The Bradford Homestead at 50 Landing Road spends most of the year the way a private home does: shades drawn, lawn mowed, nobody walking past the fence to look inside. Major John Bradford built the house around 1714, more than a decade before Kingston existed as its own town, and it has stayed in that same quiet register ever since, opened to the public only in summer months by the Jones River Village Historical Society. For one Saturday this fall, that changes. The house becomes one stop on a tour that will send Kingston residents through roughly ten properties most of them have never been inside, guided by volunteers who signed up for two- to four-hour shifts just to make it happen.
That is the part of Kingston's 300th anniversary that is easy to overlook if the parade and the festivals were the events you were following.
Three centuries built on one river
Kingston split off from Plymouth's north precinct and became its own town on June 16, 1726. The families who settled it were descendants of Mayflower passengers: Bradfords, Allertons, Cushmans, Howlands, granted land along the Jones River. What they built there over the next century and a half was a shipbuilding economy. The Drew, Delano, and Holmes families alone launched more than 270 vessels on that river over 176 years, including the Brig Independence, built in 1776 and among the first warships commissioned by Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War.
That history is why the town picked a house tour, not just a party, to anchor its Tricentennial. The buildings on Landing Road and around the historic center are not backdrops. They are the actual structures shipbuilders and their families lived in while the Jones River was doing the work that put Kingston on the map.
The events already checked off the list
If you've been half-tuned into Kingston 300th updates, you already know the large public gatherings on the calendar. The Tricentennial Proclamation happened on the Town Green on June 27. The anniversary parade ran from Kingston Elementary School to the Town House on July 25, closing roads and drawing the Kingston Police Department Honor Guard. Olde Home Day filled Opachinski Field on September 19. The second annual Cranberry Festival took over Jones River Community Chapel just yesterday, on September 26, only its second year running as a Kingston tradition and already a fixture alongside Olde Home Day rather than a replacement for it.
| Event | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Olde Home Day | Sept 19, 2026 | Opachinski Field |
| Cranberry Festival (2nd annual) | Sept 26, 2026 | Jones River Community Chapel |
| Historic House & Cemetery Tour | Early October 2026 | Roughly 10 sites, historic center |
Those were gatherings built for crowds. What's left on the calendar is built for a slower pace.
A Saturday inside Kingston's oldest rooms
The Historic House and Cemetery Tour, paired with a scavenger hunt, is the most labor-intensive event the Kingston 300th Committee has organized all year. Committee planning estimated about ten locations and roughly 60 docent shifts of two to four hours each, which means dozens of Kingston residents will spend that day standing in doorways of homes and burial grounds explaining what happened there, not just handing out a program.
Here's the wrinkle worth knowing before you plan around it. Early committee planning in March had the tour set for October 10. The town's own website now lists it as October 4, paired with a stop at the Old Burial Ground. That's a two-week planning shift, not a typo, and it's the kind of thing that happens when an all-volunteer committee is coordinating docents, garden surveys, and ten separate properties at once. If you're building a Saturday around this, check the Kingston 300th Committee's event page before you commit, since the date on the town calendar is the one that's been updated most recently.
What won't change regardless of which Saturday it lands on is what you get to see. This isn't a plaque-reading tour. It's inside actual rooms, past actual gravestones, in a town that spent a decade building nearly 3 ships a year on a small tidal river and hasn't opened its private architectural record like this before.
What still hasn't been nailed down
Not every piece of the Tricentennial calendar has firmed up yet, and that's worth saying plainly rather than papering over. Committee discussions floated a fireworks display with an RFP scope of 40,000 shots, but no confirmed date has surfaced. An Arts Festival celebrating Kingston's working artists was in the planning stages too, with exhibition venues named as the Adams Center on Summer Street, the Beal House on Main Street, and First Parish, plus a retrospective at Faunce School and a companion exhibit at the Kingston Public Library. Artists from outside Kingston are being invited to submit, not just residents, which is a bigger swing than a typical town art show.
Neither event has landed on a locked date as of this writing. That's not a gap in the planning so much as a byproduct of running an entire anniversary year on committee volunteers who are also running the docent shifts, the merchandise table, and the parade logistics. The scavenger hunt tour is confirmed because it had to be, with garden surveys and ten separate property owners to coordinate months in advance. The looser events are still catching up.
Where the day continues after the tour ends
None of this happens in a vacuum. Forty Second Brew Co. has been running as the town's default brewpub for live music and trivia nights all year, the kind of spot where a group coming off a walking tour naturally ends up. Solstice and Orta Trattoria are the two sit-down options residents already point newcomers toward for dinner. And Pages & Paws Bookshop hosted an evening with author Trisha Blanchet the same night as the Cranberry Festival, which says something about how thoroughly the Tricentennial mood has folded into the town's regular commercial rhythm rather than sitting apart from it as a one-off civic event.
That's the actual shape of Kingston's 300th year. It wasn't one weekend. It was a slow release across an entire calendar, opening with events built for crowds and continuing into October with one that invites people to spend an afternoon inside a 1714 house.
If you're free that Saturday, whichever one it turns out to be, the Kingston 300th Committee is still looking for docent volunteers to help staff the tour. It's a good way to spend a fall afternoon in a town that's been building things on the same river for three hundred years, and it's the kind of local involvement Lindsay Conlon has always made time for as a Kingston neighbor first.
