Memorial Day tradition

Ninigret – past, present and future

By Will Collette

This weekend, to honor Memorial Day, we will continue Progressive Charlestown’s tradition of running a series of essays by Frank Glista and a series of photo arrays featuring one of Charlestown’s most distinctive pieces of land, town-owned Ninigret Park and the adjacent Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge in its former incarnation as the Charlestown Naval Auxiliary Air Field (NAAF) during World War II where thousands of Navy pilots trained, including former President George H.W. Bush, father of George W.

This year is destined to be another contentious year for Ninigret Park as voters go to the polls on June 1 to decide whether to actual put some funding, $1 million in this case, into actually going forward with the Ninigret Park Master Plan. The ruling CCA Party is totally opposed to this bond petition and only allowed it to appear on the special Town Financial ballot because they have to (more than 300 Charlestown residents signed the petition).

If that bond issue passes, and I hope it does, the next struggle will be to get our CCA Party rulers to actually spend the money. I am willing to bet that they will simply impound the money. Rhode Island is one of several states that forbid the Governor from impounding funds appropriated by the General Assembly, but it’s an open question whether a municipality can do that.

I predict another major fight over Ninigret – and this ties in very closely with the reasons why we celebrate Memorial Day – if the Quonset Air Museum decides to try to relocate to Ninigret Park.

The Quonset Air Museum is at the end of its six-year lease in a Quonset Industrial Park building owned by the quasi-public RI Airport Corp. Their building has been condemned for safety reasons, the most dramatic of which was a partial roof collapse due to this past winter’s heavy snow.

Ninigret Park is on their short list for a new location.

Quonset Air Museum Director David Payne says they would want a spot near the current NAAF Memorial and would need around 8 acres. The Westerly Sun reports they would bring their 23 planes with them and would build a new hangar for restoration of aircraft, plus space for displays, offices and restrooms.

The non-profit Museum raises its own money and has an annual budget of $150,000.

Frank Glista told the Westerly Sun, “The air museum would be a great addition and improvement to our park. This would allow our tourist season to expand from just the summer months into the winter as well… It would be great to get some of those planes back to Ninigret again. There’s a tremendous amount of history here. The air museum just has so much that relates to Ninigret.”

Not to mention that this project would be very cool.

Which is why I expect the CCA Party will do everything in its power to make sure the Museum never happens. Already, the CCA Party is making its moves to roll back human activity in Ninigret Park. They pushed out Park booster Jay Primiano who was forced to resign as Director of Parks and Recreation in April.

They have not even posted his job as vacant, even though Primiano’s predecessor, former Town Councilor Lisa DiBello, has begun her effort to get her old job back.

Residents of the Arnolda neighborhood, a CCA Party stronghold, already raised hell over a small and simple open-air shelter so kids who come to the summer day camp at Ninigret can get out of the rain. Listening to their remarks about the kid’s shelter, you would think it was going to be a 100,000 seat sports stadium. (Hmmmm, I wonder if the Pawsox might consider…..Nah….).

Anyway, if the CCA people went so crazy over a 2500 square foot shelter for children, imagine their reaction to an eight-acre project that includes actual construction of a building. Somebody grab the smelling salts for Ruth Platner and go door-to-door in Arnolda with defibrillation paddles.

Anyway, that’s what’s ahead. We also hope that readers who check out the Memorial Day special coverage will also reflect on the land’s past.

Ninigret Park and the National Wildlife Refuge are covered in the 2013 Charlestown history, “Historic Cross’ Mills: A Self-Guided Tour” by Jean Pellam (and available from the Charlestown Historical Society).

Ms. Pellam notes that the area was used as a summer encampment by the Narragansetts for at least a thousand years. In 1661, by some undescribed means, the land came to be owned by Jeffery Champlin, one of the original settlers and was turned into a plantation that used both African and Narragansett Indian slaves.

The total land mass of the Champlin plantation was expanded by both hook and crook to reach from the shore of Ninigret Pond north to Watchaug Pond.

Most of the land was farmed until 1942 when the US Government bought 600 acres to set up the Naval Auxiliary Air Field. At its peak, 1,500 people lived on the base. Of all the flyers, 62 lost their lives in crashes.

NAAF was closed in 1949 but was reopened during the Korean War. But by the 1960s, according to Ms. Pellam, the runways’ main use was for drag racing.

The Air Field was decommissioned and declared excess property in 1974, setting off an array of competing uses for the land. The most controversial was to build a nuclear power plant that led to a major public uprising. A lot of people, including, for example, former state Representative Donna Walsh, had their first involvement in politics through the fight to block the nuclear power plant.

In the end, the NAAF land was divided into three parts, the 409-acre federal Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge, and the second, a restricted use parcel (172.4 acres) that was given to Charlestown by the feds to be used only for uses that don’t have any negative impact on the Wildlife Refuge.

The third and the final parcel is land (55 acres) that Charlestown bought outright and comes with no restrictions or strings.

In 2012, Charlestown was torn apart by the CCA-instigated Battle for Ninigret Park over whether Charlestown needed federal permission to install dark sky-friendly lights on its sports field. Though the CCA Party lost its effort to turn over control of Ninigret Park to the feds and oversight to a hand-picked ad hoc committee of CCA Party supporters, they did succeed in ousting former Town Administrator Bill DiLibero and this battle made Jay Primiano’s ouster an inevitability.

My colleague Linda Felaco just produced a bibliography of our coverage of the big battles of the past five years over town land use priorities. “

The Ninigret lands are an interesting historical and ecological study. They went from natural tribal hunting and fishing land to intensive farming to being heavily impacted by the construction of the Navy air field. 

Thousands of tons of concrete, dozens of buildings, underground piping and wiring and untold tons of toxic waste went onto and into that property.

You can see how hard Nature has been working over the past forty years at taking back the land but the air strips are still the most prominent features in both the Park and the Refuge. Ninigret is still very much a work in progress.

Ninigret is where Charlestown’s cultures clash, with wealthy retirees squared off against working families. Issues are often cut as environment versus the economy. But you would think that with over 600 acres total, there would be more room for accommodation – a balance between silver-haired retirees watching the birds and kids playing games and sports. Between long walks in the coastal brush and woods and adults enjoying music or good food.

Or we can continue to fight about it.