Alien-West House Barrington, Rhode Island

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The Allen-West House is significant at the local level under Criterion A, in the areas of community planning and development and agriculture. Built ca. 1763, the house is a rare survivor of the agricultural settlement of Nockum Hill, which had its origins in the early colonial period.4 Characterized by level arable lands bounded by low-lying marshes and tidal flats, the Nockum Hill area was one of the earliest nodes of European settlement in Barrington, then part of the colonial town of Swansea (1667), and, unlike the rest of the town, it remained agricultural in character through the towns suburbanization in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The Allen-West House is also significant at the local level under Criterion C, in the area of architecture, as a work of colonial architecture in the Georgian style. One of approximately fifteen houses that survive from the 18th century in Barrington, it is notable as an early example of a square-plan house, an important but little-recognized regional house type that grew out of Rhode Islands 17th-century vernacular tradition.