Wanton Bridge: Everything You Need to Know

If you’ve spent any time digging through old Rhode Island road maps or local history forums, you’ve probably run into two names for the same crossing: Wanton Bridge and Stone Bridge. They’re not two different structures. They’re the same span, over the same stretch of water, just known by different names depending on who’s talking and when.

This guide pulls together what’s actually documented about Wanton Bridge — where it stood, who built it, why it kept failing, and how a single hurricane in 1954 finally ended its 300-plus-year run as a crossing point. No guesswork, no filler. Just the facts, laid out in order, so you walk away actually knowing the story.

Table of Contents

Where Was Wanton Bridge Located?

Wanton Bridge sat across the Sakonnet River, connecting the towns of Portsmouth and Tiverton, Rhode Island. If you’re picturing Narragansett Bay’s eastern edge, that’s the right neighborhood — this crossing linked the mainland side of Tiverton to Aquidneck Island, where Portsmouth sits.

The exact coordinates for the site land at roughly 41°37′33″N, 71°13′02″W. Today, that spot carries a different name on most maps: Stone Bridge, and it once carried what’s now Rhode Island Route 138 across the water.

A few things made this particular location valuable enough to bridge, again and again, over three centuries:

It offered the shortest practical crossing between Tiverton and Aquidneck Island in that part of the bay.
It connected directly into road networks heading toward Newport, one of colonial New England’s busiest ports.
The site allowed for a fixed structure with a drawspan, meaning it didn’t fully block boat traffic moving along the river.

You’ll still find physical evidence of Wanton Bridge today. A restored bridge abutment stands near Grinnell’s Beach in Tiverton — the last visible remnant of the old crossing.

Wanton’s Ferry Before the Bridge

Long before anyone built a bridge here, people crossed by boat. Records point to a ferry operating at this exact location starting around 1640, and historians consider it possibly the very first regular ferry service in Rhode Island’s history.

That’s a genuinely old crossing. For context, Rhode Island itself wasn’t founded as a colony until 1636, so this ferry started running within just a few years of European settlement in the area.

Here’s where things get interesting for anyone trying to track the name “Wanton Bridge”: the ferry actually operated under four different names over its lifetime, depending on who ran it:

Ferry Name	Associated Operator/Era
Howland’s Ferry	The Howland family, roughly 1703–1776
Pocasset Ferry	Named after the Pocasset area
Sanford’s Ferry	Named after a ferry operator
Wanton’s Ferry	Named after the Wanton family

So “Wanton’s Ferry” wasn’t the original name of the crossing — it was one of several names the ferry picked up over more than a century of operation, tied to whichever family or individual was running the boats at the time.

This is genuinely important context. A lot of casual write-ups treat “Wanton’s Ferry” as if it were the sole, original name of the crossing. It wasn’t. It was one chapter in a much longer ferry story that predates the Wanton family’s involvement by decades.

How the First Bridge Changed Travel

Ferries have obvious limits. You wait for the operator. You load passengers, animals, and cargo by hand. You’re at the mercy of tides and weather. For anyone trying to move goods between Tiverton and Portsmouth on a schedule, that unpredictability was a real cost of doing business.

That changed in 1795, when a privately built wooden toll bridge replaced ferry service at the site. This was a significant upgrade for regional transportation. Wagons, livestock, and pedestrians could now cross on a fixed timetable — their own — instead of waiting on a ferry operator’s availability.

For farmers moving produce toward Newport’s markets, for tradespeople hauling goods between towns, and for everyday travelers, a toll bridge meant predictability. You paid your toll, you crossed, you moved on. That single change reshaped how quickly and reliably people and goods could move along this stretch of the Rhode Island coast.

Of course, “fixed” and “permanent” aren’t the same thing — and this wooden bridge would prove that the hard way.

Storm Damage at the Crossing

Wooden bridges over tidal, storm-exposed water don’t tend to last. The 1795 span at what would become Wanton Bridge was destroyed multiple times by storms in the years following its construction.

