History of Dunlap Wheeler Park

A Beginning

In 1941, the Middletown Improvement Association spent $7,425 to secure property just east of the Newport/Middletown line, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The intent was to preserve the land as a park that was to remain a beautiful spot from which to enjoy the coastal views at the end of Easton’s Beach.

The Green Pioneers

Alan R. Wheeler, a history teacher at St. George’s School for 45 years, was president of the Middletown Improvement Association, and Pauline H. Haire served as chairman of the executive committee. A number of forward-looking private contributors made this possible: Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss, Mrs. Oliver G. Jennings, Mrs. Hamilton Fish Webster, Mrs. Walter Belknap James, Mrs. William R. Hunter, Countess Laszlo Szecheny, Mrs. Nicholas Brown, Mrs. Michael Van Buren, Mrs. Louis Butler McCagg, Mr. Walter Gurnee Dyer, Mr. Alan R. Wheeler, William P. Sheffield, Esq. Mrs. George Cerio, Mr. James O’Connell, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Parish, Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs, Miss Maude K. Wetmore, Miss Edith Wetmore, Mr. William H. Vanderbilt, Mrs. T. I. Hare Powel, Mrs. G. Bogart Blakely, Mr. and Mrs. W. Henry Williams, Francis L. V. Hoppin, Stewart Duncan, Anonymous, Mr. and Mrs. William McMaster Mills, and the Middletown Improvement Association.

Mr. Edward J. Corcoran served as notary public and James A. Peckham served as town clerk at the time of purchase.

In 1947 the 0.97-acre piece of property was turned over to the town of Middletown for the sum of $10, to be used as a park or a common. This group, however, did not leave a maintenance fund or arrange to landscape the park. The park served as a dirt parking lot for over two decades throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Park Dedication- Alan R. Wheeler and Anne Slater Dunlap

 

In 1970 the town of Middletown dedicated the park to Alan R. Wheeler (1879-1956) and Anne Slater Dunlap (1922-1968), for their contributions to beautification of the town. Anne Slater Dunlap served the town of Middletown in many volunteer capacities. From 1965 to 1968 she was the first Green Acres Coordinator. She was secretary of the Conservation Commission during that same period. She was also very active in the Middletown Garden Club. Before there was a tree warden or a tree commission in Middletown, she saw the need for roadside trees. She brought this to the town’s attention, and she used her expertise as a botany professor to select the type of hardy tree that would provide the best ambience for the roads of Middletown. The town planted the pin oaks that Mrs. Dunlap selected (in the 1960s) up and down Green End Avenue, Riverview Avenue, Wyatt Road, and other roads in Middletown. Today their shade and foliage is enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors alike.

From Parking Lot to Landscaped Park

In 1978 the park returned to being a parking lot. In response to concerns expressed by Rowena Dunlap, daughter of Anne Dunlap, the town planted grass in the park and agreed to landscape the area. The town has mowed it but it has not yet been landscaped to show the park’s best face to the public.

In 2000, a grassroots effort, led by Rowena Dunlap Burke, was launched to help Dunlap Wheeler Park finally realize its potential as a fully landscaped place of beauty to be enjoyed by the public. Since then many individuals, local businesses and institutions, including family members of Alan Wheeler and Anne Slater Dunlap, have contributed to the effort and many talented individuals have volunteered their services.

Frank Amaral, of Amaral Landscaping in Newport created the initial design for Dunlap Wheeler Park in September 2000. With this design, the project gained serious momentum: Several grants were sought and awarded: a grant of $2,500 from the Aquidneck Island Land Trust, a matching grant of $11,000 from the R.I. D.E.M., and an $11,000 grant from the Bank of Newport. These monies were all deposited to a town account expressly for Dunlap Wheeler Park. Several fundraisers were held at the Atlantic Beach Club.

In August 2001, the chain link fence that surrounded the park was removed. The park took on a whole new open and inviting look. People commented on how good the park looked, inspiring and encouraging those who were working towards its revitalization to realize their goal. If it looks good now, why not make it look great?

A View to the Future

In the spring of 2003, plans by landscape architect Anna Tillinghast were approved by the town of Middletown. In addition to maintaining an open lawn area overlooking Easton’s Beach and the Atlantic Ocean, the design includes trees appropriate to the environment, walkways, benches, and appealing sculptures. Completion of planting is anticipated by August 2004.

Dunlap Wheeler Park has a site of unusual prominence on Aquidneck Island. From its waterfront position, thousands upon thousands of people drive, bicycle, and walk past it daily. Once beautified by elegant landscaping, it will become the true gateway to both Middletown and Newport.

March 2004

Last Chance Gulch

One very rainy nasty Wednesday evening 22 years ago, my good husband drove me across our small state to an interview at a tiny rural library. It was for a 24 hour a week director position. It must’ve been before handicapped accessibility regulations were put into law. I climbed a tall steep set of chairs to get into the very dimly lit library, and then climbed down another set of steep set of narrow stairs into the subterranean meeting room.

