The story
Hanton City — locals call it the Lost City — is a colonial ghost hamlet in the woods of Smithfield, Rhode Island, older and stranger than most New England ruins. It was settled in the late 1600s, likely by families named Paine, Hanton, and Shippee, possibly on land granted for service in King Philip's War. They farmed the thin soil and got by on quarrying, tanning, and bootmaking, trading among themselves in a settlement oddly cut off from the roads around it.
That isolation bred legends. One tradition holds the founders were Loyalists who withdrew — or were pushed — into the hills during the Revolution; another, with less to support it, calls it a colony of outcasts. These are unproven local stories, and we flag them as such. What the record shows is a small, self-reliant farming community that was gone by the early 1800s, its houses left to fall in.
What survives is subtle: stone foundations, miles of stone wall, a small burial ground, and a broken dam, scattered through second-growth forest with no marked village and no clear path. Hanton City is a place you read in the ground rather than see standing.
What remains today
Stone house foundations, stone walls, a family burial ground, and a ruined dam in the woods off the Hanton City Trail.
Questions from the field
- Who lived in Hanton City?
- A small colonial farming community, traditionally the Paine, Hanton, and Shippee families, who also quarried stone and made boots. It was settled in the late 1600s and abandoned by the early 1800s.
- Were the residents Loyalists?
- It's a persistent local legend that the settlers were Revolutionary-era Loyalists, but there's no firm evidence for it — we report it as folklore, not documented history.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Hanton City — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Hanton City's permanent record.
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Primary sources for this record
- — Historical Society of Smithfield
- — Providence Journal — Hanton City
- — Rhode Island colonial land records