The affluent beach community of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, sits on the westernmost edge of the state at the beginnings of Long Island Sound. The town itself terminates just before a long spit of sand—Napatree Point—stretches a mile and a half out into the ocean. Up until 1938, Fort Road used to run out to the end of the point, summer homes lining it all the way down to Fort Mansfield.
Fort Mansfield, constructed in 1898 as part of an initiative to fortify the East Coast of the United States, was maintained by the Army through a post of at least six men up until the decommission of the batteries in 1926. The luxury homes were built not long afterward. The Hurricane of 1938 came not long after that and made short work of everything on Napatree Point. The houses were washed into the bay and the road disappeared.
Today, all that remains of the fort are two out of the three original batteries. (One has since slid into the ocean due to erosion.) Mostly, the ruins are notable because of their proximity to Watch Hill—only a mile and a half walk along the public beach before you duck up a little path cut into the bluff and emerge onto the top of the old fort.
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| My brother Manning stands on a part of the old fort; photo by Kayla Safran |
I had the luck to visit Fort Mansfield last Friday—a warm, misty day up in Rhode Island. Early season beachgoers dotted the beach as we made the trek out to the end, seemingly oblivious of the ruins lurking in the vegetation at the far end of the point. We crept through the rocks and up the bluff and stood looking down over the ruined fort.
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The truth is that these abandoned places have always been of endless curiosity to me. Some of my favorite adventures include abandoned houses, barns, and dairy farms. It’s not—as might seem the case—simply an interest in history. The history you read above I treat as something more like a prelude or postlude—more like a DVD bonus feature, if you will. I really don’t have much interest in the politics or history behind the fort—more of an interest in the people who were there and what they were like.
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| My brother and I explore the fort; photo by Kayla Safran |
The fort, in that respect, was somewhat of a disappointment. There was not much evidence of the soldiers once stationed there. The bowl carved out by the dunes by the forts was likely the location of the barracks—but everything was being choked out by vegetation. It would have been a wild scramble through poison ivy and other friends to see anything of interest down in the dunes.
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But why that interest? Even I am somewhat at a loss to explain it. It’s not—as I mentioned—merely historical. There’s something very human about an abandoned building; its former residents or workers leave behind not merely a physical presence (in the forms of plates or wheels or tools), but an unnameable, incorporeal presence as well. I guess they call them ghost towns for a reason.
Not that I’m admitting to belief in ghosts, I simply have a fascination with the idea that people were once here and now they are gone. One of the best books I’ve read that delves into the subject ghost towns and the obsession that some people have with them is Jonathan Raban’s nonfiction work Bad Land, about the lonely plains of eastern Montana.
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| Tomboy, CO (near Telluride); photo by Taylor Coe |
The narrative of Raban’s book focuses on the Wollaston family and their difficulties in “homesteading” in Montana during the 1930s and 40s. One of the adventures Raban describes in the book is his trip out into backcountry Montana with the homesteaders’ grandson Mike Wollaston to find the old family property. The description of Wollaston examining the ruins captures the ghost town spirit:
“Here, picking over the scant wreckage of the family farm, he was daydreaming these fragments back to life again; the parlor rising from the grass, new cedar rafters making a grid of the blue sky.
“He stood in a dip, like the crater from a small bomb. ‘This was a fine root cellar they had…’ Near the collapsed cellar a blistered pipe stuck out of the earth. ‘Well-casing,’ Mike said. He flipped a quarter into the pipe. The coin didn’t fall far before it made a hollow, liquid plop. ‘They must have had a little windmill here to pump the water to the house.’ He was building the windmill in his head as he spoke.”
(from Bad Land, by Jonathan Raban, pp. 100-101)
It’s not so much an issue of history; Raban and Wollaston are intrigued partly by the history of people moving across the Great Plains and trying to settle in Montana, but they’re more interested in the details. They’re trying to recreate the lives that played out on the homestead. How did these people live? What would if have been like?
Earlier in the book, Raban makes another interesting observation:
“An emigrant myself, trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West, I took the ruins personally. From the names in the graveyards, I thought I knew the people who had come out here: Europeans, mostly of my grandparents’ generation, for whom belief in America, and its miraculous power of individual redemption, was the last great European religion. Faith in a bright future was written into the carpentry of every house.”
(ibid, pp. 11-12)
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In some sense, I think we all take these places personally in ways similar to Raban. It’s hard not to do so—these people, despite separations of distance, time, and (possibly) social class, weren’t so different from us. Our lot, so to speak, in the present day, is much the same. They tried very hard to create something that would work and it failed. The reasons differ from place to place, but that dream is still there. The quest to be original and make a place for yourself.
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| Gilman, CO (near Leadville); photo by Taylor Coe |
Visiting these places, I think we all unconsciously think about these things. Of course it was fun to climb around the ruins of the fort…but I couldn’t help but think that men used to march around on top of the same concrete not so long ago, manning the guns and playing war games. What was it like?
See more:
Raban, Jonathan. Bad Land. New York: Vintage, 1997.
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