Newport: What a Harbor Without Farmland Becomes

In May of 1639, a small group of settlers led by William Coddington and Nicholas Easton walked the southern shore of Aquidneck Island and made a choice that would decide everything that came after it, though none of them could have known it yet. They were choosing a home, and by the ordinary measure of the time — soil, pasture, timber — they chose badly. What Aquidneck's southern tip offered instead was a harbor: deep, sheltered, ice-free through the winter, the kind of anchorage a captain doesn't need luck to find twice. Newport's founders weren't farmers who happened to settle near water. They were a plantation with the wrong soil and the right wharf, and a town with no export crop will eventually trade in whatever the sea brings it. Everything below follows from that one asymmetry.

One relic of that agricultural false start still stands, incidentally, though its own history refuses to settle down. A squat, cylindrical stone tower in what's now Touro Park has been attributed since the colonial period to Benedict Arnold — great-grandfather and namesake of the Revolutionary War traitor, and the colony's first governor under its 1663 royal charter — who mentioned “my stone-built wind-mill” in his 1677 will. Whether Arnold actually built it or simply inherited and repurposed an older structure is a question nobody has closed; the earliest printed reference to the tower at all doesn't appear until 1819, a gap of well over a century. The record is silent on who really built it, and that's worth saying plainly rather than papering over with the confident caption a tourist plaque usually gives it.

The Wharf Becomes the Town

For a decade or two, Newport looked like what it was supposed to be — a religious settlement, modest and agrarian, its people worshipping largely as Baptists in a colony built on the promise that no one would tell them not to. But look at what actually got built once the town had a minute to breathe. Not more farmland. A wharf, and then a bigger one — Newport's merchants were already building out into the harbor almost as soon as the first houses went up, and by 1680 they'd begun organizing informally under the name Proprietors of the Long Wharf to coordinate and extend it. The wharf they were building on would take decades more, and further formalization, to become the fixture it is today. Ropewalks. Cooperages. Ship carpenters' yards. By 1680, roughly four hundred houses stood where cornfields once had, clustered tight along streets that all seemed to lean toward the water.

A harbor doesn't ask its town what it wants to become. It simply rewards whoever adapts fastest to what can move across it.

What the Harbor Paid For First

In the 1690s, what moved fastest across the Atlantic — what paid best, with the least patience required — was plunder. Newport had no navy to stop it and, more to the point, no particular interest in stopping it. When Thomas Tew sailed the Amity home to Newport in April 1694 with a fortune in Mughal gold behind him, the town didn't treat him as a fugitive. It treated him as a homecoming. Tew came from an old Newport family — his people had been among the town's original settlers — and he came bearing gifts. Caleb Carr, a longtime deputy and prominent Newport figure who would be elected governor the following year, accepted a “generous present” from him personally and looked the other way while Tew resettled among his own. Thomas Paine, wanted for piracy along the Florida coast, arrived in Newport the previous decade with a commission the governors of New York and Jamaica both called forged — and Newport's own governor, William Coddington Jr., accepted it anyway, likely with help from a cash gift of Paine's own. Within a decade Paine had bought land, married into the prominent Carr family, helped found Trinity Church, and led the town's own defense against a French privateering raid. A wanted man became a founding parishioner without ever really stopping being both.

It would be easy to call this hypocrisy. It is more precisely described as a harbor town doing, without much agonizing, what harbor towns do: pricing risk correctly and taking the trade that pays. Newport in the 1690s had no plantation economy, no staple crop, nothing to sell that the rest of New England didn't also have. What it had was a deep anchorage and a willingness to ask fewer questions than Boston or New York asked. For about thirty years, that was the whole business model.

The Harbor Finds Its Limit — 1723

The limit, when it came, didn't come from inside the town. It came from London, and it came all at once. By the 1720s, the same open door that had welcomed Tew and Paine had become an embarrassment the Crown was no longer willing to tolerate, and colonial governors were put on explicit notice to close it. The message arrived at Gravelly Point in 1723, where twenty-six men — the crew of the pirate Charles Harris, captured off the Carolina coast — were hanged in what remains the largest single mass execution of pirates in colonial American history. It was staged as public theater on purpose. Writing more than a century later, in November 1843, the Salem Observer called it “the most extensive execution of pirates that ever took place at one time” in the American colonies, adding that it drew a crowd from every part of New England. It's a secondhand memory of the day rather than a report from it, but the scale it describes matches the documented facts: twenty-six named men, tried in Newport that July, hanged together at Gravelly Point on July 19, 1723.

