12.20.99
The South County Century -- 100 Years of Highlights

• 1900
  On Sept. 12, fire erupts atop the largest of Narragansett's Victorian hotels. It soon spreads to the famous casino and other businesses, eventually consuming not just those landmarks but the era of elegance itself. Even the wood roof on the stone Towers is destroyed; it will take years before it is rebuilt.
  
  At the Wakefield Opera House on Columbia Street, the entertainment is listed as "The Robin Hood, Jr. Burlesque -- 15 Pretty Girls, 10 Big Special Acts. Prices as usual, 25 cents, 35 and 50 cents.''
  
  
• 1906
  M ill bosses in Peace Dale tell weavers to run two looms at once. The workers strike, but soon find themselves competing for work with strikebreakers from Massachusetts. The wage in 1906? A dollar or two a day.
  
  
• 1909
  T he University of Rhode Island, then called the Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, gets a new name. It becomes Rhode Island State College, a name that would stick until the Kingston campus was designated a university in 1951. "Chicken plucking'' is listed as a class way back when.
  
  
• 1910
  Halley's Comet streaks across South County in the late spring of 1910. Young Jim Perry of Matunuck sees the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle while he is outside doing chores.
  
  "I know I was scared, as I knew nothing about a comet and thought the world was coming to an end,'' Perry recalled in a memoir he wrote before his death in 1991.
  
  "... I remember watching the sky as I was doing the chores, which I did as quickly as it was possible so I could get back in the house again.''
  
  
• 1917
  The 1917-1918 winter was one of the coldest on record. On Dec. 31, thermometers at Narragansett Pier read 19 below and Narragansett Bay freezes over.
  
  At the time "Bicycle Bill'' Stedman, who later ran a Wakefield bike shop, worked at the World War 1 Torpedo Station in Newport. When the bay froze over, it made it easier for Stedman to get home from work -- he just walked across the ice.
  
  
• 1919
  South County Hospital opens its doors on Nov. 15.
  
  
• 1922
  On May 3, Governor San Souci signs state prohibition enforcement act. No matter, bootlegging thrives, especially in South County, where surplus wartime engines are bolted onto boats and the liquor is ferried up Narragansett Bay.
  
  
• 1924
  Fred Smith opens a Dodge dealership in Wakefield, one of several franchises that pop up in South County as America's love affair with the automobile takes hold.
  
  
• 1925
  Westerly Hospital opens on Aug. 17, but David Titterington of Bradford got a sneak preview; the day before, Dr. J. Gordon Anderson relieves him of a bum appendix in the new hospital.
  
  
• 1929
  A swift rum-running vessel called the Black Duck is ambushed and shot up by the Coast Guard off Jamestown. Three of the four crewmen are killed and another maimed.
  
  
• 1930
  Like the rest of the country, South County is plunged into the Great Depression.
  
  
• 1933
  In a special election on May 1, Rhode Island voters repeal a law that flat-out wasn't working: prohibition. The vote was 150,292 to 20,927.
  
  The 300-seat Theatre-By-the Sea opens in Matunuck on Aug. 7 with a production of "Strictly Dynamite.''
  
  
• 1935
  Democrats seize control of state government on Jan. 1, by refusing to seat senators elected in South Kingstown and Portsmouth.
  
  
• 1938
  The 1938 Hurricane roars into an unprepared Rhode Island on Sept. 21. The storm's fury, including a tidal wave, killed 262 Rhode Islanders.
  
  In Jamestown, a killer wave sweeps away a school bus at Mackerel Cove, killing seven of eight children on board. Four of the victims were siblings. Their father, Joseph Matoes, watched the bus carried into the sea.
  
  
• 1940
  On July 9, as the nation prepares for war, the federal government takes possession of 379 acres in North Kingstown for Quonset Point. An army of 11,000 civilian workers begin working seven days a week, 24 hours a day on what was described as the "biggest and toughest, yet most rapidly progressing construction project ever undertaken on the Atlantic Coast.''
  
  
• 1945
  War comes home to South County when a German sub, the U-853, slips within three miles of Point Judith and torpedoes a coal-carrying ship headed for Boston on May 5. Twelve of the 46 crewmen on the merchant vessel, the Black Point, die.
  
  
• 1948
  South County, along with the rest of the state, observes Victory Day for the first time on Aug. 14.
  
