The new year in Rhode Island has dawned as dark as any in recent memory.

The weak local and national economies have left staggering state budget deficits as spending outstrips tax collections, forcing cuts in services and consideration of tax reduction rollbacks or even tax increases. There is little help on the horizon.

Job growth was meager last year and will not get much stronger this year. The small gains in the state’s personal income and gross state product have slipped below national averages.

Property owners are still looking for the bottom of the housing price slump. Consumers bought less during the holidays. Energy costs, including gasoline and home heating fuel, are at or near record highs.

The state is stuck in a slow growth region and new census figures show Rhode Island’s population has slipped in each of the last four years. The country is inching toward recession and if the six-year expansion ends and turns negative, it will pull many states, including Rhode Island, with it.

As I prepared a forecast of Rhode Island’s economy, the data was so dismal that I decided to get out of the office for a different view. I headed for the ocean and stopped at a spot I’d passed by hundreds of times — Blithewold.

I walked the grounds of the 33-acre estate in Bristol, on Narragansett Bay, and learned about the fascinating history of Augustus Stout Van Wickle, the coal baron from Pennsylvania who developed the property.

But I had a question.

Of all the places he could have lived, why did he pick Rhode Island?

The answer has to do with location, world-class universities, a culture of innovation and quality of life — all attributes that Rhode Island can still exploit to avoid in the future the type of economic pit we are in now.

Here’s what Blithewold has to teach:

Van Wickle was a New Jersey native who came to love Rhode Island while he studied at Brown University. After graduating in 1876, he went to work in his father’s anthracite coal mining business in Hazleton, Pa., and later married Bessie Pardee, daughter of a wealthy coal mine owner.

The couple spent summers on Narragansett Bay. After they had their first child, and were expecting a second, they began looking for a summer home. Van Wickle was fascinated by innovative technology and met John B. Herreshoff, whose company built the best boats in the world. Van Wickle bought a 72-foot steam yacht from Herreshoff Manufacturing Co. for $100,000. Because he needed a berth on the water and wanted to be near the boat builder, he acquired property in Bristol in 1895 and renamed it Blithewold, Old English for “happy woodland.”

Van Wickle entertained on the yacht and at the estate, while his wife developed the fertile grounds with giant sequoias, bamboo forests and other one-of-a-kind trees and plants. Visitors from up and down the East Coast came to Blithewold, which became prominent in the financial, political, social, diplomatic and horticultural worlds.

Van Wickle also became a local benefactor and donated money for the Van Wickle Gates at Brown University, as well as several buildings on campus.

After Van Wickle died in a skeet-shooting accident, his widow married William Leander McKee, a businessman who had his offices in Boston. He moved his family into their winter home on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston but kept Blithewold as their summer retreat because of the easy commute to do business in Boston and New York. He also liked inventions and drove the newest Packards, Simplexes, Cadillacs and Locomobiles through the streets of Bristol. He once allowed a biplane to land on the estate’s lawn.

After the stock market crash in 1929, McKee sold his Boston house and made Blithewold their year-round home, where he and his successors lived for generations. The last owner, Marjorie Van Wickle Lyon, left the estate to the Heritage Foundation of Rhode Island, which maintains the property.

Blithwold’s heyday was 100 years ago, but its lessons are still timely.

Though Rhode Islanders will suffer through short-term pain to solve the state deficit crisis and restructure government, the reasons why Van Wickle moved here can still be exploited. They are among the long-term changes that Rhode Islanders need to focus on to create a new economy and business climate so they won’t have to go through the trauma ever again.

Here are a few ideas, based on the Blithewold experience:

•Students from around the world attend Rhode Island’s colleges and universities because they are among the best anywhere, by anyone’s ranking. There has to be a plan to encourage them to become part of the community, and then keep them here or coax them to return. They have the brains and fresh ideas that will build businesses and jobs.

•The creative-economy culture on which Rhode Island was built has to be reborn by encouraging innovation in existing companies and new knowledge-based industries that create the good-paying jobs for the future.

•The state has an excellent location in the middle of the economic corridor between Boston and New York. While the highway and rail system serves the state well, T.F. Green Airport needs to be expanded into a regional transportation hub; and the bus system needs to be improved to give lower-income residents access to jobs and communities.

•Narragansett Bay brings tourism and commerce. It is one of the elements that provides a unique quality of life here that attracts a wide variety of people who bring new ideas and vitality to the state. It should be protected and treasured.

At Blithewold, walking across the lawns at dusk, lights popped on around the bay. It’s clear that Rhode Island is still a place where many, including countless outsiders, want to live and do business.

The basics are here to create a better economy. Rhode Islanders should build on them. It’s been done before.

jkostrze@projo.com