Exploring the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace and Museum in Saunderstown

Photograph by Shawn Boyle

Tucked away on a quiet road in North Kingstown lie four centuries’ worth of American history. The former mill property — home to one of the oldest snuff mills in the United States, as well as the grist mill seen here — was the birthplace of Gilbert Stuart, best known for his portraits of American presidents. Stuart was born at the mill house in 1755 and later moved to London to pursue a career as an artist. He returned to America to paint a portrait of George Washington in 1795, during the president’s second term of office. “The two of them got on like a wet brick,” says Michelle Lee Leonard, executive director of the museum. Despite the chilly reception, Martha Washington commissioned Stuart to paint portraits of the couple the following year. The artist never delivered the final work (“He was very much more interested in a good story than the nitty gritty of the truth,” Lee Leonard says) but the unfinished study and its copies are now memorialized on the $1 bill. The mill, meanwhile, gained a different type of renown for its white cap flint cornmeal — the kind traditionally used for johnnycakes. At the age of seventy-one, Stuart returned to visit the property and reminisce about his humble beginnings. Today, visitors can learn about traditional stone milling methods while admiring paintings of our famous forebears. “There are no small people in this story,” Lee Leonard says. gilbertstuartmuseum.org