Weird Island

57. GHOST TOWN: Hanton City

Episode Summary

In Smithfield, Rhode Island, out in the middle of the woods, there are the remains of an old village that disappeared over 100 years ago. A ghost town known as Hanton City, sometimes called Haunted City or the Lost City. To Visit: Walk the Hanton City Hiking Trail, starting from 70 W. Reservoir Rd in Smithfield. About 3/4 of a mile or so in (I didn't map it exactly) you'll see the remains of an old cellar on your right in a clearing. This is my last episode before a little summer break. Thank you to everyone who continues to listen and support me on this little podcasting journey! It truly means the world to me.

Episode Notes

To Visit: Walk the Hanton City Hiking Trail, starting from 70 W. Reservoir Rd in Smithfield. About 3/4 of a mile or so in (I didn't map it exactly) you'll see the remains of an old cellar on your right in a clearing.

This is my last episode before a little summer break. Thank you to everyone who continues to listen and support me on this little podcasting journey! It truly means the world to me.

Episode Source Material

Episode Transcription

In 1587, 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present day North Carolina. Before long, it was clear the settlement didn’t have enough supplies, so the governor of the new colony, a man named John White, sailed back to England to restock. Just as he arrived in England, a war broke out with Spain and every available ship, including his own, was called into battle to confront the Spanish Armada.
It was three years before White was finally able to return to Roanoke and the people he’d left behind. Among them were his wife and daughter and his infant granddaughter. But when he showed up, everyone was gone. There was no trace of the colony, except for this word–Croatoan–carved into a wooden post. Hinting at where they may have gone.
White never found out what happened to the colony or his family, and today this continues to be one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in America. People are fascinated by the fact that a whole community could just disappear without a trace.
The story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke is undoubtedly the most well-known tale of a missing settlement, but it’s not the only time this has happened. In Smithfield, Rhode Island, out in the middle of the woods, there are the remains of an old village that disappeared over 100 years ago. A ghost town known as Hanton City, sometimes called Haunted City or the Lost City.
I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, for my last episode before a little summer break, I went out in search of the remains of Rhode Island’s very own Ghost Town–Hanton City.
It’s commonly accepted that Hanton City is named for the Hanton family who once lived there. But Hanton City is a bit of a misnomer, because the settlement was never really big enough to be called a city, or even really a town. It was a small colonial farming community, located in the wilderness of Smithfield. Today, only traces of it remain. You can see stone walls crisscrossing through the woods, many of which are at least 300 years old. There are a couple of wells, a deteriorated dam, a small cemetery and the stone foundations of homes that are no longer standing. While at one point there was a small community and roads, now, the area is heavily wooded and overgrown. Nature is taking back over. And it makes any search for the ghost town a real treasure hunt.
But people are definitely out there hunting for it. Captivated by the stories and secrets the old stone structures might reveal. And this past week, I was one of those people. There’s just something about a Ghost Town that’s enticing, and this one has a bit of a mystery to it. While it’s clear a community lived there, what’s unclear is exactly why they were there to begin with–and why they eventually disappeared.
I’d initially heard about Hanton City on Facebook, from one of those “Only in Your State” clickbait posts you sometimes see. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the historical detective work of Jim Ignasher, who wrote about Hanton City in his book Remembering Smithfield. But, I hadn’t yet read that book when I went out in search of the ghost town. At the time, I did the most cursory google search (basically only reading a few theories about the settlement that seemed iffy at best), and then early on a Saturday morning, I dragged my sleepy and disgruntled dog out from under the covers, threw on her harness and a little sweater, and we headed to to Smithfield.
In the late 1600s and into the early 1700s, Smithfield was on Rhode Island’s frontier. It was considered the wild outskirts of Providence, and a relatively small group of colonists settled in the area and started developing the land and forming a community in the latter half of the 1600s. So Smithfield itself was seen as relatively remote. I’d say it’s still pretty wooded and natural today, certainly more rural than where I am in Pawtucket. But when Hanton City came into existence, it was even isolated from the town of Smithfield. And that lends it an air of mystery. Who would choose to live there? And where did they go?
There are a number of theories you’ll see floating around on the internet today for why this community formed. Because the settlement was so isolated, people have speculated that Hanton City was formed by a group of people forced to live in isolation because they weren’t accepted in the town–maybe a group of ex-prison inmates or people from the town’s poor farm and asylum. Yet another theory is that the settlement was made up of ex-slaves and Native Americans. But perhaps the most prevalent theory you’ll see floating around is that the community was formed by British loyalists around the time of the American Revolution.
This theory gets a lot of traction, likely because of this account written by a man named Thomas Vernon who lived in Newport when the Revolution broke out. Today, we have his diary, and he details how he and four other men were arrested and exiled from Newport because they were loyal to the Crown of Great Britain. He describes four months spent wandering the northern towns in Rhode Island. And some believe it’s possible Hanton City was formed by someone in a similar situation. Someone who was banished and settled permanently in an isolated area of Smithfield, far from the authorities in Newport that had driven them out.
