We try to keep this list of historic house museums for Rhode Island current, but it is best to check directly with the museums for their hours and other information.
If you know of a historic house museum not in our list, please submit it.
If you are the director of a museum in our listings and you would like to claim your listing so you are able to maintain your listing yourself, please email us at info@vpa.org and we will set you up.
The Georgian Mansion (circa 1734) is the former home of the Babcocks and Smiths. The mansion is elegantly furnished with pieces reflecting the Colonial Babcock years, the Victorian Smith years, and colonial restoration of 1928. Historians and antique-lovers alike will enjoy all the museum has to offer! Read More
Ranked by Yankee Magazine as one of the five best public gardens in New England, Blithewold, formerly home to the Van Wickle family, is a 45-room English-style manor mansion filled with family heirlooms, framed by a series of lovely gardens and arboretum on Narragansett Bay. Read More
The house at Clouds Hill was built as a wedding gift for Elizabeth Ives Slater on her marriage to Alfred Augustus Reed, Jr. The home passed from Elizabeth to her daughter, Helen, on to Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Anne, and finally to her great-granddaughter, Anne. Anne is the current owner and graciously invites you to visit her family home which is… Read More
Heir to one of Rhode Island’s leading textile manufacturing families, Henry Lippitt (1818-1891) designed and supervised the construction in 1865 of a house at 199 Hope Street in Providence for his wife Mary Ann Balch (1823-1889) and their six children. Occupied by generations of the Lippitt family for 114 years, the house is a three story, thirty room Renaissance… Read More
Located just to the north of Providence in Lincoln, Rhode Island, Hearthside is a unique stone mansion built in 1810 on pastoral Great Road, the first road through the wilderness between Providence and Mendon, Massachusetts, and one of the oldest thoroughfares in America. Read More
The Preservation Society of Newport County presents 10 of the best homes in America. The Breakers, The Elms, Marble House, Rosecliff, Green Animals, Chateau-sur-Mer, Chepstow, Isaac Bell House, Kingscote, and Hunter House Read More
The Paine house originally was built around 1691 by Samuel Bennett. Samuel ran a saw mill at this site and it is believed that the house began as a one room shelter. Read More
The two-storied frame house being built just above the Kent Country Court House was the new home of a young lawyer, James Mitchell Varnum, and his bride, Martha. Built in keeping with the best architectural standards of the day, the new mansion had a hipped roof, modillioned cornices, heavily moulded caps, and a central pedimented doorway with columned porch.… Read More
Newport, Rhode Island's oldest residence, built in 1697 and home to generations of colonial governors and American patriots. Read More