New England Wireless & Steam Museum

The story

Robert W. Merriam opened the museum on a Frenchtown Road farm on October 3, 1964, with Governor John H. Chafee cutting the ribbon. The premise was local: in 1875 Rhode Island was the world center of the stationary steam industry, and somebody ought to keep the evidence. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers credits it with the finest collection of Rhode Island–made engines and original stationary steam engine drawings anywhere, and made the site an engineering landmark in 1992.

Much of the campus was rescued from elsewhere. The Merriam Steam Building went up in 1971 around a William A. Harris engine donated by a Dorchester laundry, and holds the largest engines — among them what is likely the only engine designed and built by George H. Corliss still running under steam. That one came out of a Stratton, Maine mill that made turned wood products, retired only when its cylinder head blew off; a new head was cast in Hartford and volunteers rigged and grouted it back into service. The Hanson Meeting Hall is an 1822 meeting house, moved here in 1972 when the Frenchtown Baptist Church built new; its steeple bell came off New Haven Railroad locomotive #1380.

The centerpiece is Massie Wireless Station PJ, built in 1907 by Walter Wentworth Massie at Point Judith to talk to the passenger steamboats running between New York and New England. It was hauled here to escape demolition and arrived unaltered, original equipment intact and working — the basis for calling it the oldest surviving, originally equipped wireless station anywhere. It joined the National Register in 2001. The Wireless Building runs from early electricity through telegraph to television: a Marconi distress transmitter of the type Titanic carried, an 1881 Dolbear receiver that still works. Keeping all of it operable is stated mission; the labor is volunteer.