Saylesville, Rhode Island
Saylesville Historic District | ||
MPS Lincoln MRA | | |
NRHP reference No. | 84002049[1] | |
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Added to NRHP | August 30, 1984 |
Saylesville is a village and
History
The area was settled as a farming community in the 17th century. The historic
In the nineteenth century William F. Sayles started the Sayles Bleacheries across from Bleachery Pond at the base of the hill below the neighborhood today known as Saylesville. Saylesville was a
The mill towns of Rhode Island were already in decline at the time of the union organizing general strike of textile workers of 1934. The violence did not leave Saylesville unscathed. Several thousand workers
The mills finally closed in the 1960s.
William F. Sayles, the businessman and philanthropist who owned the original bleachery mills in Saylesville donated the funds to build Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket.
In the 1920s the village was home to a professional soccer team known as the Sayles Finishing Plant F.C.
Community today
The village is home to the Saylesville Fire District, a combination fire department staffed by career, call and volunteer firefighters. It consists of Ladder 5, Engine 5, Engine 6, Utility 5, and Boat 5. The district covers the Saylesville, Fairlawn and Lonsdale villages and the western half of Lincoln Woods State Park.
Historic district
The Saylesville Historic District encompasses significant residential elements of the central mill village, primarily along Chapel and Walker Streets along Saylesville Pond, and extending west on Smithfield Avenue and northwest on Woodland Court. The public buildings of the village are located primarily on Walker Street, which runs east-west south of the pond. The mill worker housing on Chapel and Smithfield are about 1/2 single-family structures and 1/2 multi-unit buildings, either 1-1/2 or 2-1/2 stories in height, built out of either wood or brick. The company made an effort to relieve the uniformity of other mill villages, where identical buildings are in rows, by varying the locations of similar buildings so they were not adjacent.[4] The Saylesville Meetinghouse, an active Friends worship group built in 1703, is on Great Road beyond the end of Chapel Street, and is not part of the historic district. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. January 23, 2007.
- ^ Neufeld, Rob (June 23, 2018). "Asheville's factory village teemed where Walmart now sits". Asheville Citizen-Times. Retrieved July 23, 2018.
- ^ (Oakland Tribune 9/13/34)
- ^ "Historic Resources of Lincoln" (PDF). Rhode Island Preservation. Retrieved October 18, 2014.