Overview
Napatree Point extends its mile of sand and dune west of Watch Hill in Westerly, Rhode Island — today a conservation area of nesting birds and bare beach, but until 21 September 1938 a summer colony: some forty substantial cottages lined the spit, and the Great New England Hurricane, striking without modern warning, destroyed every one, sweeping houses and people into the bay; residents died here and along this coast in a catastrophe Rhode Island still mourns, and survivors' accounts of riding wreckage across to the Connecticut shore are among the storm's indelible stories — real deaths and real courage this record honours first. The point was never rebuilt, its emptiness the memorial. Coastal telling followed softly: figures on the dunes at dusk, lights where the cottage line stood, voices under the wind — accounts kept brief and gentle here, subordinate to documented loss. Walkers visit under conservation rules, the spit's bareness its own history lesson. Present Napatree as hurricane memory first: a colony the sea took, remembered by sand.