Meeting Hall

For as long as people have lived along Rhode Island’s meandering coast, the ocean has provided them with a ready supply of food. Whether Native American or European transplants, fishermen sought to move beyond capturing individual fish to ensnaring entire schools. Searching for increasingly efficient ways to capture their prey, the trapping technologies that they invented evolved over time, and primitive stake traps gave way to fykes and weirs, much as they had along the entire New England coast.