
The Jireh Bull site is in the Tower Hill area south of Wickford, Rhode Island, about seven miles east of the Narragansett’s fort in the Great Swamp. It was burned by the a party of Native Americans on December 15, 1675, after word spread that the Jireh Bull house was to be a gathering site for Connecticut, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay Colony soldiers. Before Plymouth and Massachusetts troops could reach the site, the house was attacked and burned to the ground.
In 1917, Norman Isham, an authority on early Colonial architecture, excavated several mounds on the site near the Pettaquamscutt River; these mounds covered the ruins of the Jireh Bull House. The excavated artifacts were donated to the Rhode Island Historical Society by John Hutchins Cady in 1967. Unfortunately, Isham was not able to supervise the final collection of artifacts, and now the exact find locations are lost. We don’t know if some came from the earliest house, the house destroyed in 1675, or the house built after King Philip’s War.

For more information about the dig and the Jireh Bull site, please see”A new Look at the Jireh Bull Excavation,” by Eleanor Monahon, Rhode Island History, Volume 20, January 1961, pp. 13-24, and Nina Zannieri’s Jireh Bull Site, published by the RIHS in 1982. Both are available in the RIHS Library. –KNH