Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Hope Valley, RI

Hope Valley is a village and census-designated place in the town of Hopkinton, Rhode Island, and as of the 2020 census it had a population of 1,870, with 723 households, making it the largest village in Hopkinton and the town's principal commercial center.

The earliest European-American settlement of the village site was by Hezekiah Carpenter, who arrived in 1770, dammed the Wood River, and built several small water-powered mills, and his settlement was called Carpenter's Mills.

The textile industry arrived in 1824, when Gardner Nichols and Russell Thayer bought the existing mills for carding wool and finishing cloth, and Nichols later renamed the village Hope Valley, reportedly because all of his hopes were centered there.

The formerly separate village of Locustville, which grew up along Brushy Brook and had a dam and mill built there in 1820, is now part of Hope Valley.

The central portion of the village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 as the Hope Valley Historic District, a 183-acre district with 134 contributing buildings and three other contributing structures.

Hope Valley covers 3.53 square miles in total, of which 3.32 square miles is land and 0.20 square miles is water, and it sits on the Wood River in southwestern Rhode Island.

Hope Valley's ZIP code is 02832, and the ZIP code area extends into the neighboring town of Richmond.

Prudence Crandall, who established a pioneering school for African-American girls, was born in 1803 in the area that is now Hope Valley, and a granite marker erected in her memory stands in the village.

Hope Valley is also the hometown of country music singer Billy Gilman.

At the 2020 census the median age in Hope Valley was 44.0 years, and according to the 2016-2020 five-year American Community Survey estimates the median household income was 83,267 dollars.