When Little Compton was the biggest poultry town in the country, this vasty stone house was the last stop the egg wagon made on its drive toward the landing where the steamboat Queen City tied up for the night.
All around the house were the flat fields, the ponds, the marshes where the cattails grew, and the sandy beaches that were endlessly thumped by the seas.
It had long memories, this Seaconnet Point Farm. The spot where the house stands was first owned by Col. Benjamin Church, the famous indian fighter. The land between there and the landing belonged on shares to the early proprietors, including Governor Winslow of Plymouth and William Pabodie, son-in-law of John Alden and Priscilla.
Here, at one of the most exposed points on the Rhode Island coast, Lemuel Sisson brought his family from Newport in a small sailing vessel in the early 1800's He was the first Shouting Methodist in S'cunnet and all the later Sissons in town were descended from him.
Henry Tillinghast Sisson was one of those descendants. Most of his clan moved eastward into S'cunnet's Psalming Country but he inherited the farm at the Point and lived most of his life in the big stone house his father had built. In the years when I knew him he was an old man, all gaunted up, with squinting and rheumy eyes and a quavery voice- but he was still our town's Civil War hero.
While he lived, S'cunnet sort of accepted him as a matter of course and didn't go out of its way to honor him. After he died, Rhode Island and Massachusetts joined in putting up his statue in the new cemetery at the Commons. Massachusetts had every reason to be grateful to him and sent its acting governor down from Boston to unveil the statue. This man spoke his piece with a twanging drawl that no old stock Yankee in S'cunnet could have beaten. His name was Calvin Coolidge.
You can see that the statue presents a most soldierly figure, with shoulders thrown back, a forward thrust to the sword, and that come-one-come-all look he must have had on the day he became a hero. But the man I knew was grizzled and old and deaf; he wasn't devout like the Sissons in the Psalming Country; he was a rough old sojer who liked to "varnish his insides with liquor".
A Hero's Story
It came about this way, at the outbreak of the Civil War young Sisson was commissioned a lieutenant and made paymaster on the staff of Ambrose E. Burnside, whose brigade fought in the first battle of Bull Run, He was soon promoted captain and given command of some of the troops taking part in the campaign of "Old Whiskers" on the North Carolina coast. When Burnside followed McClellan in command of the Army of the Potomac and was making his blundering plans for the battle of Fredericksburg, his successor in North Carolina, General Foster, promptly stuck his nose into a rebel trap. He sent two Massachusetts regiments up the Pimlico River to Fort Washington, where the Confederates penned them up.
Ten miles down the river from the fort a Union relief expedition was blocked by sunken hulks and concealed piles. The Confederates had removed all channel buoys and posted the banks with artillery supported by the infantry. The Fifth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, under Sissons command, was on one of the Union transports and like all Rhode Islanders, the boys got restless.
Sisson explained the dangers and left the decision to his men. All 388 were for action, save one, and he was the truest Rhode Islander of them all. He said afterwards he "didn't want the damned thing to be to unanimous."
Gen. Palmer commander of the expedition, said Sisson could try if he wished. Sisson loaded twenty tons of ammunition on the Escort, a wooden steamer built for the excursion business in Boston Harbor. When her for'ard deck was piled high with bales of hay to buffer the pilot house and engine, the Escort missed scraping bottom by only a foot.
After dark on April 13th, 1863, they set out. From the river banks the batteries fired on them. but not very accurately. The bullets of the Confederate infantry popped harmlessly off the sides of the steamer or thudded into the bales of hay. Fog shut down over the river and the shoreline could be located by the gun flashes only. Behind the leadsman in the bow stood Sisson, relaying directions to the pilot, doubtless with his "insides varnished" and a good plug of tobacco lodged inside his cheek.
You have guessed it. The Escort kept going, got through without the loss of one man, broke the siege. There were those who said that Sissons relief of "Little Washington" was the most daring feat of the war. It brought him recognition from an old Rhode Island friend who was coming into a position of influence in the capital.
Enter a Sprague
William Sprague had but a month before resigned as governor of Rhode Island to take a seat in the United States Senate. He was engaged to marry the daughter of Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's secretary of the treasury. In "Proud Kate," the biography of this woman written by Ishbel Ross and published a couple of years ago, you will find this reference to Col. Sisson:- Sprague wrote to his father-in-law-to-be that Sisson had been "the most successful recruiting officer" the governor had had in Rhode Island, and that he should be promoted for gallantry and sent to Florida to recruit a brigade of Negroes. His only fault, said Sprague, was intemperance, but had promised to reform.
Chase wrote back suggesting Secretary Stanton be drawn into the matter, but Sprague had a low opinion of Stanton and apparently nothing came of it. After the war Sisson had a different kind of reward, for William and Amasa Sprague, then the largest cotton goods manufacturers in Rhode Island, made him superintendent of all their mills in Warwick and Coventry.
The colonel returned to his home state with a bride. In camp, before the field and staff of his regiment, he had been wedded to Nettie Waldsworth of Elmira N.Y. Save for Burnside, he was the only soldier the General Assembly thanked for his war services.
His connection with the Spragues probably ended when the A. and W. Sprague Company failed during the severe panic of 1873. Beginning the next year the Republican Party nominated and elected him Lieutenant governor for three terms lasting one year each. The governor during this period was the older Henry Lippit.