Newport, Rhode Island: A Breakaway Plantation's "New Port"

When a group of settlers moved out of Aquidneck Island’s first town in 1639 and took its whole government with them, they started Newport, Rhode Island. A 1905 federal study says they called it a “new port.” That study is Henry Gannett’s bulletin on American place names, and the settlers had a story of their own.

A split at Pocasset

The story starts a year earlier on Aquidneck, the island that later gave the state its name. Samuel Greene Arnold’s history says a group of exiles from Massachusetts began a settlement called Pocasset in 1638, at the island’s northeast end. It grew fast. By the next spring, a part of the group was ready to move.

On April 28, 1639, William Coddington, the settlement’s judge, and a handful of others signed an agreement “to propagate a Plantation in the midst of the Island or elsewhere.” Arnold points out something odd: every member of Pocasset’s government went with them, and they took the town records too. The people who stayed behind had to organize all over again, and they renamed their town Portsmouth.

Not everyone told it the same way. Massachusetts governor John Winthrop wrote that “the people grew very tumultuous, and put out Mr. Coddington.” Arnold calls that “a Puritan version of the emigration,” and you can see he didn’t think much of it.

Coasters’ Harbor and a spring

One of the movers, Nicholas Easton, kept a journal, and Arnold retells it. Easton and his sons Peter and John came by boat to an island, spent the night there and named it Coasters’ Harbor the next morning. That same day they crossed to Newport and put up the first English building. The 1888 History of Newport County tells the same story and puts their night on the island at the end of April 1639.

At their first meeting, the newcomers wrote of “the plantation now begun at this south-west end of the island,” and named it Newport. They placed the town “on both sides of the spring, and by the seaside southward.” Arnold says that spring was on the west side of Spring Street, near the State House.

Why a port mattered

The settlers weren’t sure at first where to build. Arnold says a dense swamp lined the harbor where Thames Street runs today, so they looked at the beach instead. “There they found only an open roadstead unsafe for shipping,” he writes, “so they returned to the harbor, surveyed it, and wisely decided on the present location.”

The records Arnold quotes give the name without a word of explanation. Gannett is the one who spells it out: Newport was “so named by a party of settlers from Portsmouth, who called it a ‘new port.’” Strictly speaking, they left Pocasset, which only became Portsmouth after they’d gone. Either way, the harbor turned out to be the point. John Hayward’s 1839 gazetteer says the harbor “is considered one of the best on the coast of America.”

The name keeps spreading

Newport didn’t keep its name to itself. Gannett notes that Newport County was “named from the city in Rhode Island.” And the island Newport sits on, Aquidneck, is the “Rhode Island” that ended up naming the whole state. If you’re curious how that happened, there’s a whole story behind Rhode Island’s name.

Sources & further reading

• Samuel Greene Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 1 (1859). Pp. 69–72: the Antinomian “exiles” led by John Clark and William Coddington, Pocasset begun in 1638 and Newport in the spring of 1639. Pp. 132–133: the April 28, 1639, agreement and the departure of Pocasset’s whole government with its records. P. 134 (note): Winthrop’s “put out Mr. Coddington” and Arnold’s reply. Pp. 135–137: Pocasset renamed Portsmouth, Easton’s journal, the naming of Newport, the spring, the swamp and the harbor.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 224. “So named by a party of settlers from Portsmouth, who called it a ‘new port,’” and Newport County “named from the city.”
• Richard M. Bayles, ed., History of Newport County, Rhode Island (1888), p. 156. Easton’s night on Coasters’ Harbor island at the end of April 1639.
• John Hayward, The New England Gazetteer (1839). Newport’s harbor and its place on the island of Rhode Island.