The Roger Williams National Memorial, at 282 North Main St., is home to a spring that was donated to the city of Providence by Judge J. Jerome Hahn in 1932- in memory of his father, Isaac Hahn (1845-1909), a businessman and textile manufacturer,  who became the first Jewish resident of Providence to be elected to public office.   Judge Hahn believed that the spring was a historic and almost sacred place, as it was there that Roger Williams and his followers first found fresh water in the settlement that would become Providence.   Isaac Hahn’s parents came to the United States from Germany in the mid-19th century and made their home in New York City, where Isaac was born and raised. They later moved upstate, where Isaac married Rose Stern. In 1870, Isaac brought his wife and young son to establish a new life for their growing family in Providence. Isaac owned a dry goods store on Westminster Street, and later invested in  banking, factories and real estate. In 1884, he became the first Jewish state representative from Providence in the Rhode Island General Assembly, in which he served one term. Isaac was also deeply involved in the Jewish community, helping to build a new  synagogue for the Congregation of the Sons of Israel and David (founded in 1854, this congregation survives today as Temple Beth-El).

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Rhode Islanders often think that only Newport and Providence are significant to Jewish history in Rhode Island, because they were established early in our state’s history, but this is not true.  Bristol’s Jewish community is equally important.  The story of Jewish Bristol begins in the 1890s, when a small number of Jewish families from Eastern Europe arrived.  These new arrivals included small business owners, professionals, and laborers, drawn by economic opportunity especially at the National Rubber Company which was founded in Bristol in 1864 by Augustus O. Bourn.  The National Rubber Company played a key role in the development of the domestic rubber industry, but went bankrupt in 1887. Samuel P. Colt was appointed receiver, and the company was reorganized as the National India Rubber Company. The revitalized company brought new vigor to rubber production at the Bristol facility, producing rubber boots, shoes, garments, hoses and other items. This drew many Jewish workers to Bristol, and provided a ladder for advancement for those with talent, who started work in the plant but quickly moved up to the offices, and then left to start businesses of their own.  Since they were somewhat distant from Providence, then the main center of Jewish life in Rhode Island, Jews living in Bristol decided to form organizations of their own. In 1896, they founded the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA). As you can see from the map, there were many places in Bristol where Jews originally worshiped, usually in the home of one of the communal founders.  Within a few years, they found the need for a permanent place to worship. In 1900, they chartered the United Brothers Synagogue, under the Hebrew name Chevra Agudas Achim.   The YMHA and Chevra Agudas Achim soon joined together, and in 1908 they began to worship in a house on John Street. Later, the combined congregation moved to Richmond Street, which became the first home of Chevra Agudas Achim. Construction of a permanent synagogue, at 205 High St., began in 1916.   New arrivals to the community in Bristol came from New York, and brought with them a certain cosmopolitan spirit. The congregation soon became open to considering different forms of Jewish practice. At first the women sat upstairs in the Orthodox synagogue. But very soon the women moved to the main floor. The congregation had no rabbi; instead, a gabbai, or lay leader, ran the services. Relations with the broader community were very good, and the new building received help from both Protestant and Catholic churches in the town. In addition to helping with construction, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on Wood Street, and St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, on Hope Street, donated pews.  The early 1930s brought the Zionist movement to Bristol in the form of Young Judea, a peer-led Jewish educational movement that was embraced by second- and third-generation Jews. With the idea of building Jewish identity, Young Judea offered a Sunday School with religious and cultural programming for children and young adults. At the same time, the synagogue formed a bowling league which soon became known as the Bristol Jewish Community Center. After World War II, the community experienced a change in membership as many resident Jews left to pursue greater opportunities elsewhere and new families arrived. New families brought new ideas, and the post-war shift in social attitudes created a divide between the synagogue, which increasingly focused solely on religious life, and the community center, which encapsulated the social, cultural and educational needs of the community. The same change in social behavior led to a shift in ritual behavior, with the synagogue moving away from Orthodox toward Conservative ritual practices –  a not-uncommon change for the time. Ultimately, declining membership led to closure of the synagogue building for the decade from 1966 to 1975. In 1975, with growing interest from Jewish families newly arrived in Bristol, the synagogue reopened – again, without a rabbi – offering one service per month. This synagogue schedule has continued to the present day, with Cantor Dr. Joel Gluck as spiritual leader. Thus, we see how a building and a Jewish community can be born and reborn.

