Eighteenth-Century Garden at Smith’s Castle

In a quiet byway of the Narragansett Bay sits a promontory known as Cocumcussoc where the Richard Smith family settled in the mid 17th century to establish and grow a trading post. Smith’s Castle was built on the property as the first English style house in the area. It was destroyed by fire following a bloody conflict between the colonists and the Narragansett tribe. The family promptly rebuilt and the plantation grew and prospered over the next 100 years, particularly during the era of the Updike family in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1953, the South County Garden Club won the Founders Fund award to complete an 18th Century Garden designed by its own member and landscape architect, Irmgard Graham. Graham’s design was not a restoration of the original garden rather an authentic representation of the spirit of the period. Placed at the side of the house, the plot layout features simple beds filled with shrubs, flowers and herbs next to paths of grass and gravel surrounded by a picket fence. Nature proved its power when the following year Hurricane Carol devastated the area, bathing the garden in salt water. By the spring of 1955, the garden had been replanted and refreshed. Today, the garden still stands and is kept up by Smith’s Castle volunteers. The South County Garden Club has given regular donations to maintain this gem representing the eighteenth century.