But while this theory sounds compelling, the truth is, the settlement likely existed long before the American Revolution.
The fascination with Hanton City isn’t new. The first to really seek out answers was a reporter from the Providence Journal who, in 1889, went out in search of what remained of the settlement, just as I was doing. Even then, it was shrouded in mystery. The reporter wrote, “Today, if the question were put as to its whereabouts, a very small proportion of Rhode Island’s inhabitants would be able to give an answer, or even to claim a knowledge of its existence.”
And that’s kind of still true today. With the internet, I thought I’d easily find directions leading me right to the landmarks others had discovered. But instead, I found only vague directions based on long-gone landmarks. I drove to what, on a map, appeared to be the trailhead for the Hanton City Hiking Trail–but in person looked like someone’s driveway. Then stood in front of it for a long time, questioning whether or not this seemed right. But, my chihuahua was ready for adventure, so we started up the path and discovered… A humane trap with a peacefully sleeping groundhog inside just feet from the street. Before we could get any closer, the groundhog woke up, let out a terrified whistling scream, which in turn sent my dog into a panicked skitter away and up into the woods along what I was now sure was actually the trail. I told myself that if the groundhog was still there when we returned, I’d free it. But… spoiler alert… when we finally made it back to the trailhead, someone had either freed or relocated the poor little thing.
Back in 1889, the Providence Journal reporter’s journey to Hanton City looked a little different from mine. They took a train and then a horse-drawn carriage out to the rural area of Smithfield where the settlement was said to be. Then a local resident led them deep into the woods to meet with a man who, somehow, still lived there in a small house on the outskirts of Hanton City, despite the fact that almost everyone else had left.
This man was named Tom Hanton, and he and his sister (who he lived with), are remembered as “the last of the Hantons” and perhaps the key to understanding the mysterious Lost City. Tom Hanton was born around 1809, so he was about 80 years old when the reporter showed up at his home. He remembered that the town was a “lively and enterprising place, when he was young.” The people living there primarily worked in stone quarries or as tanners and bootmakers who sold hand-made shoes in Providence markets. But while the town was lively in his youth, Hanton told the reporter that the city was really in its prime in the 1730s–many years before he was born.
Hanton wasn’t able to shed light on how Hanton City was first started, and that reporter never really found out. But, years later, historians and reporters would continue to dig into the origins of the city. In the 1930s, another Providence Journal reporter wrote an article focused on finding a Hanton City landmark called the Threshing Rock. The Threshing Rock was a large granite rock formed by glaciers thousands of years ago that was said to have a natural hollow that both Native Americans and early English settlers used to thresh their grain. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Threshing Rock was said to overlook a Cedar Swamp and was considered to be something of a picnic destination.
In the 1970s, another pair of reporters, writing for The Observer (which is the Valley Breeze & Observer today) went looking for the Threshing Rock again and wrote about their experience trudging through the Cedar Swamp to find it. About a month later, the newspaper received a letter from a reader in Foster in response to the article on Hanton City. The letter writer, a woman named Margery Mathews, shared some family history that she suspected might explain the origins of the settlement.
She told of how her father, Herman Harrington, and her grandfather, Wheaton Harrington, both relayed family tradition suggesting there were relatives, other Harringtons, living in Smithfield. But she also shared that those Harringtons likely weren’t known by the name Harrington anymore.
That’s because the Harrington name went through a lot of changes back in the late 1600s, when literacy rates were relatively low. Each time the name was written down, it might have been written a little differently. So what began as Harrington became Herendeen, and Hearnden, and Hearnton, and finally Hanton. Today, at least 17 different corruptions of the name Harrington have been identified.
Now, that seems like it might just be kind of a fun and interesting fact. But, it actually opened up a new way to research the Hanton name and story. Margery, that woman who wrote the letter, looked in an early Providence Records and Deeds book and found a deed made out by a man named Benjamin Hearnton Sr. While in his teens, Benjamin became a Baptist and followed Roger Williams to RI. He settled in Providence sometime between 1647 and 1651.
Benjamin Hearnton owned land that was 10 miles north of Providence, bounded by the highway, and described as “part upland, part swamp.” Likely this is the land that became Hanton City. In the deed Margery found, he passed that land to his sons in 1685 and it seems they settled there.
Those two reporters then picked up the thread, tracing names and people, and further confirmed that Hanton City seems to have been settled by three related families–the Hearntons (or Hantons), the Paines and the Shippees. They were English families and were part of a social class known as freemen, which meant they were near the bottom of the social ladder at the time. The reporters found names of Hanton City residents in records of those who had served in King Philip’s War and theorized it was possible they were given land as payment for their services. So the mystery of how the settlement came into being has largely been solved. It wasn’t British Loyalists or prison inmates who formed the community, but average people looking to carve out a place for themselves.
