Misquamicut Hurricane Risk: Buried, Rebuilt, Buried Again

A Sandbar Between a Pond and the Ocean

Misquamicut occupies a barrier beach — a narrow strip of sand separating saltwater Winnapaug Pond from the Atlantic — that spans roughly three miles of developed shoreline. Barrier beaches exist because storms move sand around; they are not fixed landforms, and Misquamicut's own history is the clearest possible illustration of that fact. What is now a family beach strip of motels, restaurants, and a state beach was, a century ago, a resort village called Pleasant View, built directly on top of the same exposed sand.

Development here began around 1894, when Courtland B. Bliven built the area's first beach cottage; his wife named the growing settlement Pleasant View. By 1910 it had grown to more than 140 cottages and businesses, including four major hotels, a casino, and a trolley connection to Watch Hill and Westerly. That resort community — not the Misquamicut of today — is what stood in the path of the 1938 hurricane.

September 21, 1938: Two Rows of Cottages, Buried

The Great New England Hurricane made landfall on September 21, 1938. Per Westerly Sun reporting citing local historian Don Gentile, Pleasant View by then had "two rows of cottages and a street in between," running all the way down to the Misquamicut Club's beach cottage. The storm destroyed that community.

What happened to those cottages here is a distinct, specific contrast to what happened a few miles west at Watch Hill's Napatree Point, where the same storm swept an entire 39-cottage colony out to sea. Conservationist Chaplin Bradford Barnes has stated that Misquamicut's houses "were most likely buried in sand" rather than washed away — the storm behaved differently on this stretch of barrier beach, piling sand over structures rather than carrying them off entirely. Concrete stairs that once led up to those buried Pleasant View-era cottages remain partially covered in sand today and are periodically exposed at extreme low tides — nicknamed the "stairs to nowhere" in Westerly Sun coverage, a tangible, present-day relic of the resort that stood here before 1938. The Pleasant View House hotel was damaged in the storm and rebuilt by 1940.

1944: A Second Hurricane Before Recovery Was Complete

Whatever had been rebuilt after 1938 was hit again in 1944, when a second major hurricane struck the area, per Rhode Island State Parks' own history page and Wikipedia. The compounding effect of two major storms within six years is part of why the beachfront community here never fully recovered to its pre-1938 form — each storm arrived before the last round of rebuilding was finished.

Hurricane Carol, August 31, 1954: The Storm That Ended the Resort Era

Hurricane Carol made landfall on August 31, 1954, and produced a storm surge reported at up to 14.4 feet in Narragansett Bay — by some accounts surpassing even the 1938 storm's surge — flooding downtown Providence under roughly 12 feet of water. Statewide, Carol killed at least 17 people, destroyed 620 houses and 83 other buildings, and caused an estimated $200 million in damage in 1954 dollars, with nearly the entire state losing power. In Westerly specifically, roughly 200 homes were washed away.

A widely reproduced historical photograph shows cars buried at the Andrea Hotel on Misquamicut Beach after Carol — a real, dateable image of the storm's severity on this exact stretch of sand. The Andrea itself, a guest house dating to 1912, still exists today as an operating Misquamicut restaurant. Per Rhode Island State Parks' own account of this era: "In 1938, 1944, and 1954 just about every structure along the beach was flattened, washed out to sea, or damaged."

1959: The State Steps In — Misquamicut State Beach

Three catastrophic storms in sixteen years left the beachfront here in no condition to simply rebuild a fourth time as it had been. Following the cumulative destruction of 1938, 1944, and 1954, Governor Dennis J. Roberts initiated condemnation proceedings to acquire roughly a mile of the devastated, privately held beachfront for public use. That condemned land became Misquamicut State Beach, which opened in 1959 and is today Rhode Island's largest state-run beach.

That sequence — repeated destruction, then public acquisition rather than private rebuilding — is the direct reason a large public state beach exists on this stretch of coast at all, in place of what would otherwise likely have become another dense run of private cottages.

Superstorm Sandy, 2012, and the Restoration That Followed

Superstorm Sandy made its final US landfall well to the west, in New Jersey, in October 2012, but it still caused significant erosion at Misquamicut State Beach. The state responded with an emergency relocation of sand back onto the shoreline, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers subsequently ran a federally funded beach restoration project that placed sand to rebuild the beach to its authorized design profile. That Army Corps restoration project was completed in May 2014.

The Corps' own public notice framed the purpose explicitly as protecting public infrastructure — the bathhouse, parking, and the roadway that serves as an evacuation route — and mitigating flooding during future coastal storms, not simply widening the beach for its own sake.

An Unresolved Question Today: A Proposed Large-Scale Nourishment Project

Erosion has continued to be a live, recurring problem along Misquamicut's roughly three-mile developed shoreline, where sand and storm damage have washed into Atlantic Avenue's streets even during ordinary winter storms. In response, Caswell Cooke, Executive Director of the Misquamicut Business Association, has been the lead public advocate for a large-scale beach nourishment project — pitched to the Westerly Town Council in May 2024 and presented to state legislators in February 2025 — that would extend the shoreline roughly 200 feet seaward by pumping dredged offshore sand onto the beach.

Reported estimates put the cost at roughly $8 million to $10 million per mile across three miles, or on the order of $24 million to $30 million total, with the Army Corps expected to cover about two-thirds if the project is authorized and state/local funding covering the remainder. Cooke has said the full approval process, including congressional authorization and Army Corps feasibility studies, could take as long as four years. As of the most recent reporting found in researching this page (early 2025), the project remained in the proposal and advocacy stage — not funded, and not under construction. Anyone evaluating this as a current issue should check directly with the Misquamicut Business Association or the Town of Westerly for whatever has changed since.

What This History Should Mean for a Buyer Today

None of this is a reason to avoid Misquamicut — people have lived, vacationed, and run businesses on this beach for well over a century, through repeated destruction and repeated rebuilding. But the pattern is specific and worth taking seriously before buying on a barrier beach here: this exact stretch of sand has been substantially destroyed by hurricanes at least three times in recorded history, and the state itself ultimately concluded that a meaningful portion of the pre-1938 beachfront was better used as public parkland than rebuilt as private housing a fourth time.

Building codes and construction standards have changed enormously since the 1938 and 1954 storms. Modern coastal construction on a property like this is typically governed by FEMA flood-zone designations, base flood elevation requirements, and Rhode Island's own coastal building standards — pilings, elevated foundations, breakaway walls below the base flood elevation, and wind-rated materials that simply did not exist when Pleasant View's cottages were built at grade on the sand. A well-built, code-compliant modern home on this beach is a fundamentally different structure than the two rows of cottages that stood here in 1938. That does not eliminate storm risk on a barrier beach — it cannot — but it is the single biggest reason a buyer should not extrapolate directly from 1938 or 1954 damage photos to what a current-code home would experience today.

What this page cannot tell you is a specific property's flood-zone designation, current base flood elevation requirement, flood-insurance cost, or evacuation-zone status — those are determined lot by lot and change as FEMA maps and state building codes are updated. Before buying on this stretch of coast, confirm flood-zone status and elevation requirements directly with the Town of Westerly's building and zoning offices, review flood-insurance costs with a licensed agent, and ask directly about the property's elevation, foundation type, and any history of storm damage or flood-insurance claims.