Deep roots in Harmony brought Amy Burlingame back to town after years away at college and graduate school. And it didn’t hurt that her fiancé, who also attended Ponaganset High School, loves it here, too. The quiet, laid-back rural charm of Harmony in east Glocester, which is also conveniently near Smithfield and, further to the south and east, Providence, suits most residents who choose to live here.

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Burlingame, 28, grew up on Cooper Road in Harmony, where her parents operate a 70-acre Christmas tree farm. She left Rhode Island to go to the University of New Hampshire, and later moved to Connecticut for graduate school.

At the time, she said, her attitude was, “you grow up in Rhode Island, you get stuck in Rhode Island,” and she wanted to break free. Her brother, Rusty, moved to Alaska after meeting a woman from that state while attending Boston University. They are now married, and while Burlingame has visited her brother and sister-in-law in Alaska four or five times, she is now very happily living in Harmony.

“I couldn’t ask for a better situation,” Burlingame said. She works as a physician’s assistant at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, in North Providence, and in August, she and her fiancé moved into a 1939 farmhouse on her family’s property. It had been the longtime home of her aunt, who died earlier this year at age 95. Even though she’s living on a farm, Burlingame says she is only seven miles from work, and a 10-minute ride from Route 295. Her fiancé, an investment banker, is working in Boston, but he may eventually look for a job closer to home, she said.

Her parents live a little way down the street, in the farm’s main house, which is 250 years old, and her grandfather lives in a house on the other side of her parents’ place. On a recent unseasonably warm afternoon, Burlingame was outside playing with her dogs, while her grandfather, who is in his mid-80s, was chopping wood. She said she loves living near her family.

Many people who grew up in Harmony and other nearby towns leave Rhode Island for college or for their first jobs as young adults, then decide to return when they’re a little older, said Joann Silvia, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent who lives in Burrillville. “As a teen, they think there’s more to life than this, but then when they start their own families, they want to come back,” she said.

Silvia is the listing agent for a house on the market near the Burlingames on Cooper Road. The 1930 Arts & Crafts bungalow has 3,625 square feet of space and an asking price of $545,000. Silvia said there was recent interest in the house from a man who lives in Tennessee now, but who grew up in the neighborhood, near Waterman Lake.

Houses on the market in Harmony come in a variety of styles and prices. A tiny summer cabin on leased land has an asking price of $54,000; for year-round houses, available properties include a three-bedroom, one-bath cottage ($185,000), a three-bedroom, two-bath Cape built in 1985 ($350,000), and a 1980 contemporary in a gated compound with a new 30-by-30-foot heatedbarn with loft ($699,900). The highest asking price was $759,000 for a 1976 contemporary with four bedrooms.

“It’s a real mixture in the housing market,” Silvia said. There is little retail or commercial activity in the town, and that’s the way residents like it, and the reason newcomers move in, she said. “That’s the desirability; it keeps out the commercial look.”

“That’s my little joke,” Silvia added. “Everyone wants to live in Harmony.”