Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company (Ms. 48)

Biographical/Historical Note

The Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company was the last in a long series of attempts to provide the residents of Conanicut Island (Jamestown) with access to Newport and the mainland. The earliest settlers of the island used their own boats to cross the West Passage to South and North Kingstown and the East Passage to Newport. As the community grew and the rate of passages across the bay increased, however, the need for a more reliable and more regular of transportation became evident.

Local communities, including Jamestown, recognized this need and began licensing individuals to provide regular ferry services between Conanicut and Aquideck Islands (Newport) and the mainland by the late seventeenth century. By 1700 the licensing authority had been assumed by the colonial legislature and the first colonial license to operate a ferry out of Jamestown was issued in May of that year. Prior to the establishment of the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company, ferry licenses were granted for transporting passengers in only one direction. As a result, there were at times as many as six ferry boats plying the water between Jamestown and Newport and Jamestown and the mainland. (See Anna Augusta Chapin and Charles V. Chapin, A History of the Rhode Island Ferries, 1640-1923, Providence: The Oxford Press, 1925 for details of the licensing system).

By 1871, however, only one ferry provided service between Jamestown and Newport, that owned by William H. Knowles. When Knowles raised his rates to what townspeople considered an exorbitant level, the town petitioned the General Assembly for authority to establish ferry service between Jamestown and Newport. The General Assembly in April, 1872, passed an act authorizing Jamestown to establish ferry service between Jamestown and Newport and Jamestown and South Kingstown. The town organized the Jamestown and Newport Steam Ferry Association in May of 1872, but it was never incorporated. A year later the Jamestown and Newport Steam Ferry Company was granted a charter to provide ferry service between Jamestown and Newport. In 1888, the charter was amended to permit service between Jamestown and South Kingstown. The town was from the beginning the majority stockholder of the company, but until 1925 a minority of its stock was publicly held. Jamestown bought up the last of the remaining shares in 1925. The company began service between Jamestown and Newport on May 12, 1873 with the steam ferry Jamestown.

From its inception, and throughout its existence, the Jamestown and Newport ferry Company was a municipally owned and operated corporation. That, along with erratic management, worn out equipment, and lack of state assistance, was one of its many problems. Jamestown was a small town with a relatively small tax base and consequently found it difficult to bear the burden of the Ferry Company. Despite the fact that it provided a vital link in the state’s transportation system, the company received no aid from Rhode Island, either in the form of loans or a subsidy. Its rates were in addition regulated by the State Public Utilities Commission, which urged the company to keep them low to allow full public access. Nor did Newport or North or South Kingstown provide any financial assistance to the company, though the citizens of the three communities depended heavily upon the ferries for transportation back and forth across the bay.

As a result of these and other factors, the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company was never more than a marginally profitable operation and found itself in debt to both banks and the town of Jamestown. It tried to economize in a number of ways, including the purchase of used ferries. This proved to be false economy, however, as these boats, never less than twenty-five years old when purchased, were very expensive to operate and were frequently out of service for repairs. Such misguided attempts to economize only increased the company’s financial burden.

Early in the twentieth century the company’s burden was further increased by the opening of a competitive line providing ferry service on both sides of the bay. Stillman Saunders of North Kingstown received a charter in March, 1907 for the Narraganset Transportation Company to provide ferry services between Jamestown and Newport and Jamestown and North Kingstown (Saunderstown). He built four ferries on the beach at Saunderstown and was able to provide service equal to, if not better than, that of the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company. The competition between the two lines continued for five years until the death of Stillman Saunders in 1911. His heirs, with no apparent interest in operating a ferry company, sold the assets of the Narragansett Transportation Company to the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company.

The “Roaring Twenties” were not a “roaring” success for the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company. It participated only marginally in the booming economy of the 1920’s. Its financial position was, however, strong enough for it to order and build its last new boat, the Governor Carr, in 1926 at a cost of one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Four years later it purchased the ferry Hammonton for sixty-five thousand dollars. These two boats remained in service until 1958 when they were scrapped by the then state owned ferry service. The Ferry Company thus met the depression era with two additional boats and hopes for a profitable 1930’s.

Those hopes for a profitable decade were of course not realized. The Ferry Company managed to survive the Great Depression, however, only to be nearly destroyed by the great hurricane of September 21, 1938. Two of its three boats were caught at sea and blown ashore, one of the two destroyed. Its docking facilities on both sides of the bay were destroyed or badly damaged. The federal government supplied Works Progress Administration funds to refloat one of the vessels and to rebuild docking facilities, while the Navy loaned the company a ferry until its own boat could be refloated and repaired. The state, however, was devastated by the hurricane and was unable to provide assistance of any kind.

The Ferry Company’s financial health continued to decline throughout the 1940’s. Its unprofitable West Passage run, which had been suspended periodically during the winter in the 1930’s, was finally dropped altogether when the Jamestown Bridge connecting Jamestown to the mainland at North Kingstown opened in July of 1940. Increased military activity in Narragansett Bay provided the company with Navy and War Department contracts to ferry men and material to bases in the bay and to manufacture machine parts in its small machine shop. Whatever profit the company may have made from these contracts was more than offset, however, by a drastic reduction in civilian passengers due to war-imposed rationing of gasoline and rubber. In addition, the company’s aging ferries, the Governor Carr and the Hammonton, needed even more frequent and costly repairs.

An attempt to upgrade service with the purchase of an additional ferry finally rendered the Ferry Company insolvent in 1951. In 1950, the company purchased for one hundred twenty-five dollars the Gotham, a 24 year old diesel-electric ferry which it renamed the Jamestown. Over the next year, the company spent in excess of one hundred thousand dollars on repairs to the Jamestown, a boat actually in operation for only seventy-six days. By early 1951, the company was insolvent and its Board of Directors went before the annual Jamestown town meeting with a plan to lease the ferry operation to the State of Rhode Island. The Jamestown voters approved and, in June of 1951, the state created Jamestown Ferry Authority which began operating the ferry system on a dollar a year lease arrangement with the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company.

The lease arrangement relieved the Ferry Company and the town of the burden of operating the ferries, but it did nothing to lessen the company’s debts to its creditors, including the town of Jamestown. Finally, in 1956, the state purchased the ferry system from the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company for two hundred seventy-thousand dollars, payable in ten annual installments of twenty-seven thousand dollars which the company promptly turned over to the town of Jamestown.

In 1958 the ferry system was turned over to the Public Works Department and operated by the newly created Jamestown Ferry Division of that department. Among the first acts of the Jamestown Ferry Division was to sell its small old ferries for scrap and purchase two larger ferries from a ferry company in Virginia. Renamed the Jamestown and the Newport, these two boats were used on the run between Jamestown and Newport until the Newport Bridge opened in 1969. The boats made their last trips on June 28, 1969, thus ending ninety-six years of transporting passengers and vehicles across the bay.

Kingston, Rhode Island

January 1985