A birdhouse beckons.

Plum Beach in North Kingstown is a rural waterfront neighborhood, with houses dotting hilly, winding roads between Route 1A and Narragansett Bay. Many residents here enjoy views of the water, the Jamestown Bridge and the restored Plum Beach Lighthouse.

Spring Street and Lloyd Road are the main waterfront streets. Plum Beach is immediately south of Route 138, and that road divides this neighborhood from Plum Point, which is north of the highway.

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Plum Beach

Plum Beach is part of Saunderstown village, and like Saunderstown, it has a casual, laid-back elegance, a leftover from its days as a summer vacation destination for the well-heeled.

“Plum Beach has this very established, old Yankee, threadbare Yankee feeling about it,” said Marsha Welch, principal owner and broker of Marsha Welch Real Estate, which is based in Wickford.

Today, Plum Beach is mainly a year-round residential neighborhood, but some of the houses are second homes, according to Welch and other real-estate agents who work in North Kingstown.

Many properties here have been in the same family for three or four generations, agents said.

The Plum Beach Club — a family tennis, swimming and boating club — is open during the summer months, and it is where neighbors and old friends connect.

The Plum Beach Lighthouse is another point of pride here. Initial construction of the lighthouse was completed in 1899. It was abandoned in 1941, 1after it was declared obsolete by the Coast Guard due to construction of a bridge connecting North Kingstown and Jamestown. Before its restoration in 2003, the deteriorating, rusty lighthouse was almost whisked out of Rhode Island by a developer who wanted to move it to Quincy, Mass.

But a longtime admirer, Shirley Silvia, a legal secretary from Portsmouth, formed Friends of the Plum Beach Lighthouse, which raised the money to save it.

There were a handful of properties listed for sale last week in Plum Beach, ranging from $299,900 for a dilapidated cottage on an acre at 40 Plum Beach Rd., to $2.65 million for a 5,862-square-foot, cedar-shingled contemporary Colonial at 137 Lloyd Rd.

Other houses for sale include 100 Top Hill Rd. ($675,000); 97 Champlin Rd. ($725,000); 101 Tefft St. ($985,000); 199 Lloyd Rd. ($999,500); and 181 Lloyd Rd. ($1,375,000).

POPULATION: (North Kingstown, 2000) 26,326

MEDIAN HOUSE PRICE: (North Kingstown, 2007) $376,000

INTERESTING FACT: During the Hurricane of 1938, the keeper of the Plum Beach Lighthouse, John Ganza, and a visiting substitute keeper, Edwin Babcock strapped themselves down inside the lighthouse and survived the storm.

cdunn@projo.com