Buttonwoods Beach Historic District

Buttonwoods Beach Historic District is a historic district bounded by Brush Neck Cove, Greenwich Bay, Cooper and Promenade Avenues in Warwick, Rhode Island. "Old Buttonwoods" is a bucolic neighborhood on the eastern limb of the Nausauket neck, located in the West Bay area of Warwick, Rhode Island. Buttonwoods is delimited by Nausauket and Apponaug to the west, Buttonwoods Cove to the north, Greenwich (aka Cowesett) Bay to the south and Oakland Beach to the east. The Old Buttonwoods section of Warwick was founded as a summer colony in 1871 by the Rev. Moses Bixby of Providence’s Cranston Street Baptist Church, who was looking for a place to establish a summer colony by the shore for his congregation. He envisioned a community that would be similar to Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, where the Methodists established a summer campground in 1835. Today, this coastal neighborhood on Greenwich Bay is home to people from many different religious backgrounds.The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.Prior to locating to Cranston, RI in 1870, Moses Bixby spent ten years as a Christian missionary in Burma and Siam. He founded the First Shan Church in Toungoo, Burma in 1862 among the Tai people there (the Shan). This church has survived until modern times and is doing well. As of 2009, there are currently 92 Shan churches attributed to his efforts to build the First Missionary To The Shan Of Burma