And as to why they were so separate from the rest of Smithfield? Well, that might have just come down to the nature of the land where they settled. The area is extremely rocky, and swampy in places. In the summer, it’s full of mosquitos. So much so that a nearby settlement was literally named Skeeterville. And just the size of the land and the ruggedness of the landscape likely created an attitude of separateness and isolation.
Walking down the Hanton City Hiking Trail, I can see how that might be the case. The further we went, the more isolated the spot felt. The trail is maybe a mile and a half one way, and just about at the halfway point, I spotted what was very clearly a stone cellar, possibly a root cellar, sunk into the ground. It’s easy to feel transported to a different time while you’re standing there, because any sounds or signs of 21st century life are gone. And back in the late 1600s, you would probably have felt even more alone.
But standing there, in front of this remarkably well preserved and recognizable cellar, it was real. Someone had lived here and then… they were gone. A whole village of people disappeared. So, that brings us to part 2 of this mystery. Where did everyone go?
Well, there have been a few theories about that, too. Some are dramatic–claiming that a natural disaster or plague wiped the settlement out. Others come back to the Revolutionary War. Some theorized the settlers had their land confiscated for refusing to serve in the American Revolution. There’s really a fixation on this British loyalist theme, for some reason. Others suggested many left to fight in the Revolution and never returned.
The two reporters researching Hanton City in the ‘70s did find some evidence that at least a few people left following the Revolutionary War. Historian and author Florence Simister wrote an article indicating that some men from Smithfield bought land in St. Johnsbury, VT at a good price after the Revolution and left.. And the reporters found some names of Hanton City residents in the St. Johnsbury historical records, indicating that might have been partially true.
But, that’s likely not the only explanation for the disappearance of the settlement. In that 1889 interview with the Providence Journal reporter, Tom Hanton shared that the people living in Hanton City were never really well off. As an example, he said that if a young couple got married, the justice of the peace might be repaid with a good meal and a jug of rum.
When asked directly where everyone disappeared to, Tom Hanton replied, “They had all got poor, and sold out to anybody, and died off.”
So, instead of some big disaster, it seems more likely that people just left. In the early 1800s, Smithfield started to be transformed by industrialization. Suddenly, mills could produce the same products as individuals, only faster and cheaper. So, the Hanton City residents, who were known for making handmade boots and shoes, might have been beaten out by factories that could produce them more effectively. And as industrialization took place, it changed Smithfield from a rural area with disconnected farming communities to a series of manufacturing villages. Mills popped up with mill housing and towns built around them. And young people started leaving their homes to earn steady wages and attain a better way of life. As that happened, the rural areas of Smithfield lost population. By 1895, around the time of that first article on Hanton City, the village population of Smithfield constituted 90% of the total population in the town.
It may not be the big “wow” moment you were hoping for, but in a way, this explanation makes our fascination with Ghost Towns more poignant. People visit them to learn about the past, but also to feel something. Either a sense of wonder or a sense of melancholy or even a bit of fear. Because a ghost town is this very real evidence that nothing lasts forever. Time moves on, and life changes around us. Even the world we’re living in, that feels so present and so real, will someday be a piece of history. A thing of the past.
There are estimated to be over 3,800 ghost towns in the US, mostly abandoned in the 1800s and 1900s for similar reasons. People left in favor of bigger cities and changing industries. And this very mundane explanation, makes us wonder what will happen to the places we live. The communities we’re connected to. The homes we fill with love and memories. What will they look like, someday, when we’re gone?
Maybe nature will take them back, as it’s doing to Hanton City. Aside from that stone cellar, I found many stone walls and what maybe was an old dam, but not much else. It takes an eagle eye and a lot of focus to figure out what’s manmade and what’s a natural part of the landscape. Others have spent significantly more time in the woods, and have found wells, corn cribs, and other cellars and foundations. I’ve seen photos online of a stone cellar with shelves built into the wall that I’d really like to find, so if you know the way there, please let me know!
From what I can tell, it seems the Hanton City Hiking Trail is public, but the land just off the trail is private, so if you go out in search of Hanton City, please be respectful–of the land, and of any structures you find. And if you do find something, tell me about it! That goes for any of the places I’ve covered over the past year. If you’ve gone out and visited something and you want to share your experience and your thoughts, I’d love to hear about it. You can leave me an email at weirdrhodeisland@gmail.com. Or a message on instagram, at weird island podcast. You can also see photos of what I was able to discover of Hanton City there. And one more option–you can also send me a voice memo. I’d love to put together some sort of episode highlighting your experiences, so please reach out.
This is going to be my last official episode for a couple of months. And I just wanted to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for listening. I say it a lot, but I mean it. It really means a lot to me that you’re here.
I can’t wait to be officially back at the end of the summer with new episodes. In the meantime, subscribe on whatever app you use so you can catch any new drops and updates.
Until then, I hope you spend your summers discovering all of the weird and wonderful things we have right here in little Rhode Island. Until next time!