This is a pattern worth paying attention to, because it repeats throughout the entire history of Wanton Bridge: every major version of this crossing eventually met its match in extreme weather. The Sakonnet River sits directly in the path of nor’easters and hurricanes moving up the East Coast, and a structure spanning open, storm-driven water there faces real, recurring risk.

Rebuilding a wooden bridge after every storm wasn’t sustainable — not financially, and not practically for the communities depending on the crossing. Something sturdier was needed.

Stone Causeway and Draw Span

The answer came in 1810: a stone causeway paired with a wooden draw span. This was a meaningful engineering upgrade. Stone, unlike timber, could withstand storm surge and wave action far better, giving the bulk of the crossing real durability.

The draw span — the movable section — stayed wooden, and it served a specific purpose: it let boats continue moving up and down the Sakonnet River without a fixed structure blocking the channel. That mattered a great deal in an era when water transport was still central to regional trade.

This hybrid design — solid stone causeway, movable wooden draw — held up considerably better than the original all-wood bridge. It’s also the version of Wanton Bridge that stuck around long enough to see a change in ownership.

In 1871, the towns of Portsmouth and Tiverton purchased the bridge outright and conveyed it to the State of Rhode Island. That shift, from private toll bridge to public infrastructure, set the stage for the next major upgrade.

The 1907 Stone Bridge

By the late 1800s, the old wooden draw span was facing a new kind of pressure: streetcars. The Newport Street Railway opened in 1898, running a line between Newport and Fall River, Massachusetts, directly across this crossing. Streetcars are heavy — far heavier than horse-drawn wagons or foot traffic — and the aging wooden draw simply wasn’t built for that kind of load.

The solution arrived in 1907: a double-leaf steel rolling lift bridge, a type of bascule bridge where two separate leaves lift to allow boats through. This steel structure replaced the wooden draw span while keeping the stone causeway largely intact, giving Wanton Bridge its most durable and longest-serving form.

This 1907 span is the version most historical photographs and later references actually depict when people talk about “Stone Bridge” or “Wanton Bridge.” It carried vehicle traffic, streetcars, and pedestrians for nearly five decades — right up until a single storm changed everything.

Hurricane Carol and the Old Stone Bridge

On August 31, 1954, Hurricane Carol made landfall near the Connecticut-Rhode Island border as a Category 3 hurricane, with sustained winds reaching 110 mph and gusts even higher. It remains one of the most destructive storms ever to hit southern New England, causing 72 deaths and roughly $460 million in damage (in 1954 dollars) across the region.

Wanton Bridge — by then officially the Stone Bridge — took a direct hit. Here’s how the aftermath unfolded, step by step, based on contemporary records:

Immediately after the storm, the bridge was closed to all marine traffic.
January 13, 1955 — following inspection, the bridge closed to bus and truck traffic.
January 18, 1955 — the bridge closed to all vehicle traffic entirely. Pedestrians could still cross on foot.
March 3, 1955 — after repairs, the bridge reopened to all traffic.

So the bridge did reopen, briefly, after emergency repairs. But the damage from Hurricane Carol had already made the case for something the state had, coincidentally, already started building: a permanent replacement.

Construction on the Sakonnet River Bridge, located about 0.8 miles north of the old crossing, was already underway when Hurricane Carol struck. That new bridge opened in 1956, and with it, the old Stone Bridge — the direct descendant of Wanton Bridge — was permanently retired from vehicle traffic.

“The recently restored bridge abutment is all that remains of the old Stone Bridge that used to span the Sakonnet River and carry travelers to Island Park in Portsmouth.”

That’s how locals in Tiverton describe what’s left today: an abutment near Grinnell’s Beach, quietly marking where a 300-year transportation story came to its end.

Wanton Family Connection

So who were the Wantons, and why does their name attach to this crossing at all?

The Wanton family wasn’t just a group of ferry operators — they were one of the most politically powerful families in colonial Rhode Island. Between 1732 and 1775, four Wanton descendants served as governor of the Colony of Rhode Island, an extraordinary run of influence for a single family in early American politics.