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The Moshassuck Cemetery can be found today in Central Falls, near its border with the City of Pawtucket. On December 31, 1870, Abraham Jacobs, who served as chazan, or cantor, for the newly organized Congregation Sons of David, purchased a plot of land in its northwest corner of the cemetery.  Four years later,  Congregation Sons of David merged with Congregation of the Sons of Israel under the corporate name Congregation of the Sons of Israel and David. The newly merged congregation then decided to use the consecrated space in Moshassuck Cemetery for the burial of non-members, relatives of members and for charitable cases – that is to say, not for congregation members. The congregation already had its own large cemetery in Providence for the use of members.  Many other groups would buy into Moshassuck Cemetery over the next 25 years. One of the tombstones there has an interesting and tragic story.  During the Great Depression there was a great deal of labor unrest. In 1934, some of the Labor Day strikes happening in Rhode Island were peaceful, but not at two mills belonging to the Manville Jenckes Co., a textile bleaching company, one of which was adjacent to Moshassuck Cemetery.  During the strike, the owners decided to bring in replacement workers across the picket lines, where it is said that thousands were gathered. When two of the strike breakers tried to push through the picket line, the union supporters would not let them; the Rhode Island State Guard attempted to move the strikers toward the cemetery, and a riot broke out. Strikers and soldiers ran into the cemetery, seeking cover and vantage points. Two men were hit by bullets and died.  In addition, the tombstone of Rabbi Yosef Shaul Rabinowit was hit by bullets during the strike. An article by National Park Service Ranger Mark Mello, “The Saylesville Massacre and the American Tradition,” offers these insights: “Two bullet holes are visible in the stone: a tangible reminder of the violence within the cemetery in September 1934. The engraving on the stone starts with a simple line from the Torah, ‘Stone shall cry from a wall!’ This most likely comes from a passage from the book of Habakkuk, which references the forced labor the Babylonians inflicted on the Jewish people in constructing buildings in their cities. Written millennia before the Saylesville massacre, this line offers a prophet’s damning criticism of a different political system. Across time, workers have cried out in pain when pushed too far. The lines in this stone, etched for posterity, bring these cries to life. The poetic, haunting line takes on new meaning with knowledge of the massacre…  When considering the conditions experienced by Jewish people across the world in the 1930s and what was to come in the 1940s, two bullet holes piercing this already painful plea is ironic. Also, the plight of those protestors, many of whom were laborers in the textile industry, as they dove behind the stones evading messengers of death, is chilling. Perhaps this stone does wail—not just in memory of Rabbi Yosef and the plight of the Jewish people through the ages, but also to the memory of Goroynski and Blackwood, whose lives were lost during the Saylesville Massacre.”  While the mill closed in the 1960s, Rabbi Rabinowit’s tombstone stands as a palpable reminder of this social action and communities impacted by this chapter in Rhode Island’s history.

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"Seeing all kinds of people… people who were experiencing human anguish and confusion and hurt. They had the courage to look at what and where they wanted to be in their lives. I help shepherd them where they want to grow to their best self." – Freeman T. Freeman  

A hub for local, independently owned distilleries and breweries, Pawtucket features a Lesbian-founded and woman-, employee-, veteran-, and queer-owned distillery: Rhode Island Spirits. The company’s ownership model has roots in Lesbian business and community history as well as the city’s history of female labor organizing: in 1824, around one hundred women employed in a Pawtucket textile mill started the country’s first wage-worker strike. Previously located in the former Morrison Thread Mill and now housed in a former screw and fastener manufacturing building, Rhode Island Spirits engages with this legacy.

Rhode Island Spirits co-founder Cathy Plourde became interested in gin while living in England with her former partner Kara Larson. Originally from East Providence, Cathy and Kara relocated to Rhode Island to be closer to family, and decided to develop a Rhode Island-specific version of their favorite spirit. They chose Pawtucket as their location because of the city’s support for new businesses. Proximity to the historic Slater Mill and the new train station (opened in 2023) as well as the commitments to revitalizing the river and developing art-centered activities all made Pawtucket an attractive and potentially lucrative place to be. After a year of research and exploration, they opened Rhode Island Spirits in 2019. The tasting room closed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but was able to reopen in 2021.

