The sign above indicates that the village of Adamsville, which is part of Little Compton, Tiverton and Westport, Mass., was incorporated in 1675. The bronze plaque, left, honors the Rhode Island Red Rooster.

Art Mello, of Tiverton, checks on a ZIP code at the Adamsville post office.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

Politically, the village of Adamsville is part of Little Compton. Geographically, it is part of three towns and two states, Little Compton, Tiverton and Westport, Mass. Socially, it is a place where everyone seems to know everybody else.

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Adamsville

“At one time, a fifth of the whole town was named Wilbor,” noted Carlton Brownell, Little Compton’s unofficial town historian.

The flinty spirit of the Pilgrims is alive here, along with a friendly, unpretentious Yankee sensibility. Many residents visiting the Town Hall, library or any of the small local businesses are greeted by name, but even strangers are welcomed with a prompt offer of assistance. Things seem to get done quickly and efficiently, without a fuss.

“Little Compton is sort of a subtle place,” Brownell said. “...It’s a rural community ... it’s a very sophisticated rural community.”

The connection to Colonial America is in ample evidence, and not only in the carefully preserved historic architecture. A gravestone in the cemetery at The Commons, Little Compton’s town center, marks the resting place of “Elisabeth Paebodie, daughter of the Plymouth Pilgrims John Alden and Priscilla Mullin, the first white woman born in New England.”

The Yankee virtues of thrift and frugality also come to mind in Adamsville.

“No point in heating it,” Grayton Waite, the owner of Gray’s Store, responded when a visitor mentioned the chilly temperature inside the Main Street landmark. Gray’s Store was built in 1788 by Samuel Church, and was the first post office in Little Compton.

Waite said it is the oldest general store in the state, and it is still open seven days a week except for the winter months, when there are reduced hours. Gray’s sells a few antiques, toys, jonnycake meal and cigars, among other sundries. Waite keeps a corner of the store, the old post office, as it was in the past, complete with antique letters.

Little Compton’s coastal location and unspoiled beauty has brought a large number of summer residents, but anyone who loves New England and its seasons could not fail to be charmed by the bare trees and stark landscape of this town in late fall.

“Nobody goes through Little Compton accidentally,” Brownell said. “...We are a peninsula. For many, many years, people just didn’t get here. It was always just out of the way.”

Waite said that Adamsville, settled by a Baptist community, has always been the part of town where “the common folk” live. The Old Stone Baptist Church, in Tiverton, was the Adamsville congregation’s house of worship, and the site for many years of an annual clambake that was an important social event in the area.

“Adamsville — it’s a hamlet, and it was always just far enough away from The Commons to have their own store. It always has been, to many people on this side of the town, they always thought Adamsville was a little more isolated,” Brownell said. “ ‘Over east’ meant the Adamsville area,” he added. “People used to be very, very insular here. ... ‘Over east’ ... was calling them down a little bit.”

Little Compton, a onetime farm community, is now a place where the population (3,593 in the last census) more than doubles in the summertime, and “probably only three farmers actually make a living at farming,” Brownell said. Brownell, who is 89, said his father was a dairy and poultry farmer. “Our business is the summer people,” he said.

Summer residents are “mostly people who like quiet. They don’t want to go to Newport,” Brownell said. He acknowledged with a laugh that “a few [summer residents] have built hideous places,” and they “sometimes don’t care” what people think about their taste in architecture.

Architecture in Adamsville, as in all of Little Compton, comes at a premium price. Although the town has the lowest property tax rate in Rhode Island, the median sales price for houses in town last year was $595,000, second only to Block Island. All property sales in town are also subject to a one-time conservation tax.

There were 38 properties for sale in Little Compton in the state’s Multiple Listing Service recently, ranging from $259,000 for a mobile home to $1,995,000 for a four-bedroom house on Bailey’s Ledge. Only one house was listed in Adamsville, a five-bedroom house built in the 1980s with an asking price of $579,500.

The Barn is a popular breakfast spot in Adamsville, and one of the few restaurants in town. Brownell said a number of local eateries in town were hit by fire in recent years. Abraham Manchester’s Restaurant and Tavern, a historic building that was once a general store, and which was right next door to The Barn, burned down in 2002. Commons Lunch, in the center of Little Compton, reopened about two months ago after a fire that burned it to the ground, Brownell said. And the Country Harvest restaurant, on West Main Road west of Adamsville, was destroyed by fire in the late 1990s, but reopened in 2000.

Little Compton’s out-of-the-way location attracts independent spirits, but also requires members of the community to bond and work together, residents say.

“Little Compton still does have a lot more community spirit than most small towns,” Brownell said.