Kingscote – Newport

George Noble Jones, a plantation owner from Savannah, Georgia, hired Richard Upjohn to build a Gothic Revival summer cottage on what was then a dirt road — the stretch that would become Bellevue Avenue. Construction ran from 1839 to 1841. In 1863, William Henry King, a wealthy China Trade merchant, purchased the property, renamed it Kingscote, and four generations of his family lived there. The Kings added a dining room in 1881, designed by McKim, Mead and White — by one account, one of the finest interiors in 19th-century America. The King family bequeathed Kingscote to the Preservation Society of Newport County in 1972.