Celebrity Travel
Watch Hill Is the Rhode Island Enclave That Never Tried to Be Newport
Watch Hill, a small village within the town of Westerly at Rhode Island's southwestern tip, has built its old-money reputation around a Gilded Age yacht club, a working 19th-century carousel and a scale that has stayed deliberately smaller than Newport's.
By BigTravel.in Editorial Team · · 2 min read
Rhode Island's best-known old-money address is Newport, with its string of Gilded Age mansions along Bellevue Avenue. Watch Hill, a small village within the town of Westerly at the state's southwestern tip, has always played a quieter game: a summer colony built around a working harbour, a historic yacht club and a Main Street scaled to a village rather than a resort town. It has stayed that way largely by staying small, with none of the mansion-tour tourism that shapes a visit to Newport.
A carousel older than the yacht club
The Flying Horse Carousel, installed in Watch Hill in 1876, is recognised as one of the oldest carousels still operating in the United States, its wooden horses suspended from an overhead frame rather than fixed to the platform. It has run every summer for generations and remains free for local children, a detail that says something about how Watch Hill has chosen to present itself: understated rather than showy, even where money is clearly present.
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A famous resident, and a village that doesn't advertise it
Watch Hill has drawn periodic press attention for being the location of a waterfront home long associated with the singer Taylor Swift, a widely reported fact that has made the otherwise low-profile village a occasional subject of tabloid coverage. Locals and longtime summer residents have largely treated it as one more detail about a village that has never marketed itself on its famous names, old or new.
The Ocean House, restored rather than replaced
Watch Hill's grandest hotel, the Ocean House, originally built in the 1860s, was torn down and rebuilt on the same bluff in the late 2000s to replicate its original yellow clapboard silhouette rather than modernise it away, a decision that reflects the village's broader instinct to preserve its 19th-century character rather than update it.
Traveller tips
- Watch Hill has no train station of its own; Westerly, a short drive away, is served by Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor.
- The Flying Horse Carousel operates seasonally through the summer months and is one of Watch Hill's few genuinely public attractions.
- Parking in the village is limited in peak summer season; many visitors arrive by boat via the harbour.
- Watch Hill Light is not generally open to the public for tours, though the grounds and shoreline nearby are accessible.
Where this is
Watch Hill, Rhode Island