The alcohol from Rhode Island Spirits is truly Rhode Island-based. Vodka is transformed into gin through the addition of florals, botanicals, and local ingredients, gaining sensory complexity and intrigue in the process. The company has integrated foraged Rhode Island botanicals into their products, including autumn olives, also known as autumn berry or silver berry, and also sumac and rugosa. Given that these are invasive species, these botanicals are abundantly available, and their harvesting is not ecologically disruptive. Over time, RI Spirits has developed a number of Rhode Island-specific spirits: for example, the Rhode Island Red, a cranberry/cherry combination named for the state bird (a chicken).

Initially owned by two out-and-proud Lesbians, the founders of RI Spirits realized their vision to be an employee-owned company in 2024. The owners of RI Spirits are also open about their identity as a queer-owned business, and find that this feeds and supports their business’s values (inclusion, excellence, and transparency) and vision (ensuring a welcoming environment to all). Of course, alcohol is a complicated and sometimes harmful force, including in LGBTQIA+ communities. When asked about this complex relationship during an interview, Cathy made connections with the comorbidities of alcohol with homelessness, abuse, neglect, and drug use. Given this, RI Spirits abides by state and federal regulations, such as the three-drink limit.

Given the history of female labor organizing in Pawtucket’s nineteenth-century mills, it seems fitting that a Lesbian-founded and queer- and employee-owned business has now taken up residence in two former manufacturing sites. RI Spirits and other diverse independent distillers and brewers have together created a new, twenty-first century hub for Pawtucket manufacturing.

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“The heavens were open’d And She saw too Archangels descending from the east, with golden crowns upon there [sic] heads, clothed in long white Robes, down to the feet; Bringing a sealed Pardon from the living God.” In a note found in the Friend’s Bible titled “A Memorandum of the Introduction of the Fatal Fever,” Public Universal Friend described the vision they experienced that altered their life.  The Public Universal Friend was a Quaker born as Jemima Wilkinson in 1752 in Cumberland, Rhode Island. In 1776, after suffering a fever, the Jemima Wilkinson claimed to have “died” and been reborn as the Public Universal Friend (the Friend). Through this vision, the Friend believed they were called to preach as God’s mouthpiece. The Friend immediately began spreading the word of their rebirth in their hometown and throughout towns in New England. Their powerful oration and stances on women’s equality and the prohibition of slavery created a small following, known as the Society of Universal Friends.  While their beliefs were primarily standard Quaker doctrine, many onlookers were more focused on their androgynous appearance. After their rebirth, the Friend refused to respond to their old name, dressed themselves in androgynous preachers’ clothes, and forbade their followers from referring to them using gendered pronouns. One description of their clothing in 1787 describes them wearing: “…light cloth Cloke with a Cape like a Man’s–Purple Gown, long sleeves to Wristbands–Mans shirt down to the Hands with Neckband–purple handkerchief or Neckcloth tied around the neck like a man’s–No Cap–Hair combed turned over & not long–wear a Watch–Man’s Hat.” In addition, their tone and confidence were also considered “masculine.” Their manner of speech deeply compelled and sometimes confused their audience, who often speculated as to whether the Friend was truly a man or a woman. One onlooker wrote: “What she said, or of the subject matter, nothing is remembered; but her person, dress and manner is as palpable… as though she thus looked and spake but yesterday.” Of the detractors of their following, the Friend said: “They hate us without a cause, and thus evilly entreat us in the darkness of their minds, and in the ignorance and hardness of their hearts, for which my soul doth pity them, and even entreat thee for them, that if possible their eyes may be yet opened.“ The Society of Universal Friends grew in Rhode Island and slowly spread throughout New England, as the Friend traveled constantly. Eventually the Friend expanded their reach to Pennsylvania, shifting the group’s headquarters to Worcester, Pennsylvania, in 1787 and permanently leaving New England in 1789. During their short time in Pennsylvania, the Friend was planning to establish a settlement in rural New York, which they founded in 1790. They named it Jerusalem. With frequent land disputes and attempts to arrest the Friend for blasphemy–both stemming from the Friend’s former followers– the Friend persisted in Jerusalem but struggled to bring in new recruits. The Friend eventually passed away in 1819 at the age of 66. The legacy of the Friend is complex, with some portraying them as a manipulative con artist, and others praising their progressive stances. While the language of non-binary gender identity did not exist then in the same way it does today, the Public Universal Friend is often pointed to as one of the first self-described non-binary people in colonial America.

