The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.
The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.
Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.
Fern L. Nesson
Little Compton, Rhode island, a small rural and extraordinarily beautiful old seaside town in the quietest part of Rhode Island has several claims to national fame. The land originally named Sakonnet (“the black goose comes”), belonged to the Sakonnet tribe, led in the 17th century by Sachem-Squaw Awashonks, the niece of the renowned Chief Massasoit of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The first Europeans settled in Little Compton in 1674. In 1675, war broke out between the Narragansett and Wampanoag tribes, led by Metacomet, the son of Massasoit (also called “King Philip”) and the British settlers of New England.
Attempting to stay clear of the fray, Benjamin Church, one of Little Compton’s original settlers, Benjamin agreed with Awashonks that neither the tribe nor the settlers would join in the fighting. King Philip’s war raged for two years across Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire and Maine and in 1676, the battles reached Mount Hope,Rhode Island, a few miles from Little Compton. At this point, the settlers and the Sakonnets combined to fight against Metacomet. The Rhode Island Guide describes the culminating events of the War in lively detail:
“[King Philip’s War] was an armed conflict between a confederation of Native American Indian tribes led by Metacomet, chief of the Wampanoag, who was also called Philip. The war was sparked by disputes over land and poor treatment of the Wampanoag by the British colonists. After three Wampanoag men were executed by Plymouth Colony in 1675, the natives attacked English settlements in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine. A confederation of colonists responded by calling out militia forces and attacking Narragansett settlements in Rhode Island and [in 1676] they overwhelmed King Philip’s forces.
On August 12, 1676 […] Little Compton’s Benjamin Church led the small band that finally captured King Philip. Church described the final scene thus:
‘Some of Captain Church’s Indians took hold of him [Philip] by his stockings, and some by his small breeches, being otherwise naked, and drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast he looked like. Captain Church then said, forasmuch as he had caused many an Englishman’s body to be unburied, and to rot above ground, that not one of his bones should be buried. And calling [Alderman] an old Indian executioner, bid him behead and quarter him. . . . And so [Alderman] went to work, and did as he was ordered. Philip having one very remarkable hand, being much scarred, occasioned by the splitting of a pistol in it formerly, Captain Church gave the head and that hand to Alderman […]'”
Rhode Island Guide.
Admirably, the Guide assigns the blame for the war on the English settlers’ violations of native rights and predation of territory. It stresses that, although the losses were great on both sides, they were most devastating to the natives and were squarely the fault of the settler’s aggressions:
“The war greatly affected both sides. The Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes were almost exterminated. English villages and towns suffered severe damage and roughly a tenth of the men who fought in the war died. The final acts of the victors in this war, which had resulted from the first flagrant violation by the English settlers of an agreement [between them and the natives] set the tone for future relations between the races and undoubtedly had permanent influences on the attitude of the Indians in dealing with the expropriators of their lands.”
Things quieted down considerably in Little Compton after 1676 and haven’t picked up much ever since. With one notable exception: the Rhode Island Red:
“Rhode Island [agriculture is] noted for […] white corn meal […] and Rhode Island Red chickens. The corn meal is made from white hard ‘ flint ‘ corn, ground slowly (to avoid frictional heat) between old-fashioned millstones turned by water-power. From the resulting meal the famous Rhode Island johnnycake is made.”
One can still purchase Gray’s Mill stoneground johnnycake meal at Wilbur’s General Store in Little Compton (and can eat johnnycakes for breakfast at the store café but it cannot be said that the taste for johnnycakes has spread much beyond Rhode Islands’s border (if at all.) But it is a totally different story with Rhode Island Reds. These Little Compton chickens have achieved world-wide fame.
“Rhode Island Red hens were developed in Little Compton. Captain William Tripp and […] John Macomber […] began poultry experiments in 1854, crossing Malay and Java cocks with Cochin China hens, and then crossing the resulting breed with Light Brahmas, Plymouth Rocks, and Brown Leghorns, the final product being a breed with both a high egg yield and sound flesh for the table. The name is generally credited to Isaac C. Wilbur of Little Compton; and the Red was recognized as a legitimate breed at the Providence Poultry Show in 1895.”
Rhode Island Guide 94-5.
Even today, on the small green of the part of Little Compton called Adamsville, pride of place is still accorded to the Rhode Island Red Hen Monument. “A pointed granite stone on which is a bronze plaque commemorating the origin of this notable breed.”
Rhode Island Guide 94.
August, 2023
