NEWPORT, R.I. - The Breakers in Newport is an opulent oceanside mansion completed in 1895 as a summer cottage for the wealthy Vanderbilt family. Less than 15 minutes away and across a bridge into nearby Bristol, stands the 45-room Blithewold mansion and its verdant 33-acre garden estate of trees, shrubs, and lawns.
Both buildings are relics of America's Gilded Age and monuments to unfettered wealth. Now, tourism officials want to make sure visitors to one site are also checking out the other.
Newport and its neighboring communities are creating a trail of historic attractions, linking up notable sites with color-coded maps and eventually road signs to make it easier for tourists to move from museum to mansion to Colonial-era farm. The goal of the initiative, known as the Newport Bristol Heritage Passage, is not to draw more tourists, but to encourage those who already come to extend their stays by steering them to attractions they may not have thought to visit.
"We're going after the quality visitor, and the quality visitor has a particular interest in heritage tourism attractions and events," said Keith Stokes, executive director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, which is spearheading the trail.
The project's intent is similar to Boston's Freedom Trail, a 2.5-mile red-brick walking trail linking historic sites. But this trail will be accessed more by drivers given the broad swath of land it covers, bookended by Newport and Bristol and winding through the lesser-known towns of Portsmouth, Jamestown, Middletown, Tiverton, and Little Compton.
The corridor is already laid out, with more than 80 mansions, museums, gardens, farms and burial grounds highlighted on maps, marked on a website, and grouped into seven categories, such as maritime heritage, religious freedom and tolerance, Gilded Age, and museums.
Once the project is completed, Stokes said, highway and road signs will alert drivers that they have entered the Newport Bristol Heritage Passage. Signs within the communities, bearing a logo or symbol, will give visitors information about reaching historic sites and attractions along the corridor and will provide general information about things like public parking and nearby restrooms, he said.
"It helps to communicate that there's more to see, that this is one part of a greater whole," said Andrew Barresi, a principal of Roll-Barresi & Associates, a design firm in Cambridge, Mass., hired for the project. "If there was no signage or no indication that it's part of the heritage trail, it's a one-stop experience, so to speak."
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