Around New England: Samuel Clarke Farm
William Morgan
Essentially a Cape Cod cottage, the house on Samuel Clarke Farm was extended on the rear in the 18th century.
For the price of a wee apartment in Cambridge or Brookline, Massachusetts, you could have the Samuel Clarke Farm in Richmond, Rhode Island. For under $600,000, the farm offers a 1691 gambrel roof house, along with a substantial late 19th-century barn, on 40 mostly wooded acres. In addition there is a one-room schoolhouse, an outhouse, a stone blacksmith shop, and corncrib on six granite pilings that keeps grain away from varmints. Best of all, there is a family cemetery where you can be laid to rest after restoring this gorgeous property to what it once was.
William Morgan
The massive central chimney supports fireplaces in the old kitchen, a parlor, and here in the dining room.
William Morgan
Ceilings are low, as to be expected in a home this early.
As with classic early New England dwellings, the staircase clings to the central chimney. Dangerous perhaps, but the abstract pattern would have appealed to many an early modern painter.
Richmond (population less than 8,000), while mainly an agricultural community, is a half dozen miles from the Amtrak station at Kingston; the University of Rhode Island is two miles farther away. Newport and Providence are close as well. While Rhode Island lacks the cachet of Cape Cod and Maine, say, this is closer to Boston and New York. And with 40 acres you could raise goats, establish a tree farm, grow vegetables. Or you could fashion a career just maintaining the farm’s miles of magnificent stone walls.
William Morgan
Stone walls dot the farm’s landscape.
Most of all, let’s hope for a sympathetic buyer who will maintain the house and keep the Clarke farm as an agricultural enterprise. Otherwise, the fate of this handsome ensemble may be yet another speculative and tragic development of ticky tack houses.
The listing broker is:
Andy Schilke
Randall Realtors
Westerly, R.I.
401.793.6399
[email protected]
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