Here’s the lineage, in order of service:

Governor	Term(s)	Relationship
William Wanton	1732–1733	Son of Edward Wanton
John Wanton	1734–1740	Brother of William
Gideon Wanton	1745–1746, 1747–1748	Nephew of William and John
Joseph Wanton	1769–1775	Son of William Wanton

The family’s roots trace back to Edward Wanton, a shipbuilder born around 1631 who eventually settled in Scituate, Massachusetts, before his sons moved into Rhode Island and built careers around shipping, privateering, and trade along Narragansett Bay. Shipbuilding and maritime trade were the family business long before politics entered the picture — which explains why a Wanton might logically end up running a ferry crossing.

Gideon Wanton, notably, was born in Tiverton in 1693 — right in the same town the ferry and later bridge connected to. His father, Joseph Wanton, had moved to Tiverton in 1688 specifically to work as a shipbuilder, putting the Wanton name directly in the local community that the ferry served.

It’s this deep, generations-long presence in the Tiverton-Portsmouth-Newport area — as shipbuilders, ferry operators, merchants, and eventually governors — that explains why the crossing picked up the name “Wanton’s Ferry,” and later, informally, “Wanton Bridge.”

One more historical wrinkle worth knowing: the last Wanton governor, Joseph Wanton Sr., was removed from office in 1775 at the start of the Revolutionary War after refusing to support raising a colonial army against the British crown. That controversial exit ended the Wanton family’s remarkable, decades-long grip on the Rhode Island governorship — though by then, the family name was already permanently woven into local geography.

Why the Name Wanton Bridge Can Cause Confusion

Here’s the practical issue anyone researching this topic runs into: official records, historical societies, and modern maps mostly refer to the structure as Stone Bridge, not Wanton Bridge. Yet “Wanton Bridge” persists in local usage, older documents, and casual references, because it traces back to Wanton’s Ferry, one of the crossing’s earlier names.

A few reasons the naming gets tangled:

The ferry had four names. “Wanton’s Ferry” was just one of them, alongside Howland’s Ferry, Pocasset Ferry, and Sanford’s Ferry.
The bridge outlived the ferry naming convention. Once a fixed structure replaced the ferry, official records increasingly used “Stone Bridge” to describe the stone causeway built in 1810 — a more literal, descriptive name.
Local and colloquial usage lagged behind official naming. Long after the state started calling it Stone Bridge, longtime residents and older texts kept the Wanton reference alive.
Genealogy and family history research into the Wanton family frequently references “Wanton’s Ferry” and, by extension, “Wanton Bridge,” even when discussing the later stone-and-steel structure.

If you’re researching this topic and see both names used interchangeably, that’s not an error — it’s just two overlapping naming traditions describing the same physical crossing at different points in its 300-plus-year history.

Transportation and Local Trade

Before highways and interstate systems reshaped New England travel, crossings like Wanton Bridge functioned as critical economic arteries. Consider what depended on this single crossing point over the centuries:

Agricultural trade — Farmers around Tiverton and Portsmouth needed a reliable route to move crops and livestock toward larger markets, particularly Newport.
Local commerce — Tradespeople and merchants moving goods between Aquidneck Island and the mainland relied on this crossing rather than a much longer land route around the bay.
Everyday travel — Residents commuting between the two towns for work, church, and family needs used this bridge daily once it replaced ferry service.

The shift from ferry to bridge in 1795 wasn’t just a convenience upgrade — it fundamentally changed the economics of moving goods through this corridor. A scheduled, toll-based bridge crossing meant merchants could plan shipments around a fixed cost and fixed timing, rather than the variable delays of ferry availability and tidal conditions.

Wanton Bridge and Maritime Traffic

Every version of Wanton Bridge, from the 1810 stone causeway onward, had to account for one non-negotiable requirement: boats still needed to move through the Sakonnet River.

This is precisely why every rebuild included a draw span rather than a solid, fixed structure:

The 1810 version used a wooden draw span alongside the new stone causeway.
The 1907 version replaced that wooden draw with a double-leaf steel rolling lift bridge, a bascule design built specifically to handle heavier traffic loads while still opening for marine traffic.

