The town of Warwick, R. I., is not to-day of remarkable interest to the antiquary or seeker after the venerable relics of bygone days. It has “come out into the newness” of our nineteenth century life. Its streams respond to the music of the flying shuttle and the turning wheel with a dash and hurry almost human in their restlessness. Half 8a score of flourishing manufacturing villages lend their potent aid to make it the sixth town, in population, in the State having a larger number of inhabitants to the square mile than any other in the American union.

The old Colonial and Revolutionary dwellings were largely, doubtless, of a humble sort, and have given place to the more prosperous farm-houses and pretentious mansions of a generation that knows not the ways of the fathers. The busy Pawtuxet and its tributary streams, partly excused from the drudgery of mill-turning by the more potent substitutes of the later day, are pumped away to quench the thirst of the distant city whose contentions a quarter of a millenium ago drove Samuell Gorton[1] and 9his colleagues to seek their homes in the Shawomet wilderness, there to become the founders of a State.

Yet the Warwick of to-day, in its summer dress, well repays the visitor who may chance upon its hospitable soil. All along its beautiful shores arise pleasant homes and hostelries for the accommodation of the summer visitor; while inland, the rolling hills, prosperous with growing grass and coming harvests, are not without a quiet and restful beauty which pleases the eye, and solaces the mind and heart. In the little hamlet of Apponaug, close by Coweset Bay, the brave new Town Hall, one of the finest in New England, testifies to the enterprise as well as to the prosperity of the people. Its newness is in harmonious touch with the prevalent appearance of the country around it. There is 10nothing old, apparently, in old Warwick but the sub-soil and rocks, and here and there a venerable tree antedating European occupation, beneath the branches of which Pomham and Soccononocco, with their dusky braves, may have sat and smoked the pipe of peace with the men of Massachusetts, or taken counsel as to the best means of circumventing the united wiles of the head-sachem of the Narragansetts, Miantonomi, and his persistent allies, the pale-faced “Gortonoges.”

Yet old Warwick has a history surpassed in interest by none other of the New England settlements. Its founder was a man of intellectual and moral force, worthy to rank with Roger Williams, William Bradford, and the other noble founders of our liberties. He was a man much misrepresented in his day 11and generation, and but little remembered and understood even in our own time, when history is being studied anew in the light of evolution and a true historical method, and reconstructed on the principles of enlightened scholarship and impartial justice. The later history of Warwick also has much of interest for the patriotic American. On its shores the first blow of our Revolutionary struggle was struck, in the capture and destruction of the British schooner Gaspee; while the heights of Warwick Neck were then crowned with a fort, long since dismantled, for the protection of the settlements around Coweset Bay from the attacks of the English.

It is the Warwick of the seventeenth century, not that of the eighteenth or nineteenth, that I would fain call to the minds of my readers,—the Warwick 12whose inland acres were covered with the primitive wilderness, where wolves and Indians were at home,[2] and the white man was a stranger; the Warwick which Samuell Gorton sought after being frozen out of Boston, banished from Plymouth and Pocasset, and driven by contentions from Providence and Pawtuxet.

Yonder, on Conimicut Point, he built his block-house,[3] and therein defied for a day and a night the force of Puritans and savages in equal numbers, aggregating more than four times his own, 13which Massachusetts sent against him; finally surrendering to superior battalions to prevent blood-shed. Farther south, at the head of Warwick Cove, a quiet arm of the Narragansett, stood his humble homestead, where he passed his declining years in the honorable service of the Town and Commonwealth which he helped to found; the land surrounding which has remained in unbroken succession in the hands of his descendants to the present day. Near by, John Greene, John Wickes, Randall Holden and the other men, good and true, who were his colleagues and supporters, cleared and tilled their allotted acres, making the wilderness to blossom as the rose.

Yes, there are after all some reminders of these primitive times besides the sub-soil and the ancient cedar by the 14Potowomut River; for yonder, at Rocky Point, the perennial clambake celebrates in aboriginal fashion and in their native haunts, the shore-feasts of the Indians. And down on Potowomut Neck which Warwick won for her own after long and litigious struggles, once the favorite camping ground of the aborigines, you may still pick up the flint arrow-heads which they fashioned and left behind them three centuries ago. You may paddle up the Pawtuxet, under the over-arching branches of noble trees, into quiet reaches of the river, where the hum of cities and the bustle of civilization seem remote indeed. And in the new Town Hall at Apponaug you may shut out the noises of the day, and curiously con the ancient records of the Town;—you may see the very pages on which these pioneers of a new civilization 15bore testimony to their humble beginnings, and told, in part, the story of the building of a State. I have searched these records faithfully—here, and in the library of the Historical Society at Providence, where other precious manuscripts are preserved. Some of these men I have come to know. I have thought their thoughts after them in deciphering their writings. I have felt their throbbing human hearts, laboring to lay the foundations of a Commonwealth wherein liberty should be secure under the protection of law; wherein the civil power should have no control over the consciences of men. Something of this would I lay before the impartial reader; in justice to these men who so labored that we might enter into their labors and reap the ripe fruits thereof; in justice also to ourselves, that we as 16American citizens may not remain ignorant of this forgotten chapter in the noble story of the beginnings of our National life.