People who come to Ninigret Park in Charlestown know it’s the place to go for a brisk, waterside walk. They might also know it’s a former airfield where George H.W. Bush trained during World War II.
What most people don’t realize is, hundreds of years earlier, the land was a plantation where enslaved Africans worked in the fields and outbuildings.
“Thinking about this history here, I think: What would you have heard?” said artist and ecologist Ana Flores on a recent walk through the park. “Would they have been singing to themselves while they’re tending the cattle? Would they have been picking up berries to share?”
Flores became interested in the history of Charlestown after she and her husband moved to Rhode Island. That’s when she found out enslaved people once labored in this area to the benefit of the wealthy Champlin family.
“And I’m like, ‘Wow, I had no idea,’” she said. “So that began my curiosity, and I’ve been interested in it ever since, because I live here.”
Enslaved people once made up a third of the population of South County, which back then was called Narragansett Country. Thousands of enslaved laborers grew crops, bred and raised farm animals, and produced goods for export. Influential families like the Hazards, the Potters, and the Stantons all owned slaves.
That’s the subject of a new exhibit, titled “Illuminating History: An Exploration of the History of Slavery in South County, Rhode Island.” It includes historical documents, images, and a series of public lectures.
“Seeing an exhibit like this,” said historian and Wakefield resident Joanne Pope Melish, “allows white people to abandon the idea that there’s a white New England, built on the backs of white people, who are virtuous people who exploited nobody, and into this paradise came people of color and somehow gummed it up.”
Pope Melish, a retired University of Kentucky professor, is also one of the scheduled speakers for the lecture series that will accompany the exhibit.
She said many people today see racism as a southern phenomenon that came north with African Americans in the early 20th Century. But it’s not. Rhode Island’s port cities were integral to the global slave trade, and in South County elite families relied on enslaved people to farm some of the biggest plots of land in the state.
“Very large farms, some of them three, four thousand acres,” she said. “And you need a lot of labor to work three or four thousand acres, and the labor that they imported was enslaved labor.”
Slavery in South County was crucial to the slave economy outside of New England. The farms here produced cheese to be shipped down to the West Indies to feed enslaved laborers on sugar plantations. White millworkers turned cotton picked down south into clothing to be worn by enslaved people.
When gradual emancipation became state law in Rhode Island, some families sold off their enslaved workers and used the money to start other businesses, something their middle class descendants probably don’t realize today. The problem was so bad, the state eventually banned the sale of enslaved laborers to buyers out of state. 
On a recent weekday morning, the magnifying glasses were out at the Charlestown Historical Society while the organization’s president, Pam Lyons, and Ana Flores examined some old documents a local family donated.
They refer to a white man named Christopher Babcock. Some have to do with goods being delivered. Others detail Babcock’s efforts to settle the estate of a free black man he used to own. It’s an unusual document, because the writer identifies the black man by name.
“His name was James Davis,” Lyons said. “We have a few other articles about him in here referring to his estate that was insolvent and what he owned, which was not very much obviously. Obviously, he just became a free man, who knows, maybe two or three years before it was written.”
Lyons said she’s not sure what these pieces of paper say about the relationship between Davis and Babcock, or slavery in South County more broadly. But they do point to another reason why the historical society is organizing the exhibit.
Flores said they’re hoping the talks and artifacts will spark interest among historians who can come examine these documents and uncover the stories that have been hidden so far.
“Because the history’s been so not addressed,” she said. The mission of the exhibit is “to illuminate the fact that this area that people come to and think is just beaches and woods is so layered in extraordinary history.”
Flores said increased understanding of that history could ultimately lead to necessary discussions and the inclusion of more local history in school curriculum.
The “Illuminating History” exhibit opens March 5 and will run until March 25 at the Cross Mills Public Library in Charlestown.
This story was reported through The Public’s Radio’s new South County Bureau, which opened earlier this year and will eventually be located at The United Theater arts, performance and community space currently being renovated in historic downtown Westerly.
