Ten years after Rocky Point opened as a state park, one of the main figures in its revitalization took students through the park to teach them about its history.

George Shuster Jr., Save The Bay board president and lifelong Warwick resident, led a class of about 20 through the park, pointing out the history of the land. Shuster, along with Beacon editor John Howell, led the push for Rocky Point’s revitalization and acquisition as a state park following the 1995 failure of the amusement park that was once the land’s main attraction.

“Like so many people in Rhode Island, I came here as a kid,” Shuster said. “It was my fantasy world, right? It was the place that I thought about all summer. I would come here with friends for my birthday. I knew every ride down to the last detail.”

The class was taught through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which reached out to Shuster asking if he wanted to teach a class on Rocky Point. The OLLI has branches at more than 100 colleges nationwide — including the University of Rhode Island — aimed at providing older adults with opportunities to learn in a different way and potentially receive college credits.

To Shuster, teaching the history of the park — including some things he was involved in that hadn’t been publicly chronicled — was very important.

“It was more or less when I went off to college that the park failed, and so the end of my childhood was the end of Rocky Point,” Shuster said. “That probably also places it in my mind in a slightly different way than for some other people, because when your own childhood is falling away, at the same time that the childhood fantasy of a place like Rocky Point is falling away, it puts you in a position where you, more than someone else, want to go back and preserve the place, because in some ways, it’s preserving your own childhood.”

The tour was the third class taught by Shuster on the park’s history, and focused primarily on Rocky Point’s environment and significance to Rhode Island’s history. The prior two classes were focused on transportation to Rocky Point and public gatherings held throughout its history.

Rocky Point, Shuster said, is one of three major state parks in the upper part of Narragansett Bay, along with Goddard Memorial State Park and Colt State Park. It differs from those two, however, in its history and how it became a state park. 

“Colt State Park is 400 acres developed by Samuel Colt… more or less, his family donated that land to become a state park,” Shuster said. “Samuel Goddard, same thing- giant estate in Potowomut, 300-some odd acres, decides when he doesn’t want to pay taxes on it anymore to donate it to the state. This one’s very different. This was always the people’s park; this was the place where the common blue-collar worker would have come to enjoy themselves. It wasn’t some private estate and it still isn’t today.”

Rocky Point’s history as an amusement park began in 1847, when Capt. William Winslow developed the land. From there, the park grew to reach a peak in the mid-to-late 20^th century, before financial issues forced it to close in 1995.

Potential plans to develop the park after the amusement park closed never ended up coming to fruition, according to Shuster. Eventually, in 2010, a bond referendum for $10 million for the state to purchase the parts of Rocky Point not owned by the city and to revitalize and develop it as a public park, among other projects, passed, leading to the public park opening in 2014. 

But since the state park’s opening, Shuster said, there has been a general lack of will to invest in it, which he says could present major challenges to Rocky Point in the future.

“The people who are charged with doing the work are already overburdened,” Shuster said. “They don’t want to think about expanding what this place is going to be, because they immediately think that they don’t have the resources to do whatever that idea might be.”

He also noted that he had been involved in a lecture series featuring students at the Rhode Island School of Design and their proposals to redesign the park, with some proposals — such as moving the parking lot to the northern end of the park — that could bring new life to the site.

Despite any challenges, though, Shuster is optimistic that Rocky Point has a bright future ahead.

“Rocky Point has always been whatever people wanted to make it,” Shuster said, “and I think we still have opportunities to make it something different and even more enjoyable than it is today.”