Chepiwanoxet Point

41°40′24″N 71°26′30″W / 41.67333°N 71.44167°W / 41.67333; -71.44167

Chepiwanoxet is a neighborhood in Warwick, Rhode Island, with an island peninsula in Greenwich Bay, an arm of Narragansett Bay. The neighborhood straddles the Amtrak railroad lines, which lies just east of and parallel to the Post Road (US Route 1). Its boundaries are Neptune Street to the North, Alger Avenue to the South, Post Road to the West, and Greenwich Bay to the East. Chepiwanoxet Way, an underpass beneath the Amtrak lines, now serves as the only street access in and out of the neighborhood.

Native Americans, who fished its island and shores, named this area between Post Road and Greenwich Bay "Chepiwanoxet." Settled as a colonial farm in early 18th century, it became a beach resort with hotel and shore dinner hall after the Chepiwanoxet railroad station opened in around 1837. Small lots were sold for summer cottages to upstate residents and for homes to workers in nearby Cowesett Hill Estates in late 19th century. Before World War I, the Gallaudet Aircraft Company built a causeway to the island for its seaplane factory. The Chepiwanoxet entrance sign states that Warwick bought the island in 1994 for a city park.

Chepiwanoxet, known also in earlier sources, such as A Key into the Language of America as Chepinoxet, is a Narragansett word. It may be derived from chepi 'separated,' -wan (particle) -ok 'little' -sett 'place', meaning perhaps 'Little Separated Place,' or possibly 'Little Place at the Northeast,' compare chepewéssin 'northeast wind.'

Chepiwanoxet Alternate Names: Chepi, Devil's Island, Gallaudet Seaplane Factory

Chepiwanoxet is underlaid by sedimentary rocks of the Coal Age (Pennsylvanian period, about 300 million years old). This rock formation is 60 miles (97 km) long, extending from Hanover, Massachusetts, south to the mouth of Narragansett Bay, and 18 miles (29 km) wide from Providence to Fall River. It underlies the entire Narragansett Bay, including the Providence River, Greenwich Bay, Fall River, the Sakonnet River, plus both East and West passages out to the ocean. Chepiwanoxet and East Greenwich are just inside the western edge of the Rhode Island formation.

The new Bedrock Geologic Map of Rhode Island gives more details of what underlies the unconsolidated surface material. Chepiwanoxet sits atop the western edge of the Rhode Island Formation of the stratified Narragansett Bay Group of the Pennsylvanian period (between 323 and 290 million years ago). The Narragansett Bay Group rocks are part of the Esmond-Dedham subterrane of the Southeastern New England Avalon zone. Uphill from the Post Road (US Route 1) is the boundary between the Rhode Island Formation and the older Scituate Igneous Suite (granite and diorite/gabbro rock) of the Devonian period (408 to 362 million years ago), which extends westward to the Connecticut border.

The real beginning of Chepiwanoxet Island came as a result of the last great ice sheets, which bulldozed rock and stone from Canada to Rhode Island. Along the way, each glacier gouged up billions of cubic meters of underlying bedrock, and then ground local and imported rocks together, creating much of the glacial deposits existing today. When the Earth's temperature rose about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the glaciers began melting faster than they were moving forward leaving huge deposits of sand and feeding many rivers and streams that rose sea level and washed sand into the coves and bays. For extended periods, the ice advance equaled the rate of melt, and piles of sediment were deposited in terminal or end moraines, such as on Block Island and in Charlestown (hills in the southern part of the state).