MY WIFE, VICTORIA, and I motored down to West Greenwich a month ago to visit the village of Nooseneck — who can resist a place with such a name? — and in particular to find Hell’s Half Acre. This was supposed to be at the intersection of the old New London Turnpike and Hopkins Hollow Road. By 1850 it was, according to a survey of the town by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, a “backwoods red-light district, where prostitution, gambling and murder were common.” A tourist attraction!

But we found that every road had forest on both sides. Landmarks were almost nonexistent. The few road signs only confirmed that we were not where we thought our map said we were. We never found Hell’s Half Acre or Nooseneck.

In 1741, West Greenwich became Rhode Island’s 17th town when it was split off from what became East Greenwich. In 1790, the population of its 50.1 square miles reached 2,054. Thereafter, its population fell for almost two centuries. The New London Turnpike opened in 1821 with commercial expectations that were dashed as water and rail transport trumped turnpikes throughout the nation. Farming was difficult, markets were distant and most industries failed, except for those involving timber, mainly white pine, oak, chestnut and birch.

Saw mills and shingle mills fueled the growth of Nooseneck, the only settlement in the town that ever achieved the status of a village. Its name, used as early as 1819, harks back not to any frontier justice at Hell’s Half Acre (which came later) but to the style of traps used to snare deer. Textile mills started up but failed to flourish. Most mills and their hamlets had vanished by the turn of the 20th Century, and Nooseneck itself relapsed to hamlet status. Many of the modest Greek Revival houses on Nooseneck Hill Road had disappeared and much of the woodland in the eastern third of the town had been harvested by the time the Big River Reservoir was proposed in 1966. By then, the entire population of West Greenwich had fallen to about 800.

The Rhode Island Water Supply (now Resources) Board took by eminent domain about 8,600 acres, or 13.5 square miles, of land in eastern West Greenwich, the largest parcel of public land in the state, and more than a quarter of the town’s area. It cost the state $7.5 million to take land from 351 owners, land that would now be worth at least $100,000 an acre. Nooseneck and other hamlets were liquidated, yet the reservoir was not needed at the time and remains unbuilt to this day. Families packed it in when it turned out they didn’t have to. In 1990, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded that the land was too sandy and porous to support a reservoir; it recommended a system of deep wells instead. The same year, the project was blocked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because the proposed 3,400-acre lake would have drowned 10 ponds and 17 miles of streams that added up, in the federal reckoning, to 575 acres of “protected” wetlands.

The irony of the EPA’s ruling is not lost today on Kevin Breene, who was 13 when his family was forced to sell 2,800 acres of land to the state. Breene’s family tree goes back 11 generations in West Greenwich. Today he is the town administrator. A week ago, he and Police Chief Ronald Lepre took me and Brown sophomore Daniel Bowen, an intern at Grow Smart Rhode Island, on a tour of the town’s various landmarks. We crossed a bridge over the actual Big River, circled the former summer colony around Lake Mishnock (about the only place in town where you can see more than one house at a time), and even drove by Hell’s Half Acre — many trees, no whorehouse. We saw the Rhode Island Desert, off of Nooseneck Hill Road. We passed by the gravestone of the Breene family’s colonial patriarch, who had settled in Greenwich in 1680. It reads: “Here were buried Theophilus Whale, ‘the singular good old man,’ born in England about 1616, [who] died on this hill about 1720, and his wife Elizabeth Mills of Virginia. Their descendants endure even unto this day.”

Would the Whales weep or smile (or both) at the fate of West Greenwich? Compare its loss of potentially productive land and 200 houses and buildings with the fate of Scituate, whose citizens were parted from about half of their land, including 1,195 houses and buildings, to make way for the Scituate Reservoir, completed in 1926. At least Scituate was not left high and dry. Today, it has a lovely lake of 5.3 square miles. Below lies an Atlantis of submerged villages, visible from the diving bell of the imagination. Maybe it compensates Scituaters of a more romantic turn of mind for the losses of their ancestors.

For West Greenwich, recompense of sorts comes by way of an influx of more than 4,000 suburbanites since 1966, lifting the town to the third-highest rank in median household income (after Barrington and East Greenwich). Some of their McMansions achieve a sort of colonial grandeur. Others . . . well, they may bring a smile if you can see them through the woods as you drive by. As for its “historical character,” West Greenwich’s forests may be said to have preserved it at a point as distant in time as any Rhode Island city or town, circa Theophilus Whale.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).