Getting there had been circuitous. One dark winding road led to an even darker more winding road into seeming nothingness. The first sign I could make out proclaimed, “Last Chance Gulch” over the driveway of a little rocky homestead.

I had gotten off my student intern job at another public library, transformed myself into interview material and hopped into the warm car for the ride to this interview. I didn’t have any time to be nervous. I looked as good as I could in a buttoned-up librarian sort of way.

Sitting around the table like the twelve apostles, in that subterranean meeting room were the library’s trustees. They all took turns giving me their versions of the mission and historic details of the library, asked several questions, some a little less than professional. Finally, I was asked if I had any questions for them. I asked why the current director was leaving the position. The older man trustee in the red plaid flannel shirt piped up, “He knocked up his wife and had to find a full-time position.”

Thankfully, a few weeks later, I found out they’d hired the woman who lived next door to be their new library director.

The Great Equalizer

I was a newly minted 30 year old librarian on my first professional job interview. I had very carefully, with a great deal of help from my old father, constructed a resume and cover letters for 5 different librarian positions. My husband drove me up to the city, coaching me a bit along the way. After the initial interview at the main library with the head of personnel, I was driven out to a branch library in a section of the city I’d never explored before. It was an asphalt jungle. The library was large, old, and imposing. It had been built as a fallout shelter. Though it was on street named for a large majestic tree, there was not a tree in sight. Nor were there any people outside walking. We parked in a gated, chain-linked parking lot behind the library.

The library director grilled me, much the way our family doctor always had, pounding my knees with his rubber mallet checking my reflexes. She hurled question after question at me. She was quick paced. I followed suit, feeling like I was on Jeopardy. Towards the end of the interview she asked me what I’d do if a library patron complained to me about the odor of another library patron. Now you probably know just as well as I do that the public library is the great equalizer. Everybody’s welcome. And people are only kicked out under the direst of circumstances. I chewed on that one for a minute and told her that I’d have a small basket of herbal sachets at the desk and if someone came to me with that complaint, I’d give them one to sniff instead of the poor unbathed person.

Not too long afterwards I was hired.

Meeting Fifi

I was 14 years old playing hooky from school with my brother and father. My brother was going up to Hanover, New Hampshire to see Dartmouth College and be interviewed for admission. I was the tag-along kid along for the ride. I love going places, meeting people, and watching the scenery rush by a moving vehicle.

The ride went quickly. My father had a little English Ford called a Cortina. It hummed just like a sewing machine. We drove over the Connecticut River into Hanover. It’s purely a college town, with one main street leading up to a large green and an old-fashioned New England campus with lots of maple trees.

My father was stopped at a light on Main Street when all of a sudden he said to me, “Hop out, find 36 Maple Street and knock on the door.” It wasn’t hard; I walked about a block and a half and went up and knocked on the door of a white raised ranch house. Pretty soon I saw a dark-haired lady in white tennis shorts come bustling down the stairs. She opened the door, looked at me and said in a deep German accent, “Don’t tell me who you are- I’m going to guess!”

To my surprise, she guessed correctly. Within 2 or 3 minutes she exclaimed, “You’re a perfect cross between Anne and Richard- come in and have some cake; it’s just cooled and ready to eat.”

With a rather dramatic flair, Fifi sliced into the cake, only to have the cake knife leap out of her hand and ricochet away. Fifi burst out laughing as she peered into the offending cake: she’d baked a utility rubber band right into the middle of a German chocolate cake. After she delicately removed the rubber band, she served me the most delicious piece of cake I’d ever had in my life.

And when I had had my last swallow, she said, “I am sure glad you came by just now; the faculty wives will be here in an hour. I’d have been the laughing stock of Hanover.”

So that was how I met Fifi.

Hooch

My father, Rick, has a couple of drinking stories. He was born in 1917 and grew up in Columbia, Missouri. His mother was from Chicago and my father spent vacations there with an older cousin named Bill.

Both these tales took place when my father was twelve or thirteen years old, his cousin Bill 19, during Prohibition. Bill took my father to a popular drinking establishment in Chicago called Ivanhoe’s. My father said it had an extremely clever set-up: the bartender could push a button and the bar would crash down a floor breaking all the bottles, leaving no proper evidence for the police.


My dad’s cousin Bill’s family had a summer cottage on the far tip of a peninsula in Lake Michigan, a place called Ellison Bay. Rick and Bill were alone there in late September. One morning very early the two boys heard a boat being rowed to shore right in front of their cottage. Rick and Bill scrambled into their clothes and went outside to see who was there. There were four hulking big guys hoisting huge burlap bags toward the cottage. They asked if they could leave the bags beneath the porch till they could get back at nightfall. Both boys nodded in assent and one of the men pulled a bottle of liquor from his stash in the burlap bag. They sat in a circle and took turns sampling the hooch and then the men disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. This was my father’s first drink of liquor. He likes to show me the exact place on the map where this action took place.

Babysitting Adventures

At the end of the summer when I was 15 years old, I received a phone call asking me to babysit overnight. I'd never met the person or heard their name in my life, but on the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend in 1972, a lady in a very ordinary car picked me up.

