The House
Nearly three centuries under one roof
The farmhouse you can visit today was raised in 1736 and has stood through almost three hundred years of Rhode Island history. It is a real, lived-in home — not a film set or a recreation — and every family who passed through it left something of their story behind. What follows is the history of the house, the land it sits on, and the people whose accounts carried its name far beyond Burrillville.
The Old Arnold Estate
The land beneath the house
The property is part of what was long known locally as the Old Arnold Estate — a substantial tract of farmland in the rural northwest corner of Rhode Island. For most of its life this was a working farm, with fields, stone walls, and a family burial ground among the trees.
That sense of accumulated history is part of what makes the house so striking to visit. You are not walking through a single story but through the overlapping lives of everyone who worked this land across nearly three hundred years.
A Timeline
Three hundred years, in order
The full history of the property is laid out as an interactive walk through the years — 16 entries running from the 1680 survey of the land to the house as it stands tonight. It covers the eight generations of one family who lived and died here, what town records and obituaries actually say about the names attached to this place, the Perron family's decade from 1971 to 1980, and the three quiet decades that followed.
History reads differently after dark
Three centuries of it, documented and in order — and a record of how the house has been opened to the public since 2019.