What's worth noticing is what didn't change. Newport didn't stop being a harbor town willing to trade in whatever paid. It only lost access to one particular trade. The 1720s didn't teach Newport caution. They taught it to look for the next thing.

The Next Thing

The next thing was rum, and molasses, and — a fact the town's own wealthiest families would spend the following century building fortunes on and the following two centuries mostly declining to discuss — enslaved people.

The clearest window into how this actually began isn't a legend or a plaque. It's a letter. In 1708, Rhode Island's governor, Samuel Cranston, wrote to the Board of Trade in London accounting for the colony's involvement in the African trade, as he'd been ordered to. He reported that in May of 1696, a brigantine called the Seaflower, under a captain named Thomas Windsor, had arrived at Newport from the African coast carrying forty-seven captive people, fourteen of whom were sold in the colony before the ship carried the rest onward. Cranston's letter is specific enough to note something easy to miss: the Seaflower's voyage had been financed by investors in Boston, not Newport. The harbor received the trade before its own merchants had organized to run it themselves.

They didn't take long to catch up. Over the following century, Newport merchants would go on to sponsor roughly six hundred of the more than nine hundred slaving voyages launched from Rhode Island, part of a triangular circuit that was, in its mechanics, brutally simple: rum distilled in Newport bought captives on the West African coast; captives were sold in the Caribbean or the southern colonies for molasses; the molasses came home to Newport's stills to be made into more rum. Among the families who ran it were the Wantons — the same family whose sons had chased privateers and gone on to govern the colony — and the Vernon brothers, William and Samuel, whose firm financed more than thirty slaving voyages before William went on to head the Continental Navy Board and help build the fleet that would fight for American independence. Aaron Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish refugee who found in Newport one of the only colonial ports willing to let his family worship openly, built the bulk of his fortune in candles, rum, and shipping — and financed slaving voyages for roughly thirteen years within that much longer career, a stark, uncomfortable fact next to the town's professed tolerance rather than the whole of his business. None of this was hidden or unusual for the port. It was simply what Newport had found, this time, that the Atlantic would pay for.

What Still Stands

Walk the waterfront today and the wealth this produced is still standing. Long Wharf runs into the harbor along roughly the footprint the Proprietors laid out in the 1680s. The White Horse Tavern, in continuous operation since before 1673 — older, in fact, than the town's own piracy problem — was where captains and merchants struck the deals that built the wharves in the first place.

Hunter House, raised in 1748 by the merchant and deputy governor Jonathan Nichols Jr. and later expanded by his successor Joseph Wanton Jr., is usually described as one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in New England. What the house's own current stewards now document alongside the woodwork and the Townsend-Goddard furniture is a list of names: at least thirteen enslaved people who lived and worked on the property under its two owners. The house isn't separate from the story above. It's what the story above looked like once it was finished paying for itself.

The Harbor, Still Asking

None of this makes Newport unusual among Atlantic ports of its century — nearly every one of them ran some version of the same arithmetic, trading whatever the ocean would reward. What makes Newport worth telling as one story, start to finish, is how visible the pattern is: a town with a harbor and nothing much else, adapting in turn to piracy, to the Crown's patience running out, to rum and molasses and the trade in human beings, each phase leaving behind the wharves and houses that still stand. The town never really decided what kind of place it wanted to be. It kept asking what the water would pay for, and it kept answering.

That's not a comfortable throughline, and it isn't meant to be. It's just what a harbor without farmland becomes, told plainly, three hundred years on.

Curiosity never retires. Neither does the sea's invitation. Live curiously →

Sources & Further Reading

Gov. Samuel Cranston to the Board of Trade, Dec. 5, 1708 — Online Review of Rhode Island History

Newport Historical Society, “A Brief History of Newport”

Newport Historical Society, “‘That Awful Spectacle’: Masking the City-by-the-Sea's Piratical Past”

Newport Historical Society, “Old Stone Mill” archive collection

Newport Historical Society, “History Bytes: How Jewish Was Aaron Lopez's Mercantile Operation?”

William L. Clements Library (University of Michigan), Samuel and William Vernon Collection

New England Historical Society, Aaron Lopez profile

Wikipedia, “Goat Island (Rhode Island)” (quoting the Salem Observer, Nov. 11, 1843)

Newport Mansions (Preservation Society of Newport County), Hunter House

Note: this article draws on institutional archives, one primary colonial-era document, and cross-checked secondary sources current as of 2026, following the Nonfiction Collaboration Playbook's sourcing and revision process.