The Dr. Silas Holmes House (1787)

The Stonington Borough house of of Dr. Silas Holmes was built in 1787. Holmes was a physician and, according to Richard Anson Wheeler’s History of the Town of Stonington (1900), “He was summoned to visit a sick man on Block Island, who sent for him in his boat, which took and bore him safely over to the island, and after he had visited his patient and diagnosed his physical condition, he started with the boatman and craft to return to his home in Stonington, but unfortunately a terrible thunder storm arose with a rushing cyclone of wind, which lashed the ocean into fearful waving foam, which capsized their boat and filled it with water, which, in spite of all the efforts of the doctor and the boatman, sunk, and they were both drowned.” Wheeler gives the date of this event as September 12, 1790, but a sign on the house states that “Dr. Holmes drowned returning from an errand of mercy on Block Island in 1791.”