Place of
the Oyster

Long before the name Apponaug appeared on any map, this crossroads at the head of the cove sat along the Old Pequot Path, the trail that linked Narragansett settlements around the bay. The Narragansett had camped and traveled along it for roughly two thousand years before European colonization ever reached these shores.

When Roger Williams passed through in 1636, on his way to a trading post near present-day Wickford, he wrote down what the Narragansett called this particular bend of shoreline: Oppenenauchack — oyster. He noted that shellfish here were so abundant that a traveler could gather them freely along the way. Colonial writers spelled the name as they heard it — Aponahock, Aponake — as early as 1663, and it eventually settled into the Apponaug of today. The cove has carried the same meaning under every spelling: a place where oysters were simply there for the taking.

In 1954 and 1955, the Narragansett Archaeological Society excavated Sweet's Meadows, a low rise above a small spring-fed brook that still empties into Apponaug Cove. Its director, William Fowler, described a campsite people kept returning to — from roughly 100 B.C. to 1600 A.D. — a run of use long enough to leave real weight in the ground.

What the dig turned up was, quite literally, dinner: the shells of oysters, quahaugs, sea clams, scallops, whelk, and razor clams, layered into the soil over fourteen centuries. It is the kind of evidence that doesn't need much interpretation. People camped here because the cove in front of them never stopped giving up shellfish — the same fact Roger Williams would write down, in one word, sixteen hundred years later.

By the turn of the twentieth century the shoreline of Apponaug Cove was lined with small wooden shanties, built out over the water on pilings — half workshop, half warehouse, where oystermen, quahoggers, and scallopers landed, sorted, and shucked the day's catch before it went to market. They stood in two loose rows: one off Station Street on the cove's south side, another along the Metropolitan Parkway — the road known today as Hallworth Drive — toward Arnold's Neck.

One shanty on Station Street, run by the Wilcox family, handled quahogs and scallops well into the twentieth century — the same building whose last piece would still be standing, alone, in 1987 (see The Last Shanty, below). A few miles south on Greenwich Cove, the Drew Shanty followed nearly the same arc: built first as a scallop-shucking house where workers were paid by the measure, later converted for welding bullrake frames, and today kept by the Drew family for recreation rather than work. Up and down this stretch of bay, the shanty rarely stayed one thing for long.

A photograph made in August 1938 — a month, as it turned out, before the Great Hurricane tore through Narragansett Bay — shows the row still whole. Jordan's shanty sits at the center with its two hoists; the Northup and Gebler shanty stands beside it; at the far end is the shanty Ernest Wilcox and Burt Davis rented from Wickford Shellfish. A rowboat tied at the pilings is remembered, in one hand, as belonging to Joe Ouellette, and in another as Willet's — family memory rarely agrees on everything.

That same summer the Providence Sunday Journal sent a photographer named Williams down to the cove and ran its own view of the row — the E. Wilcox operation that had worked the north shanties off Station Street since 1892.

The hurricane, and the decades after it, thinned the row for good. Title to the shanties had always been informal — built as they were on filled bay land nobody quite held clear ownership of — and as the working oystermen died out, one by one, the buildings went unrepaired. A snapshot labeled "before '54" shows one still standing and still in use, a boat drawn up close beside it.

By January 1982 the Warwick Beacon could still point a reader to a single survivor at the water's edge — Charlie Turner's old shanty, by then passed to Tom Anderson. Five years after that, in 1987, only one shanty remained at all — the last building at the end of Station Street, the same Wilcox quahog-and-scallop shanty from a century before, photographed bare against the marsh grass that autumn and again buried in snow that winter, boats hauled out all around it. It came down not long after.