grounds. When fall winds whipped and
hurricanes menaced the coast, the tribes
moved inland.
In 1660, white settlers bought the land
and, for the two centuries that followed,
says Zachary Garceau of the Westerly
Historical Society, Misquamicut was used
for agricultural purposes.
“Courtland B. Bliven was the first person
who realized the potential of the area,
and in the 1890s, he built a summer cottage
here and started convincing other
people to do that too,” says Garceau.
Between 1894 and 1903, twenty-eight
cottages were constructed by the beach,
where you could get a fifty-foot lot for
$50. The place was renamed Pleasant
View, and tourism boomed.
“That was really when it started to get
going, and they started building a lot of
hotels,” Garceau says.
By 1913, the settlement jumped to 129
buildings. Then, in 1914, both fire and
flood destroyed many village cottages
and businesses. The 1918 flu pandemic
lingered for a while, but Misquamicut
and the town of Westerly fended it off
better than most places with intermittent
business closures and enforced quarantines
in the town’s hard-hit north end.
Then, finally, a period of strength and
prosperity, which included the official
village name change from Pleasant View
to Misquamicut (another town in northern
Rhode Island laid claim to the former).
But it was never meant to last, this calm
before a trifecta of storms that put Misquamicut’s
resilience to the test.
“The 1938 hurricane threw a wrench
in a lot of the plans they had,” says Garceau
of the booming economy. In Misquamicut
alone, 150-mile-per-hour winds destroyed
369 homes and claimed forty-one lives,
including a group of picnickers who sought
shelter in a cottage that was swept out
to sea.
The village underwent a period of
intense rebuilding, then was hit by another
major hurricane in 1944 and Hurricane
Carol a decade later. Carol washed away
more than 200 cottages — so many, in fact,
that the state condemned a mile-long
stretch of land to create Misquamicut
Beach.
Floods also tormented the region on
and off for years, including in 2010 in
Westerly’s north end. The Ocean Community
Chamber of Commerce and its
president, Lisa Konicki, raised $63,000
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JULY 2020 89