The Sakonnet River wasn’t just a barrier to cross — it was itself a working waterway, used by fishing vessels, cargo boats, and later, larger commercial traffic. A bridge that ignored maritime needs would have simply shifted the bottleneck from land travel to water travel, so every major redesign of Wanton Bridge had to balance both.

After Hurricane Carol struck in 1954, marine traffic access was the very first thing cut off, even before vehicle traffic — a sign of how quickly the storm compromised the structure’s moving parts.

Wanton Bridge and Regional Transportation

Zoom out from the bridge itself, and Wanton Bridge functioned as one link in a much larger regional transportation network connecting:

Tiverton to Portsmouth, directly.
Portsmouth/Aquidneck Island to Newport, one of the busiest ports in colonial and early industrial New England.
The broader route between Fall River, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island, especially once the Newport Street Railway began running streetcars across the bridge in 1898.

That streetcar connection is worth emphasizing. It transformed Wanton Bridge from a purely local crossing into part of an interstate public transit corridor, linking Massachusetts and Rhode Island communities well before automobiles dominated regional travel. The 1907 steel rebuild exists specifically because this expanded regional role demanded a stronger structure than the old wooden draw span could provide.

What Happened to Wanton Bridge?

To pull the full story together in one place, here’s the short version of what ultimately happened to Wanton Bridge:

Hurricane Carol struck on August 31, 1954, causing severe structural damage.
Marine traffic access was cut off immediately.
Bus and truck traffic was banned on January 13, 1955.
All vehicle traffic was banned on January 18, 1955, with pedestrian crossing still allowed.
Repairs allowed the bridge to reopen to all traffic on March 3, 1955.
The new Sakonnet River Bridge, already under construction nearby, opened in 1956.
With a permanent replacement in place, the old Stone Bridge — the direct successor to Wanton Bridge — was retired from vehicular use.

In short: Wanton Bridge didn’t vanish overnight. It survived Hurricane Carol, limped along under repair for a few months, and was then quietly phased out once a modern replacement became available less than a mile away.

Wanton Bridge Today

What’s left of Wanton Bridge today is modest but genuine: a restored bridge abutment near Grinnell’s Beach in Tiverton, Rhode Island. It’s the physical remnant of the old causeway and draw span structure that once carried travelers between Tiverton and Island Park in Portsmouth.

Grinnell’s Beach itself is a small, locally popular spot — a place for a swim, a picnic, or a sunset view over the water. The abutment sits quietly on the site, a low-key historical marker for anyone who knows the story behind it. There’s no visitor center or formal exhibit at the site itself; it’s simply a preserved piece of the original structure, left in place as a marker of where the crossing once stood.

For anyone visiting the area, it’s worth noting:

The abutment is located on Main Road in Tiverton, near Grinnell’s Beach.
The modern Sakonnet River Bridge, roughly 0.8 miles north, is the active crossing that replaced it and still carries Route 138 traffic today.
Local historical societies in Tiverton and Portsmouth hold additional records and photographs related to the old bridge, for anyone wanting to dig deeper into primary sources.

Wanton Bridge Historical Dates

For a quick reference, here’s the full timeline of Wanton Bridge, from ferry origins to final retirement:

Year	Event
c. 1640	Ferry service begins at the site — possibly Rhode Island’s first regular ferry
1703–1776	Ferry known as Howland’s Ferry, under that family’s operation
—	Ferry also known at various points as Pocasset Ferry, Sanford’s Ferry, and Wanton’s Ferry
1795	First fixed structure built: a privately owned wooden toll bridge
—	Wooden bridge destroyed multiple times by storms
1810	Stone causeway with wooden draw span constructed
1871	Portsmouth and Tiverton purchase the bridge and convey it to the State of Rhode Island
1898	Newport Street Railway begins streetcar service across the bridge
1907	Wooden draw span replaced with a double-leaf steel rolling lift bridge
August 31, 1954	Hurricane Carol severely damages the bridge
January 13, 1955	Bus and truck traffic banned
January 18, 1955	All vehicle traffic banned; pedestrians still allowed
March 3, 1955	Bridge reopens to all traffic after repairs
1956	Sakonnet River Bridge opens; old Stone Bridge retired from vehicle use

Frequently Asked Questions About Wanton Bridge

Is Wanton Bridge the same as Stone Bridge?

