375th Volunteers Clean Up Town's Historic Sites

Friday and Saturday were days of public service for the Portsmouth Garden Club, local Girl Scouts and several Portsmouth High School Students at two of our Town's most important historic sites. 

In preparation for the RIMAP walking tour of Fort Butts on Saturday afternoon, about 30 students from Student Council, Green Club, Community Service Club and others just along to help joined forces and picked up trash, litter and downed branches in and Ft. Butts on Friday. Fort Butts dates from the Revolutionary War where it figured prominently in the Battle of Rhode Island on 27-29 August, 1778, one of the largest engagements of Patriot and British forces of the war. A recent book, "The Rhode Island Campaign" by Christian McBurney (Westholme Publishing, 2011) provides a fascinating and highly readable description and assessment of this battle.

On Saturday, the Portsmouth Garden Club and local Girl Scouts cleaned up Founder's Brook Park, weeding and replanting the small gardens there and generally sprucing up this small but historically important public park. Founder's Brook was the site that the original Portsmouth settlers used as a meeting space when they arrived here in 1638. Portsmouth's founders, followers of Anne Hutchinson, made this area the center of their community, using it for town meetings, drilling and training of militia and as a source of fresh water. The photos above show some of the Garden Club and Girl Scout Volunteers working on the key feature of this site, Puddingstone Rock, which has a bronze plaque commemorating the Portsmouth Compact of 1638, the founding document of the town.

Subsequent development in the Founder's Brook area, to include the construction of Route 24, has made the small park hard to find and visit, but an initiative of the Portsmouth 375th Celebration Steering Committee includes plans to make Founder's Brook Park more visible and accessible, to include better signage and a public parking area.