Antiquing in Chepachet Rhode Island

After visiting the cemetery and general store we were all ready to check out the three antique stores, The Town Trader, The Old Post Office Antiques, and Old Stone Mill Antiques and Treasures, that exist right next to each other in the reportedly highly haunted little village of Chepachet RI. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day. The sky was bright and blue, the weather was fair, and everyone was in a good mood after coming out of a long winter.

I am used to going “antiquing” in Maine where I can find dirt cheap treasures in mounds of rusted junk piles. So far my visits to Rhode Island antique stores were far more refined and expensive so I figured Chepachet would be no exception but it really was. These antique stores all sold a variety of goodies for exceptionally reasonable prices. Everything from old cast iron pans, creepy probably possessed clown dolls, old paintings, furniture, and random little piles of vinyl records. And they were all located in very old buildings which were a delight to poke around. The Old Stone Mill antique store had the most to offer as far as ambiance with its exposed post and beams, wooden floors, and masonry. Clearly this was once the heart of this whole area and you could feel the history emanating from it.

On this particular day I didn’t end up coming home with anything although I had strongly considered a cast iron “pancake ball” pan as my travel companion called it. It was Swedish and I was unfamiliar with the particular word on the label but I’d like to hope it translates as pancake balls because that’s hilarious. He did end up going home with an old copy of a Julia Childs cookbook which we’d later flip through and see if ANY of the recipes were devoid of butter. Clearly we’re both easily entertained. And nostalgic of growing up on a steady diet of PBS.

And speaking of food – we were able to walk a little ways down the street and eat lunch at the Black Forest Café which was the best way to round out the afternoon. I had a turkey and gouda sandwich and my companion had a Rueben. We both behaved ourselves and didn’t get a slice of cheese cake or any of the other delicious looking goodies at the dessert counter.

April 11, 2021 1

Brown’s and Hopkin’s – The US’s Oldest Consecutively Run General Store – Chepachet Rhode Island

I admit it was the Chepachet Cemetery which initially drew us in but after that there was the entire center of this little village was was supposed to be just as haunted and even better it was mostly antique shops that were said to be “very affordable” according to the reviews online. How could we resist?

But before we even got that far we checked out Brown’s and Hopkin’s: the US’s “oldest consecutively run general store.” It started its life as a residence and hattery in 1799 but switched over to a general store with new owners in 1809 which it has stayed until this day.

As you can see the outside of it still screams general store and the inside has a warm and inviting feeling of stepping into the past. It has the sweet worn hardwood floors of a life well lived and I was delighted to find it still had a penny candy counter. In fact the whole place was just adorable with two floors of random country chic products from homemade soaps to farm décor. As always I loved the variety of cast iron items and ended up with a little cast iron hare magnet. My companion gleefully bought some amusing tea towels and we both had fun guessing who the historical figures the little felted dolls were supposed to represent.

And to top of the experience the staff here were as cheerful as the day was sunny. It was al together a great experience even without meeting the ghosts that are supposed to haunt the property. It was only a hop and a skip to the antique stores which made it all the better.

April 11, 2021 2

Acotes Hill Cemetery – Chepachet Rhode Island

I know I am a little late starting out this year with my adventuring but truth be told I did attempt to go out a few weeks ago – sadly that destination ended up as such a clusterfuck I didn’t write about it (or even have photos to show off as my camera randomly decided the memory card was not readable.) Some days are just hard like that – and you find yourself arriving at a closed sandwich shop after the GPS sends you backtracking for half an hour after already driving for two and a half. And then you find out just how badly out of shape you are as you huff, puff, and puke trying to reach the end of a very short hike, and to top it all off you end up locked in a park after hours because you couldn’t get your ass back to the car in time. I didn’t want to ward people off from this otherwise lovely location so we decided we’d go back at a different time and try again.

Which brings me to my last little adventure which was MUCH more pleasant! We had decided a leisurely stroll through the village of Chepachet Rhode Island was a better option for the beginning of this year’s blog. The drive was reasonable, the destinations were super easy to find, and it was a gorgeous spring day.

We started with Acotes Hill Cemetery (alternately called Chepachet cemetery and/or Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Glocester #23) which is said to be quite haunted. Or at least that’s what the book we found it in claimed. It was named after a mystery man who was buried here in an unmarked grave. He was just travelling through town when he booked a room at the Kimball Hotel. This is ultimately where he died of a mysterious fatal wound and a fall down the stairs. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that his death was ever investigated as a murder though it sounds like it probably was. This may just be because justice for “half-breeds” (people of both white and indigenous descent) was hard to come across in those days – and maybe that’s why his ghost is said to sometimes haunt these hills.

The cemetery is surprisingly vast and so indicative of burial grounds here in New England. At it’s center there is what was likely the groundskeeper’s house in the past just in front of an old dug crypt. The stones are scattered over a series of rolling hills and a few share the shade a handful of creepy gnarled trees. It’s something from a Stephen king novel.