Yes. “Wanton Bridge” is the older, informal name tied to Wanton’s Ferry, one of several names the original ferry crossing carried. “Stone Bridge” became the more formal, official name once the 1810 stone causeway replaced the ferry, and it’s the name most state records and modern maps use.

Why was it called Wanton’s Ferry if the Wanton family didn’t start the ferry service?

The ferry at this location predates the Wanton family’s involvement by decades, going back to around 1640. The crossing simply carried the name of whoever was operating it at a given time — Howland, Pocasset, Sanford, and eventually Wanton. The Wanton name stuck in local memory partly because the family remained so prominent in Rhode Island politics and shipping for generations afterward.

Can you still visit Wanton Bridge today?

You can visit the site. A restored bridge abutment stands near Grinnell’s Beach on Main Road in Tiverton, Rhode Island. There’s no bridge to walk across anymore, but the abutment itself is accessible and marks the historical location clearly.

What replaced Wanton Bridge?

The Sakonnet River Bridge, located about 0.8 miles north of the old site, opened in 1956 and now carries Route 138 traffic between Portsmouth and Tiverton.

Did Hurricane Carol destroy Wanton Bridge completely?

Not immediately. Hurricane Carol severely damaged the bridge on August 31, 1954, but repairs allowed it to reopen to all traffic by March 3, 1955. It wasn’t formally retired until the Sakonnet River Bridge opened in 1956, which made continued repairs to the aging structure unnecessary.

A Closer Look: Why This Crossing Kept Failing

It’s worth pausing on a pattern that runs through the entire history of Wanton Bridge, because it says something about the site itself, not just bad luck. Every structural version of this crossing — the 1795 wooden bridge, the 1810 stone-and-wood causeway, and the 1907 steel bascule bridge — eventually ran into the same problem: severe coastal storms.

The Sakonnet River sits in a genuinely exposed position along the New England coastline, directly in the path of hurricanes and nor’easters moving up from the Atlantic. A crossing built there isn’t just fighting normal wear and tear; it’s absorbing storm surge, high winds, and wave action on a semi-regular basis. That’s a fundamentally different engineering challenge than building a bridge over a calm inland river.

Looking at the timeline, you can actually track improving storm resistance with each rebuild:

The 1795 wooden bridge lasted only about 15 years before storm damage forced a full redesign.
The 1810 stone causeway held up far longer, surviving nearly a century before the next major rebuild — though that rebuild was driven by streetcar weight, not storm damage.
The 1907 steel bascule bridge lasted almost 50 years, and even after Hurricane Carol’s direct hit in 1954, it was repairable enough to reopen for a few more months.

In other words, each version of Wanton Bridge was a genuine engineering improvement over the last. The site never got “safer” from storms — it’s the same exposed stretch of water it always was — but the structures built there got progressively better at surviving what that location kept throwing at them. Hurricane Carol didn’t beat a poorly built bridge. It beat a location that had already outlasted two prior generations of construction, and it took a genuinely historic, retired-name storm to finally do it.

Final Thoughts

Wanton Bridge tells a genuinely compelling story about how a single crossing point can outlast wars, storms, changing technology, and even the family whose name got attached to it along the way. From a 1640s ferry to a 1907 steel bascule bridge, and finally to a storm-battered ruin retired in 1956, this small stretch of the Sakonnet River saw more than three centuries of continuous use.

What survives today — a quiet stone abutment near a Tiverton beach — doesn’t look like much at first glance. But it marks a spot that shaped regional trade, colonial politics, and everyday travel for generation after generation of Rhode Islanders. That’s a lot of history packed into one unassuming pile of stone.

Samuel Harris