Excerpt:
Up, up, up goes oceanfront real estate in Rhode Island.
Watch Hill is an old neighborhood, where houses with names like Windridge, Waveland and Sea Swept began to take their positions on the ridge more than 160 years ago. The first lighthouse keeper, Jonathan Nash, recognized its potential as a retreat, opening his Watch Hill House to boarders in 1833. Other summer colonists followed, attracted by the “tonic effect of this air on the appetite, the shattered nerves and overworked brain,” according to one early history. With sweeping views of Block Island Sound, the Atlantic Ocean and Little Narragansett Bay, Watch Hill was also a natural rampart, used by the Niantic tribes in the early seventeenth century to anticipate the arrival of warring parties of Montaup Indians and, nearly 300 years later, by the United States military as a coastal battlement.
But Watch Hill’s most implacable foe has always been Mother Nature. In 1938, the Great Hurricane wiped fifty houses off Napatree Point, a finger of land curling into the sound. Today, the village is under the increasingly frequent assault of water coaxed by tidal force or blown in by Nor’easters over streets and parking lots, cutting off access to Napatree and giving the old house names a sardonic twist…
