In just a month, an anniversary of sorts here in our fair town will occur. For it was 220 years ago, at the end of November, that the region’s first bank, the Narragansett Bank of Wickford opened its doors to the public for the first time. It was located in a building owned by its President Benjamin Fowler, which still exists to this day, as a private home on Main Street. Fourteen years later in 1819, Judge Daniel Champlin and Pardon T. Hammond received a charter for a competitor to the Narragansett Bank and opened the North Kingstown Bank of Wickford in a portion of the substantial brick home of the Noel Freeborn family. For decades after that, these two well-capitalized and soundly managed institutions operated as the “only games in town.” All that changed at the halfway point of the century, as North Kingstown, along with the rest of southern New England, raced into the industrial age, riding the coattails of the rapidly expanding textile industry.