Newport Historical Society brings back Magical History Tour June 6

Residents who reserved a seat on Newport Historical Society’s Magical History Tour spent Saturday morning tracing the town’s history from the Nettleton House at 20 Central Street through Pollards Mills, the Little Red Schoolhouse, Unity Road, Pine Street, North Newport and the Corbin Covered Bridge. The narrated outing ran from 10 a.m. to noon, lasted about two hours, was free and accepted donations, with seating limited to 12 people.

The society framed the return of the tour as a hands-on way to explore Newport with vintage charm rather than a formal lecture. Each seat included a tour book with old photos of the sites discussed, turning the ride into a moving archive as much as a community event. For residents who know Newport mostly by its present-day roads and landmarks, the tour connected those places to the town’s deeper civic memory.

The route highlighted some of Newport’s best-known preservation touchstones. The Little Red Schoolhouse, built in 1835, had Josiah Stevens as its first schoolmaster and closed as a school in 1885. The Corbin Covered Bridge carried even more local weight: the historical society says it was built around 1835, survived as the sole remaining span from Newport’s six highway covered bridges, was destroyed by arson on May 25, 1993, and was rebuilt in 1994 after a town vote and community fundraising effort.

The tour also fit into a larger season for the historical society. Newport was founded in 1761, the first Newport Historical Society was established in 1928, and a new society was incorporated on February 26, 1975. Its museum, housed in the historic Nettleton House, reopened on April 12, 2026, with updated exhibits and free admission. The house itself dates to the 1820s and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

That momentum matters as Newport heads toward its America250 programming. The society says the town’s contribution to the nation’s 250th anniversary will launch two years of events, with an opening celebration set for June 20, 2026. In that context, the Magical History Tour was more than a seasonal outing: it was a public route through the places Newport is choosing to preserve, explain and put back in front of its own residents.