and produced one third of all torpedoes used in World War II.

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.

Also new this year, the loan exhibit will be produced by our colleagues at The New Bedford Whaling Museum.  Please watch this site for more information as plans come together.

Guns of the Sloop Tartar Sit Outside the Newport Historical Society's Headquarters

In order to address hostilities during the time of King George’s War, the Rhode Island General Assembly voted to build a sloop in 1740. She was 115 tons and cost  L#8,679, and was named the Tartar, after the H.M.S. Tartar which visited from England in 1737. Rhode Island’s new Sloop of War had a distinguished and well documented career, particularly at the Battle of Louisbourg in 1744-1745.

Sadly, the Tartar was decommissioned in 1748 and her inventory was sold on Goat Island at public auction. The unclaimed items were stored at Fort George for many years. Eventually, two of her twelve guns were recovered and used as traffic control bollards at the foot of Washington Square. In 1934 the Newport Historical Society arranged to rescue the guns and mounted them on the lawn of the Touro Street headquarters, where they can be seen today.

Guns of the Sloop Tartar

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.

This sepia toned photograph of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) at the Battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia 1864 was taken when Grant was Lieutenant General during the Civil War by Matthew Brady.

You can read more about Brady in a New York Times column this morning by our Rhode Island colleage Ted Widmer.

In a letter written to his family, John Scott DeBlois said of whaling, “It is a wretched life [of] privations and hardship deprived of friends and society.”  Born in Newport in 1816, DeBlois began sailing as a young boy.  He served as the 3^rd Mate aboard the whaling bark Isabella from 1841 to 1845 and as the 1^st Mate of the Ann Alexander from 1845 to 1849.  Between the two voyages, he married Henrietta Tew of Newport.  In 1850, DeBlois was promoted to the position of captain aboard the Ann Alexander.  Though his first voyage as commander ended in catastrophe, the experience made him one of the most famous whaling captains of the nineteenth century. 

While cruising in the Pacific Ocean on August 20^th, 1851, the crew of the Ann Alexander spotted a pod of whales.  Attempts to capture the whales ended in disaster, as one of the whales became enraged and destroyed two of the small whale boats.  DeBlois rescued all of his men, and continued the pursuit from the safety of the Ann Alexander itself.  After several hours of chase, the creature turned toward the vessel and rammed its hull.  With the hull compromised, DeBlois ordered his crew to repair to the remaining whale boats.  Luckily, the men were saved on August 22^nd when they were spotted by the crew of the Nantucket.

 Newspaper accounts of the Ann Alexander incident portrayed Captain DeBlois as a hero. His celebrity grew after the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, as the American public compared John DeBlois to Melville’s fictitious Captain Ahab. 

 Undaunted, DeBlois continued his career at sea, regularly corresponding with his wife Henrietta.  She, a school teacher, was an exceptional writer.  From 1856 to 1859, Henrietta joined her husband on a whaling voyage aboard the Merlin.  She chronicled daily life aboard the vessel in a private journal, offering an exceptional window into life onboard a whaling vessel.

John and Henrietta’s letters, log books and journals are in the collections at the Newport Historical society. Reading Henrietta’s journal reveals much about her and her life at sea.

May 21^st
Blois is improving the shower by washing. I am obliged to keep below as the house on deck leaks badly. I go to the head of the stairs occasionally and fetch a hem just to make Blois look up and grin then I go below carefully holding up my skirts as the stairs are flooded.

June 11^th
Delightful weather calm through the night & greater part of the day. A little breeze has sprung up but we do not sail much. A sail in sight. Blois on the house spying. Mr. Adams working lunars in my room. Mr. Enos’ little Snowball lying at my feet. The Doctor is just in front of my window frying Dolphin for supper. His stove was moved out to paint the Galley so he cooks outdoors and it has quite a “Picturesque effect,” reminds one of the Pic Nics. No one seems very impatient to get home except the Capt he would like to get the care off his shoulders. I hardly can define my feelings. I wish to see my friends but dread the change from this quiet life. May God keep us as he has hitherto is my prayer.

Lat 33..07 N
Long 60..10 W
518 miles from home

June 16^th
…I cannot speak my feelings as they are so complicated as I near home. I thought the feelings would be all joy but I find there are many fond associations with the Old Merlin, and I feel shy about encountering the land… Oh! May we be assisted to live a Christian life on shore, may we not be ashamed to acknowledge our indebtedness to God who has sustained us.”

They came to anchor off New Bedford on the 18^th.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude in action. Image courtesy Salve Regina University Special Collections, William A. and Gael Crimmins Papers and Photos on "Monumenta".

In 2005, the artists Christo (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (1935 – 2009) constructed 7,503 fabric panels on the snow covered grounds of Central Park in New York. Known as The Gates, it was an immediate sensation and a new example of textile sculpture in the artist’s portfolio of “wrappings.”

As part of the 1974 citywide exhibit of modern sculpture in Newport known as Monumenta, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped King’s Beach on Ocean Drive. It consisted of 150,000 square feet of white polypropylene fabric attached to the shoreline. It was called “Oceanfront Project” and lasted only eight days. Later, in the 1980s, it was falsely rumored that Christo and Jeanne-Claude would wrap Rose Island. As for Monumenta, some of the sculptures are in private collections and one can still see the concentric mounds of grass known as the “Sod Maze” by Richard Fleischner at Chateau Sur Mer.

Aerial shot of "Monumenta". Image courtesy Salve Regina University Special Collections, William A. and Gael Crimmins Papers and Photos on "Monumenta".

Providence Roller Derby, Photo By George Ross

The Atlantic House Hotel on Bellevue and Pelham, having been abandoned by the U.S. Naval Academy in 1865, was seeking new guests and activities for the summer. In July 1866 the hotel contracted with James. L. Plimpton of New York to provide rooms for the New York Skating Association to introduce roller skating to Newport. Known as “rinking,” roller skating developed in the parlors of European aristocracy and was imported to America by Plimpton in 1863. In 1879 the Ocean House Hotel constructed a new rink, now the site of the Newport Casino grandstand. It hosted roller skating polo and “circling” around the rink, enjoyed by “educated and refined patrons” and later opened to the general public.