I noticed when I was there the stones were very chronologically mixed up. Usually cemeteries are somewhat organized by broad age categories and I was told this was an old cemetery so I looked for the slate stones that would have been the markers for Revolutionary War era individuals but alas, I found none. This confusing set of circumstances ended up being because this cemetery is actually a gathering place of many other cemeteries in the area which had been disinterred and moved here.

The monuments here were more or less the usual series of boring marble stones although a few did catch my attention. A large angel looks over the grounds from the back and nearby a bronze of the Virgin Mary cradling a dying Jesus is situated in a corner. I didn’t really know what to make of it.

In any event it was a nice place for a little walk and a great way to start when exploring this sweet little corner of New England. To add to its charm it was also the site of a tiny “armed but bloodless” uprising between the People’s Rights faction and the Law and Order party in 1842. The leader of the People’s Rights Thomas Wilson Dorr surrendered peacefully but was still tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. However public sentiments were so strongly in favor of his cause that he only languished there for a few years before being released and he now enjoys a monument here in the cemetery.

April 11, 2021 2

The Enchanted Forest Abandoned Amusement Park Hope Valley RI

Last week’s adventures had a theme – abandoned theme parks! And we started with this one which was… an adventure. It always is.

It was another FaceBook suggestion which I have found to be a total coin toss when it comes to being worth it. I thought this was the place with the abandoned fairy village but no, that was a different Facebook suggestion which I will refind later.

In fact this place was kind of hard to find. It wasn’t really around too much civilization which you would expect of a theme park… The GPS played a few games with the street address before we finally arrived. There was a decrepit sign aside the road that led to a terrifyingly rough parking lot which had been nearly completely taken over by weeds and shrubs. The parking lot was paved but that isn’t’ saying much considering there was grass jutting out from the many cracks in it. This was like all the photos you see of current day Chernobyl, probably the sketchiest place we’ve been yet!

Things got even more creepy as we made our way towards the woods and found… a couch! Why? I have no goddamn idea but here it was, covered in spray paint, torn apart, but still in bizarrely good condition considering which suggests it hadn’t been there for long. Clearly this was where local teenagers came to drink. Been finding a lot of their secret hiding places as of late… maybe I am trying to find my own inner teen who didn’t really have much of a life back in the day, certainly less adventure than I do now.

Beyond the couch there were trails, of a sort, although there were no signs, no markers, no real suggestion that they were for people and not just overgrown deer paths. This place was supposed to have ruins scattered about but we didn’t come across much until we were fairly far down these paths. The first things looked like maybe the roof of a doghouse? And a wishing well nearby. From there we found what looked like an abandoned mini barn which some delightfully positive delinquent spray painted, “Someone loves you!” on the front of. You got to love life affirming graffiti. You, my dear tagger, have it right. Keep on shining!

The insides were of course covered and more typical of what you might expect. From here we crossed a little bridge, found some sort of open storage house decaying out here with perfectly good PVC still stacked up under them. From he we ended up wandering cluelessly onto a nearby golf course before going back into the woods from whence we came. This place was so overtaken with vegetation I felt like we were urban explorers trekking through Ingene Island trying to dodge nests of velociraptors…. and maybe a few pterodactyls.

When we came back to the parking lot I noticed trees blocked all of the Enchanted Forest’s sign except for what looked like “The END.” Fitting! And creepy! And of course when we got back to the car the one other person there had emerged from the thicket and was looking suspiciously at us. He was clearly a teenager, loitering about, maybe waiting for friends and we… were probably just a confusing sight to him with our unfamiliar baby faces.

Onto the next park!

September 26, 2020 1

Glen Farm Trail/Abandoned Ice House – Portsmouth RI

The East Coast got a little bit of a shake-up the other day as a tropical storm hit. Some of us even had tornado warnings. I was in Rhode Island and the damage here wasn’t quite so fierce. There was a lot of wind and then maybe 10 minutes of downpouring rain and then…. massive power outages. Which was the perfect motivation to go back outside on another little side quest. To the Glen Farm Trail!

I’ve never heard of the Glen Farm Trail but seeing as I was being offered to check it out I couldn’t really say no. I have been to a bunch of little trails in populous areas and although the city parks are adorable and well maintained they rarely have much interesting in them. This trail however had a lot of character.

For one going directly after a rain storm made for some interesting lighting that added just the right amount of whimsy. Secondly it cut through a slate forest – this region (and Boston) are where the slate was quarried that would later be made into those beautiful grave stones I am always admiring. So it was interesting to see the rock in it’s natural habitat as it were but it was better than that.

Here I found a bunch of No Trespassing signs and a fence which had been unceremoniously toppled.

“Some guy bought the surrounding property and is being a dick about it. The locals said ‘Fuck this fence’ and now we just walk over it.”

