One for the History Books

On a steamy summer afternoon, a trio of tourists pulled up at the Kingston Hill Store on Route 138 at the center of Kingston Village on their way back to New York, drawn in by the sign out front proclaiming books for sale. They wandered in among the shelves lined high with books in this Kingston landmark that traces its roots to the family of John Clarke, one of the founders of Newport.

Allison Goodsell, the bookstore owner, and Sanford Neuschatz, who owns the building and sells Rhode Island historical ephemera from a small office in the back, say they see visitors from all over the country in addition to those from their own backyard. Goodsell says, “Not too long ago a man from Mystic stopped in with a few boxes of books and said, ‘I want to make a donation.’ He wasn’t expecting much. I gave him $20, but once I started looking through the boxes, I realized what he had. I’ve been sending him checks ever since.” Among the items Goodsell found was a Civil War map with railroad routes marked on it. It was worth a good deal more than the $20 she gave the contributor.

“Just the other day, there was a group here from Shanghai,” Neuschatz says. “They were visiting Newport. Goodsell has had people from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. They come back whenever they are traveling. They could be going from Boston to New York, but they stop here.” For 15 years, the Kingston Hill Store has functioned as a rare book shop and a community curiosity for neighbors and visitors alike. People poke around the shelves hoping to find something they read 20 years earlier but discarded. Or they could be collectors of practically anything: Rhode Island history, particular obscure authors, naturalists’ illustrations. “We have a large number of Rhode Islanders who are collectors, historians and genealogists who frequently shop at the store,” says Goodsell, who started collecting books as a hobby, then abandoned a corporate career to buy and sell rare books full time, which she has been doing for more than two decades.

Neuschatz is a retired special education teacher who remembers the Kingston Hill Store from his days as a URI student in the 1960s. It was a general store back then as it had been for most of the 20th century, but after he bought the store in the mid-1990s, he indulged his interest in Rhode Island history by researching its “roots” back before the 19th century. It was a blacksmith shop at one time, then a marble stonecutting shop, and it was in the same extended Clarke family for ages, rented out to a number of well-known South County family operations.

Before all that, Neuschatz had become something of a real estate “mogul,” buying old houses first in Narragansett and then in Shannock Village, where he lives now. That’s how he developed his hobby-turned-retirement business of collecting and selling photographs, postcards and other images of Rhode Island’s historic villages from Bradford to Peacedale and Adamsville and the urban mill villages upstate.

“In every house I bought in Shannock I found incredible historical material,” Neuschatz explains. “The best was a diary where a young woman recorded every day of her life between 1907 and 1916,” he said. “This is how I started collecting things, including books. That’s how I met Allison, and when I bought this building I suggested that she rent it as a bookstore.”

The monetary value of what each of them sells means less than the historical value and the human connections they make, Goodsell insists. In their way, operating from a historic location, they are keeping Rhode Island’s history alive. 2528 Kingstown Road, Kingston. 401-796-8662. You can contact Goodsell at allisonbgoodsell@hotmail.com and Neuschatz at info@driftways.com.