South County Museum: A Short History

Founded in 1933 in North Kingstown, South County Museum twice moved to new locations before finding its present home on Canonchet Farm in 1984. (The final move was forced by the expansion of Route 4.) The main exhibit hall, the Metz Building, was built in 1987 and the Carpentry Shop, Blacksmith Forge, Fiber Arts Center and Carriage Barn somewhat later.

The museum is located within Canonchet Farm, a large public park owned by the town of Narragansett. The museum is a separate nonprofit organization funded through donations, grants and admissions. Today the collections contain more than 20,000 items. They date from 1695 to 1950, though most of them are from the Victorian era, c. 1840-1910.

The museum has become a popular attraction and its exhibits have helped to keep alive Rhode Island's rural, village, and maritime heritage, providing a fascinating glimpse of the hand-craft technology and everyday life of the people of the past two centuries.
Owned by the town of Narragansett, 174-acre Canonchet Farm has historical significance as the former home of the 12th governor of Rhode Island, Col. William Sprague, and his wife Kate Chase, daughter of Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.

In 1866, the A.W. Sprague Company purchased the William H. Robinson farm in Narragansett. At 650 acres, it was the largest farm in the area. The company also purchased the adjoining Mumford farm, now the site of Narragansett Pier School. Governor Sprague and his wife spent summers in the Robinson farm house until about 1870, when Kate decided to build the "largest, finest, and showiest" house in Rhode Island. At the time William Sprague was one of the wealthiest men in the United States and could easily afford the reputed cost of $600,000 (about $7 million in 2005 dollars) to fulfill his wife's dream. The Sprague mansion predated the Newport mansions by several years. Interestingly, the original Robinson home remained intact as the core of the Sprague mansion.

The 68-room mansion, which they named "Canonchet" after the grandnephew of Canonicus, the last great Narragansett Indian sachem (chief), was a hodgepodge of gothic, Italianate and oriental styles. It was lavishly furnished with antiques from Europe and its centerpiece was a fireplace from one of Marie Antoinette's palaces.

At Canonchet the Spragues entertained such notables as Ulysses S. Grant, Horace Greeley and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. But they had a turbulent marriage that ended in divorce in 1882. Sprague married Inez Calvert in 1883. Because of financial troubles, Sprague had lost his fortune and lost his beloved Canonchet Farm. His second wife helped him regain ownership of the mansion.

The mansion burned to the ground on October 11, 1909, as a result of an ember escaping from one of its many fireplaces. Little survives from that era except the Robinson cemetery (a small family plot about 1,600 feet west of the farm), the stone ruins of the Sprague carriage house — which burned in 1950 — a few tiles unearthed in 2003 during the construction of a nearby home, and a rather odd grandfather clock imported from Paris. The Visitors Center, thought to be the icehouse, remains from that period. The Caretaker's cottage also dates from the Sprague period and were lived in or used by Gov. Sprague's employees.