I appreciated the community spirit of mass rebellion. And I can see why they’d be so insistent. There was something really charming about this little forest and the weird slate walls that popped up here and there as well as the small slate bridges. But that wasn’t what we were here for. That would be an old abandoned ice house just sitting here in the woods looking adorable and sad all at the same time.

Now if you don’t know what an ice house is I’ll give you a brief run down. Back before electricity and refrigerators the only way you could get ice would to harvest it in the winter from lakes and rivers and ship it in insulated containers wherever it needed to go. The old “ice boxes” that predated our modern fridges ran off a block of ice replaced every day or so. It was a rich person’s luxury and a whole industry here in the North. A whole industry that died a rather sudden death with the invention of electricity and refrigeration.

I was delighted to find we could skip across the little river and enter this archaic structure. Apparently others had come before and just like the last place I went it was covered in graffiti which is always a source of entertainment for me. Good graffiti artists can do some really impressive work but bad graffiti artists… well they’re just hilarious. And frequently very confusing! But it’s all good fun to try and puzzle out.

After this we found a tiny ocean beach at the end of another of the trails. It’s been a long time since I have been oceanside. The smell of the salt and the lapping of the waves enlivened my spirit. We sat and watched someone flying a kite in the far distance and enjoyed the moment. It was a nice way to keep cool and calm.

I’d suggest this trail to anyone in the area as it seems to have just a little magic in it.

The Ice House:

The Little Beach:

The Trail Itself:

August 7, 2020 0

Simmons Pond Loop – Little Compton RI

I admit most of the time I am a lone hiker wandering the woods in search of spiritual inspiration but on this day I decided to be a little more amicable. I went out, clad in my mask, with a family – two small children in tow. We needed to go somewhere they would not die of exhaustion and need to be carried home so Simmons Pond it was, apparently an old favorite haunt. I was all the happier to tag along.

I admit this was out of my comfort zone because during the corona epidemic it was more peopled than I am used to… there was a large parking lot and it had quite a few cars in it. Hikers passed by at will and some were masked although others were not. But they say Rhode Island is one of only two states to have a decreasing risk of Corona so I tried to relax my newly acquired germaphobia just enough to at least enjoy myself out here in the open air.

It’s been interesting. I wasn’t even 200 feet up the trail before I saw something dark black in color move on the ground at the side of the path. I thought it might be a salamander or something so I looked a little harder. I didn’t see anything. So I shuffled my feet until I saw it again. It wasn’t a salamander. It was a baby ringneck snake. I had a brief discussion with myself, “Should I pick this little cutey up? The kids might find it interesting. This is your first outing with them – for the love of god don’t go all Crocodile Hunter on them. Be NoRmAl. Nooooormaaaaalllll”

Obviously I had no choice but to pick it up and then yell, “HEY! LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” Which caused some unrelated hikers to walk up from behind to check the situation out.

“Oh my God, that thing is TINY. HOW DID YOU SEE THAT?!”

The kids toddled up. I let them pet it before releasing it back into the bushes – forgetting to take a photo. We walked a ways down the path which was quaint and well maintained with all sorts of informative plaques about the local plant life and the various ruined foundations that were smattered about this once-farm. I was told this was the job of the local Boy Scouts to maintain. Wow. Where I am from the Boy Scouts whittle sticks… if they’re lucky. And that’s way cooler than what the Girl Scouts are up to — which is why I always wanted to be a Boy Scout. AH! Childhood memories of disappointment and confusion!

When we got to the pond we all sat down on its banks and enjoyed a wee picnic. The kids seemed to be lethally allergic to food in general so this was a bit of a circus but I was enjoying it. It was the perfect day for this sort of thing. After lunch had concluded mama wanted to stay behind with the kids and read a book so I wandered off with my remaining hiking companion to a little loop trail nearby and explored that for the next 20 or 30 minutes. The farther I went the less people there were and the calmer I became. I enjoyed poking around another large cellar hole that was overgrown with ferns. It provided a nice opportunity for photos even though I’d forgotten my actual camera and only had my cell phone.

It was a nice short walk – perfectly level – impossible to get lost on. When we got back the kids wanted to show me “a really huge scary bug” so I walked with them to a bench next to the water leaving the other adults behind. The bug had gone but the kids were thrilled to have me around. The little one got really close to the water’s edge and I pulled him back the first time but realizing it was only two inches of water and I was standing right there in case he toppled in I just let it go. I save my policing for matches and knives. This is likely why I don’t have children. On the way back the little squirts fought over who got to hold my hand.

“Is this…. usual?” I had to ask. “Your kids wanting to hold a stranger’s hand?”

“Well I mean I haven’t really had any female friends around them in a long time sooo….”

All and all this was a very pleasant place full of history and charm and I would highly suggest it to anyone who needs an easy amble. Or a place to walk the kiddoes. Or perhaps just someone who wants both a nature walk and to see a tiny old family cemetery which sits at it’s entrance.

July 9, 2020 0