  
• 1950
  A new $250,000 airport opens on Block Island on July 1.
  
  
• 1952
  Voters in Exeter reject a proposed $1 million harness racing track by a nine-ballot margin on June 7. The final count shows 182 against the track, 173 for it. The referendum draws a record number of voters to the polls.
  
  
• 1954
  Hurricane Carol hits the state on Aug. 31, leaving at least 16 dead and scores of people hurt. Property damage from the storm is estimated at $90 million. In South County, Carol nearly obliterated summer colonies at Misquamicut and Weekapaug. Wakefield's Bob Wilkie recorded the damage in Galilee. A 29-year-old short order cook at the time, Wilkie rushed to the fishing port with his camera, when the storm broke. His photographs of sunken boats and flooded roadways appeared in the Narragansett Times, among other publications.
  
  
• 1963
  On Sept. 17, by a 15-1 margin, voters on Block Island approve a plan which takes their town of New Shoreham out of Newport County and puts it in Washington County. Block Island had been a part of Newport County for 235 years.
  
  
• 1960s
  The social unrest gripping the country comes home to South Kingstown, where a citizens group -- reacting to complaints about slumlords -- campaigns for minimum housing standards. During an emotional Town Council meeting on the proposal, a black councilman calls South County "a little Selma, Alabama."
  
  
• 1973
  On April 16, sources in Congress reveal that a shutdown of Quonset Point is planned.
  
  A leaky, Wickford-based charter fishing boat called "The Comet'' leaves Galilee with 27 buddies on board on May 19. Seven miles at sea, it breaks apart. Sixteen people perish.
  
  On June 5, the Navy reveals plans to move about 5,000 military families from R.I. to southern states by the end of September.
  
  
• 1974
  After 33 years in service as one of the largest Naval Air Stations in the country, on June 28 Quonset Point is decommissioned.
  
  
• 1978
  A settlement is reached on March 1 in a three-year-old claim by Narragansett Indian tribe to ancestral lands. The settlement gives the Narragansetts about 1,800 acres in Charlestown.
  
  On a warm September day in 1978, a 75-foot steel-hulled, lobster boat leaves Galilee with five men on board. Once at sea, however, the "LOBSTA 1'' suddenly flips and sinks; the crew of five perishes without sending a distress signal. Despite an eight-month investigation, the Coast Guard could never come up with a cause for the disaster.
  
  
• 1981
  Workers strike Brown & Sharpe Mfg. Co. in North Kingstown. No none knows it at the time, but the strike will go down as the longest -- and most violent -- in the state's history.
  
  
• 1988
  Wave after wave in the summer brings medical waste to South County's shore. Sixty items were found over a two-week period in July. After an intensive investigation, the source was determined to be a New York landfill that was overflowing. Once corrective measures were taken, the waste wasn't seen again.
  
  
• 1989
  The Greek tanker World Prodigy smashes into Brenton Reef on June 23, spilling 420,000 gallons of oil into Rhode Island Sound. But luck was with South County. The tanker carried a light fuel that evaporates quickly and doesn't coat wildlife. As a result, there was minimal, lasting environmental damage from the spill.
  
  
• Late 1980s
  Nudists go to war over a decision to partially close Moonstone Beach to protect a tiny threatened bird, the piping plover.
  
  
• 1991
  Hurricane Bob slams into Rhode Island on Aug. 19 with 105-mph winds and waves that caused 50 million gallons of untreated sewage to flow into Narragansett Bay. No deaths or injuries are reported, but the storm left thousands of homes and businesses without power, uprooted trees and caused serious erosion along the South County shoreline.
  
  
• 1996
  South County was the setting for the worst oil spill in Rhode Island's history in January. A runaway tug and barge crashed into Moonstone Beach, spilling more than 800,000 of home heating oil into Block Island Sound.
  
  Block Island -- and the rest of the state -- are riveted by a rape case involving the man, who then held the island's highest elected position: Edward S. McGovern. A 22-year-old woman accused McGovern and two other men of raping her on the floor of McGovern's Yellow Kittens Tavern in Oct., 1996. But after two trials, the three were exonerated.
  
  
• 1990s
  Development fever grips South County. Year after year, South Kingstown tops the list as the state's fastest growing community, but North Kingstown, Narragansett, Westerly and Charlestown are never far behind.
  

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