Understand Rhode Island

Understand Rhode Island

Background reading for the Ocean State behind the itinerary — the small state of the sea, of conscience, and of the machine, told in four acts from Providence to Block Island.

The white marble Rhode Island State House and its dome above the Providence lawn at dusk

Act one · Conscience Providence and the idea of freedom Rhode Island began as an argument about conscience. Roger Williams founded Providence in 1636 as a refuge from religious coercion, and the 1663 royal charter made that freedom law — a radical experiment whose marks are still legible on College Hill and Smith Hill.

The columned white-marble portico of Marble House on Bellevue Avenue in Newport

Act two · Wealth Newport and the sea of wealth Newport reads as two cities at once: a tolerant colonial port of synagogue, taverns, and wharves, and the summer capital of the Gilded Age, where America's richest families built marble palaces above the Atlantic. The Cliff Walk runs the seam between them.

Slater Mill beside the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Act three · The machine Blackstone Valley and industrial America Rhode Island's second great story is industrial. At Pawtucket in 1793, Samuel Slater's water-powered mill set off the American Industrial Revolution, and the Blackstone River was turned into a working machine of dams, mills, and immigrant mill villages.

The misty shoreline of Ninigret Pond at the wildlife refuge in Charlestown

Act four · The sea South County and Block Island South of the bay, Rhode Island opens to the open Atlantic: long barrier beaches, salt ponds alive with birds, fishing ports, and — twelve miles out — Block Island, with its clay bluffs, trails, and refuges. This is the Ocean State at its wildest edge.