The Rhode to Suffrage: The Expansion of Voting Rights in Rhode Island

Jenna Peterson-Magnuski, LCHS Museum Educator

Each state in the new United States established its own rules for who could vote. When people sought the right to vote, some tried to change state laws and constitutions and others looked for national changes. Rhode Island initially allowed only freeholders (men owning a significant amount of land) and their eldest sons to vote. The trip to today’s voting rights was anything but straightforward. Museum Educator Jenna Peterson-Magnuski will share key figures, including Little Compton residents, and events along that journey.

Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, A Life Remembered: Scholar, Author, Activist, Muse

P. Scott Brown, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of North Florida

Little Compton summer resident Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield had a fascinating family, including her famous/infamous father, the Boss Tweed crony and Egyptologist; her mother, the well-known suffragist; and her husband, Edwin, the celebrated painter. But Evangeline herself has been nearly forgotten, though artists and intellectuals on two continents remembered her on her death in 1918 as “the most learned woman” alive. It is all the more ironic that she has been forgotten, since she was a pioneer of women’s history, whose most important work was misappropriated by another, now-famous woman. Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield is well worth remembering, for her brilliant writing on women and art and for her profound influence on her husband’s art and on the ideals of public beauty and aesthetic access in America.

“There’s nothing of their house but the ruined foundation”: History and Archaeology at the Manton Farm Property

Holly Herbster, Senior Archaeologist and Principal Investigator at The Public Archaeology Laboratory

The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) teamed with LCHS and community volunteers to document the history of the Manton Farm on Mullin Hill Road. Henry Manton was a Black man who came to Little Compton as a boy in the 1860s; his wife Ida Johnson’s African American and Native American family was from Dartmouth. At numerous times during three generations of ownership, the Manton family was the only family of color in Little Compton. Join PAL Senior Archaeologist Holly Herbster and LCHS’s Executive Director Marjory O’Toole as they share the history of the Manton Family and the results of the 2019 archaeological investigations.

Introducing the Big Barn Project

Marjory O’Toole, LCHS Executive Director

Hear about the Historical Society’s first permanent exhibition project in over 40 years. Executive Director Marjory O’Toole will share our plans for a major permanent exhibition on farming from the time of the Sakonnet People to the present day. See before and after photos of our 19th-century dairy barn as we reimagine it from an underappreciated storage building and create a vibrant new museum space. Learn how you and other community members can help by sharing farming photos, stories, and artifacts with us.

Beyond Salem 1692: Witchcraft in the Seventeenth-Century

Dr. Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, Associate Professor of History at Roger Williams University

Between 1450 and 1750, at least 100,000 individuals, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft in Europe and North America. Of these, roughly half met their demise at the stake or in the noose. The lecture will address how and why magic and witchcraft made sense to early modern people and what it meant when someone was accused of making a pact with the Devil. By setting the Salem trials of 1692 in context, the lecture will consider the nature of witch-hunts more broadly and the social, religious, judicial, and political causes.