Washington County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Washington County

Block Island sits 13 miles south of the Washington County mainland in Block Island Sound — accessible only by year-round Block Island Ferry from Galilee at Point Judith, the Block Island Express high-speed ferry from New London CT (summer only), or seasonal commuter flights from Westerly State Airport — and the island holds one of the highest concentrations of preserved-land conservation easements anywhere in the United States: roughly 40% of the 9.7-square-mile island is permanently protected through The Nature Conservancy's Block Island Project, the Block Island Conservancy, and the federally-managed Block Island National Wildlife Refuge per TNC ranking, making this the only US barrier island with that scale of protection. The refuge is the only federally-designated Wilderness Area in Rhode Island. Washington County itself is a Census-Bureau-recognized county that no longer has any active county-government function — Rhode Island abolished county-level administration in 1846, distributing all governance to the towns.

South Kingstown is the largest town and the traditional 'county seat' by historical convention but holds no actual county office. The county covers 333 sq mi of southern Rhode Island including the towns of South Kingstown, Narragansett, Charlestown, Westerly, Hopkinton, Richmond, Exeter, and New Shoreham (Block Island). Burlingame State Park on the mainland Charlestown coast accepts rigs to 45 ft with electric hookups and operates 700+ RV-friendly sites, the largest state-park campground in Rhode Island — reservations on the RI State Parks reservation system open 5 months out and Memorial Day-through-Labor Day weekends sell within hours of release. The Charlestown Breachway State Beach accepts self-contained RV staging on a separate 75-site shoreline loop. Misquamicut State Beach in Westerly is the canonical southern-RI beach destination, drawing 200,000+ summer visitors per RI DEM season-end reports. Watch Hill Lighthouse at the western county tip is one of the oldest continuously operating Atlantic-coast lighthouses (1808 original, 1856 current keeper's house) and the canonical sunset viewpoint of the Connecticut-Rhode Island maritime border.