Some islands get history; Block Island kept it. The stone walls still cross the fields, the 19th-century hotels still take guests, and the town’s legal name — New Shoreham — still reads like a colonial land deed, because it essentially is one. Here’s the short version of a long story.
Manisses
For centuries before Europeans arrived, this was Manisses — “Island of the Little God” — home to the Manissean people, connected to the Narragansett of the mainland. The island was both a home and a sacred place, and its defensive geography made it defensible ground: the name Mohegan Bluffs remembers a 1590 battle in which the Manisseans drove off a Mohegan raiding party at the cliffs.
Charted, named, purchased
Verrazzano sighted the island in 1524 and sailed on. Adriaen Block, the Dutch explorer, mapped it in 1614 and named it for himself — the rare branding decision to survive four centuries. In 1661 a group of English settlers purchased the island, a date the 1661 Inn still wears. New Shoreham incorporated as a town and got on with three quiet centuries of farming and fishing behind its stone walls.
Wrecks and the Palatine light
An island in a shipping lane collects tragedies, and this one collected legends with them. The Palatine story — the 18th-century wreck whose ghostly light islanders claimed to see for generations — became New England folklore. The worst was real and recent: in 1907, the steamer Larchmont went down off the island in winter seas, Rhode Island’s deadliest maritime disaster. The Southeast and North lighthouses exist because this coastline earned them.
The resort century
After the Civil War, steamboats turned the island into a Victorian summer resort — the grand hotels of the 1870s and 80s rose along the harbors, and the mainland arrived every June. Most of those buildings still stand and still rent rooms, which is why the island looks the way it does: the boom happened once, beautifully, and then largely stopped.
The island that said no
The modern chapter is the quiet one that mattered most. In 1972, Block Island became one of the first American communities to organize serious land conservation, and today roughly half the island is protected open space — the moors, Rodman’s Hollow, the Greenway trails. The Nature Conservancy named it one of its “Last Great Places,” and the deer, the stone walls, and the unbuilt hills are the receipts.
The Block Island Historical Society — based since 1942 in the 1871 Woonsocket House — keeps the deep archive, runs summer programs, and is worth an hour of any rainy island day. For the geography that shaped all of it, see the facts page and where the island actually sits.