How One Harbor Built America's Richest Resort: Block Island

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1870, Block Island had no harbor, no hotels, and no future beyond subsistence fishing. One islander — Nicholas Ball, flush with California Gold Rush money — lobbied Congress for a federal breakwater that would cost $155,000 and change everything. Within a decade, Old Harbor was lined with grand Victorian hotels, including Ball’s own Ocean View, a 330-foot wooden colossus that may have been the largest in New England. Steamships brought 56,000 visitors a year. Then the fires started. One by one, the great wooden hotels burned — the National in 1902, the Hygeia in 1916, the Ocean View in 1966. The automobile pulled tourists to mainland resorts. The 1938 hurricane crippled the fishing fleet. By 1960, Block Island’s year-round population had fallen to 489, the lowest since the 1770s. The National Register’s own verdict on Old Harbor: it never recovered. But the land did something no one predicted — it became extraordinarily valuable to people who would never live there full-time. Today the median home listing is $3.5 million, nearly 80% of houses sit empty most of the year, and the families who built the island can no longer afford it. Sources: Historic and Architectural Resources of New Shoreham (Block Island), Rhode Island, 1636–Present — National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, National Park Service (prepared by Wm. McKenzie Woodward, RI Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, 2001) Block Island South East Light, New Shoreham, Rhode Island — Historic Structures / National Register nomination documentation (historic-structures.com) “A Real Queen, She Was” — Memories of the Ocean View Hotel, Block Island Times Resurrection of the Surf Hotel, Block Island Times Old Harbor Historic District — National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, 1974 (Rhode Island State Historic Preservation Office) The Palatine Wreck: The Legend of the New England Ghost Ship — Jill Farinelli (University Press of New England, 2017), referenced via Massachusetts Historical Society review and New England Historical Society