The nineteenth century was a golden era for the family and its bank, an age when patrician attitudes went hand in hand with the growth of the republic. The Civil War brought a financial boom, and another son, Joshua Samuel, marched off to help destroy the evil institution of slavery that his forefathers had done so much to establish. Young Joshua did not march back; a grave was chipped out on the frozen slopes of Fredericksburg, where a Rhode Island general had ordered him to his death. (“A foolish charge,” Joshua’s father had grumbled at the memorial service, “like someone from Massachusetts might do”-that state having a reputation for fanaticism akin to Rhode Island’s legacy of unprovoked orneriness.)

In the halcyon years between Appomattox and the sinking of the Lusitania, the bank thrived. The gaslight gave way to the electric light, furnaces took the place of potbellied stoves, but the old stone building itself never changed. (And never would. “A bank isn’t plastic, glass, and steel,” one Kitteredge had thundered during an infamous 1962 board meeting when a foolish member had proposed a “new look.” “A bank is stone, brass, and hardwood. People bring their money here.”)

The Kitteredge lifestyle was as conservative as the building itself. “Keep the business in the office and out of the newspapers” was the honored family motto. No Newport mansions or debutante balls for the Kitteredges. Their large houses were tucked away in Narragansett or in the woods of Lincoln, and, of course, the old family home on College Hill remained occupied and freshly painted. The Kitteredge youths attended Brown (Yale, too progressive; Harvard, too flashy; Princeton, in New Jersey), berthed their sailboats in a small cove in Wickford, married girls from New Hampshire and Vermont, and drank their whiskey in their dens at night.

July 8, 1913, stands out as a significant date in terms of the lives of Neal Carey and Joe Graham.