In the preparation of this article, I have received much material from Casey B. Tyler, who is well acquainted with the history of the Dorrances, and is likewise excellently posted on that of many other prominent Rhode Island families. Mr. Tyler also sent me the following interesting facts relating to the subject of this sketch: “I have had in my possession,” he says, “a pane of glass which Susanna [Dorrance] Wells presented me many years ago, which she said came from the old country [Ireland], and was originally set in a lead sash and brought from Ireland by her great-great-grandfather, George Dorrance, and used in the same old house for many years, until replaced by a wood sash and a 6 × 8 glass. This old pane of glass is yellowish and coarse and in diamond shape, and measures four inches on each side. She also said that she kept a part of the sash for a long time, but the boys used it up making shot and bullets to hunt with. This Susanna Dorrance was born in 1799, and married Jeremiah Wells, son of Benjamin Wells at Foster, and lived to a good old age, a very intelligent and highly-esteemed woman. “Maj. George Dorrance, who lived in the other old house, and who died in 1827, aged seventy-seven years, without children, had many articles which came from Ireland with his ancestors. They were sold at auction in 1833 by Palmer Dorrance, one of the heirs-at-law. Among the rest was an old-fashioned solid mahogany double-bureau, which was purchased by John Tyler of ‘Tyler’s store,’ who had the old brass trimmings taken off, and had it made into two nice bureaus with more fashionable trimmings. “One of these bureaus was later owned by his granddaughter, Matilda Rathbun, in Mossup Valley, and highly prized. The other came into possession of his grandson, Albert Tyler, near the Centreville, R. I., depot. These two bureaus were altered by Israel Lyon in 1833, while he carried on the carriage business in the basement of the house in Foster, where his brother, Hon. Sheldon P. Lyon, lived and died. “An old-fashioned silver tankard, holding two quarts, with a cover like a Brittania teapot cover, was sold at the same time, and it was a well-known fact that Major Dorrance, when first born, was very small, and was put into that tankard, and the cover shut down, although he was a man afterwards six feet two inches in height. John Tyler always regretted not buying the tankard.” The Dorrance mills remained in the Dorrance family down to 1808. During the next few years the mills changed hands several times. In 1813 they were sold to Peleg Place, whose daughters married Dorrances. Mr. Place occupied the mill property until 1824, the balance of the estate, or most of it, still remaining in the Dorrance family. In 1824 Mr. Place sold the mills to Stephen Potter, who put up another building, introduced “water looms,” and made cotton cloth for several years.