Community group envisions building complete with 24-foot griffin, a place where tourists and students could learn about Narragansett.

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — The cover of the March 1887 Scientific American showed a contraption touted as a marvel of modern technology.

It looked like a small castle perched atop a stone base, with a windmill spinning from a smaller, higher tower. It wasn't a castle, though, but a water tank in disguise, and the windmill was designed to provide electricity for what we would now call a cluster development equipped with green technology.

The tower was the centerpiece for a development of summer mansions being built by Edward Earle, a New York lawyer, just south of the Narragansett Pier Casino. With the casino's many leisure activities, plus beaches and shops, Narragansett had all the amenities for the wealthy of the Gilded Age, although Earle could see that its clientele was beginning to prefer private mansions to grand hotels.

Earle built his tower, but without the windmill. A photo taken around 1900, the same year a fire destroyed the casino and several hotels, shows the water tower sporting its carved wooden griffin, a dragonlike creature that dwarfs a nearby horse and wagon. Mansions can be seen in the background.

"Everyone, when they see the picture, they can't believe it," said Sallie Latimer, chairwoman of Griffins R Us, the group that has been working since 2013 to rebuild the tower as an educational center and tourist attraction.



All that's left of the tower is its stone base, which stands in a wide spot in the narrow lane of Earle's Court, a residential street that connects Ocean Road with Gibson Avenue.

Keith Lescarbeau, 57, whose company, Abcore Restoration, has almost finished restoring the Towers on Ocean Road and who has brought several lighthouses back to their former glory, was asked if he could make a new griffin. The original was lost either in 1928, when a storm damaged the tower, or in 1938, when the hurricane finished it off.

"I asked them if they wanted the dragon to breathe fire or not," Lescarbeau said.

The committee declined the fire option. Griffins, which have the head, wings and talons of an eagle, with the body and tail of a lion, aren't fire breathers. The griffin symbolized the power of the kings of both land and air. "It was to protect treasures," Latimer said.

The treasure in this case was the neighborhood. Next to Earle's Court was another set of mansions, the Sherry Cottages on Kentara Green, built by New York restaurateur Louis Sherry at about the same time. Brought in to oversee dining for all the casino operations, he ended up owning the casino and rebuilding it after the fire. Sherry hired McKim, Mead & White, the architects who had designed the casino, as well as the Rhode Island State House and the Newport Casino, now the International Tennis Hall of Fame, to build his project.

Latimer, 80, and her husband live in one of the surviving Sherry Cottages.

Lescarbeau was the right person to ask about the griffin. He's done plenty of unusual jobs. And this one's unusual.

"It's a 24-foot, carbon-fiber dragon attached to an 80-foot building that's only about 14 feet wide, and it's in the middle of the road," Lescarbeau said. "You're not going to find people to do that in the Yellow Pages."

He knows some engineers in Florida who have done special projects for him and for Disney. He'll build a mold and a cradle, because "it's so large, you can't just grab it by the arms." He'll take it to Florida, where they'll do the injection molding in carbon fiber. He'll truck it back and install it on the tower, which he expects to build once the group has raised its goal of about $350,000. The griffin, he figures, will cost about $140,000.



Instead of a water tank, the tower will support an octagonal room with an interactive museum and a video showing historic photos and aerial footage shot by Don and Nate Bousquet from a remote-controlled toy plane.

A steel structure in the base will support about 25 people at a time, either in the Tank Room or walking around an outer deck for panoramic views of Narragansett and the ocean.

"It's a good teaching spot," Latimer said.

The base was given to the town in 1999, and Griffins R Us got permission to rebuild the tower with private funding. At the urging of Michael DeLuca, director of Narragansett's Department of Community Development, the group recently hired a fundraiser, Daniel R. Barry and Associates.

Barry said he sent letters in December to about 40 key people in Narragansett and South Kingstown, asking not for money but for their insights into whether a capital campaign could be successful and what kind of timetable it would need.

He asked to meet with each person who received a letter.

Latimer's dream is for a place where tourists and students on field trips could learn about Narragansett, the environment and any other topic programmed into the interactive exhibits.

She cites an idea that is often attributed to William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

Lescarbeau said the water tower never did pump water. The town installed a municipal water system two years after it was built.

And even though griffins don't shoot fire, "We do want to light a fire" in students' minds, Latimer said.

— dnaylor@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7411

On Twitter: @donita22