Richmond, Rhode Island

Richmond was incorporated in seventeen forty-seven, split off from Charlestown in Washington County. The town was named, as dozens of American places were, for the Duke of Richmond, a title in the English peerage. It grew as a quietly agricultural community threading through the rolling woodlands of southern Rhode Island, supporting small mills on the Wood River and later the Pawcatuck.

For most of its history Richmond remained one of the least-populated towns in the state, and it largely still is, with about eight thousand residents today. Its woods and river corridors make it a corridor stop on the Appalachian-adjacent trail network of southern New England, valued now more for what it was not than for what it built.