She was dressed up for the end-of-the-season bash at Bailey's Beach, a very exclusive beach in Newport, Rhode Island, where you have to have the proper credentials and wait for someone to die to even think about becoming a member. Jacqueline Kennedy's family belonged. A teacher at school, who life guarded at their pool, once told me that the faucets were made of gold.

It was the most foul weather we'd had all summer long and we were headed into hurricane season. At 5 o'clock it was already dark with pouring rain, thunder, and gale force winds. The lady delivered me to her house about a mile and half from my family's home. We went off the road onto a long, narrow, rutted lane. It was darkened not only by the weather but by the huge canopied trees bent over it.

Finally, she deposited me at the front door of her house, instructing me to go right inside on my own. With the weather being what it was, I didn't get a good look the yard or anything- I just blew into the house.

My young charge met me at the door. She told me she was 13 years old. She was very skinny and looked younger than she was. I was not skinny at all and maybe looked a year or two older than I was.

The hallway was full of larger-than-life ancestor portraits, mostly in military uniforms and bearing large weapons. All 6 pairs of eyes were on me. My young charge swung her arm out towards the left and said, "And there's the larder." No way was I going to ask her what the heck a larder was, but it didn't sound good to me. Then she delivered me up the huge set of oriental-carpeted stairs to my room on the second floor, where she abruptly left me to my own devices while she disappeared to her own room, never to meet again that night.

There wasn't much to do but sit on the bed and watch the storm out the big hulking window. After reading for a while, I hid under the covers for the rest of the night. The weather was better the next morning, and I was delivered home twenty-five dollars richer.

About 30 years after that long, snackless night under the covers, one of my sisters came home for the weekend and convinced me to go visit a friend with her. Now, I had never been able to or wanted to retrace the path to that forbidding house, but all of a sudden I realized that there we were, the same darn ancestor portraits staring me down again, and just as creepy as the first time.

We were whisked through a narrow crooked hallway off the big hallway to, yes, the larder, where I was introduced to my sister's friend, his wife and in-laws. His wife looked at me, grinning ear-to-ear, and said, "I know you; you babysat me!" Well, so much for my attempt at adult sophistication...

The very same girl that I'd babysat gave me a tour of the downstairs, the tennis courts, the ferryman's house and the pier onto the Sakonnet River. She told me about her uncle-ancestor who'd read a book about how to start a gentleman's farm and according to instructions, purchased 60 acres, had a huge, slate-roofed, many-faceted house built in 1860. It had its own ferryboat landing so he could receive shipments of necessary supplies from the mainland. Of course, all I could think of was hooch deliveries in the dark during Prohibition.

Then she showed me the fields of grapes for the vineyards she and her father had started so the land could be taxed as agricultural land and pay for itself. Finally, she went down to the cellar and fetched up a couple of bottles of their own vineyard's wine.

We are good friends now—but I will never forget that first night I spent at their house!

A Plumbing Adventure

My father reads me like a book: when he calls me or I call him, the first thing he asks me is where I am. Once in 1979 I disappeared wordlessly from Rhode Island and drove to Montana alone. It was the first of my lengthy, random, solitary western adventures. My father understands spontaneity. 12 years ago, at age 80, he decided that he wanted to go to the 50th reunion at the college he’d taught at in Istanbul. My stepmother refused to go because my father wanted to be spontaneous and not book a room in advance. She's a Taurus like me. We like our creature comforts. He did the trip. My 2 sisters went along. 1 of them booked the room. My father would not sleep in a separate room. He did not want to miss a thing. When they came home, I heard from 3 different people about 3 entirely different trips. They all had a fabulous time. My dad brought home some very pretty bright-colored hand-woven table cloths that he’d selected at the market for my stepmother  and me.

My dad and 2 sisters spent 3 weeks in Istanbul meeting many people who had had either my mother or him for professors back in the 1940s after the war. They each took the same ship, the Gripsholm, over from New York, a few months apart, in the summertime before fall semester started. My dad went to a job teaching engineering at Robert College. My mother went to a post teaching biology and botany at the American School for Girls, really a college. My mom arrived first. My dad spotted her shortly after he arrived, at a faculty picnic. She was not alone. A short while later, my father was out walking and he saw the police start to manhandle my mother and try to take her camera away. She had her brownie and was attempting to capture the view from a bridge. Apparently, she was a security risk. My handsome, well-appointed father stepped right in and told the police that he knew her and that she was an upstanding individual who was employed at the college. He may have saved her from a lengthy prison stay.

At the next faculty picnic, my mother arrived with a swarthy Romanian. Somewhere along the path, the Romanian stepped away to use the outhouse on a hill and it tipped over and tumbled down the hill with him inside. Well, he left early to clean up. My father moved quickly and the swarthy Romanian became history.

When I first heard this story 12 years ago, I wondered exactly how that outhouse got tipped over. Had it been a spontaneous gesture? Like Bailey White said, every family has a plumbing adventure & that was ours.