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Imagine flipping channels in the 1990s. Infomercials, old sitcoms, made-for-tv movies. Suddenly, flash!—a group of people standing in the West Greenwich sand dunes of the colloquially named “Rhode Island Desert” hold a large pink triangle together. Flash!—a person in a gorilla suit throws sand while surrounded by half-buried televisions that show static and pink triangles. Flash!—LGTV: Lesbian/Gay TV Rhode Island. Television at that time had become what the internet is to us now. In spite of efforts to control, censor and suppress the pervasiveness of television, the medium now belonged to everyone. There was no bigger indicator of this than the advent of public-access television, where any Rhode Island citizen could create a television show that would be broadcast throughout the state. Like shortwave radio before it and YouTube after it, with public-access TV, broadcasting companies allowed anyone who had something to say to be able to say it to the world.  During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, communication and community building were crucial for LGBTQ+ people as traditional media intentionally suppressed information about the virus. Furthermore, it was very rare for LGBTQ+ people to see themselves portrayed favorably—or portrayed at all—in any medium. At the time, the pink triangle, a symbol for gay men in Nazi Germany, was reappropriated to honor our queer ancestors and used as a way to show who you were in a way that the average cis-hetero person may not notice. The pink triangle in the Rhode Island Desert was a flashy 1990s eye-catcher, but it was also a bold statement: We are here, and we will speak out for ourselves in Rhode Island. Taking cues from MTV, traditional news sources, and PBS, LGBTQ+ volunteers came together in the early 1990s to create television for their community in Rhode Island through public access. LGTV, or Lesbian/Gay Television Rhode Island, was a compilation show of 5-10 minute segments, each looking at the lives of LGBTQ+ people from a different perspective. These segments included reviews of film and books; updates on pertinent issues; information about helplines and social events; and footage from events like Beyond Right Now, an international conference of queer elected officials, the Barons and Baroness Ball, and the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. Bravely representing their people and speaking their minds, the creators of LGTV made Rhode Island a place where LGBTQ+ people didn’t have to be alone.

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When it came to getting your hair done on Broad Street, Kandy’s Of Course Beauty Salon was the place to go. The owner, Kandy Rainey, lived above her beauty salon in a building named the Lola Apartments. Together, these two spaces bravely created an important nexus of community and a safe haven for trans and gender-nonconforming people in Providence. Kandy Rainey opened Kandy’s Of Course Beauty Salon in 1968. The salon was first located at 246 Broad Street at the intersection of Wickham Street, where the Upper South Providence and West Side neighborhoods meet. Providence was undergoing a massive shift at that time. The population of the city was decreasing and the city government’s hostile urban renewal policies began to push Black people and families in South Providence to the outskirts of the city. Kandy’s was located near the newly-constructed Interstate Highway 95 (I-95), which split the city of Providence in two. I-95 demarcated communities along the lines of race and class in the city. For most of Kandy’s time there, Broad Street was considered the declining outskirts of the city; but for LGBTQ+ people, the outskirts were safer than the so-called thriving parts of the city. The city itself was not a safe place for LGBTQ+ people in the 1960s, and while things improved slightly with communal events like the city’s first Pride March in 1976, LGBTQ+ people were still being harassed and assaulted by police and average citizens alike. As a sanctuary for trans people and drag performers, the Lola was more than just an apartment building; it was a family. Former resident Brian Belovitch wrote in his book, Trans Figured, “the Lola was an education at best in how to survive a life that was going to be extremely challenging.” This feeling of family and care extended to Kandy’s Of Course Beauty Salon. In its early years, below the Lola Apartments, the salon was known by the neighborhood kids who would, in Belovitch’s words, “watch the drag queens running in and out of the beauty salon.” Eventually, in the 1980s, Kandy’s moved to 802 Broad Street, a mile south of the Lola. As the only beauty salon along Broad Street for a long time, Kandy’s became an important part of the community. As so many beauty salons in Black neighborhoods do, Kandy’s Of Course provided a gathering space, a center of care, and a place of refuge. Kandy’s longstanding dedication to the neighborhood was even noticed by the local government, and Kandy received a commendation from the State of Rhode Island House of Representatives in 2005 for “outstanding and dedicated service to improve the quality of life.” Kandy’s went on for another decade and, after 49 years of serving the community, closed in 2017.

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In 2000, Thayer Dietrich, a member of the Rhode Island LGBT Pride Committee, suggested a performance to raise funds for Pride events while showcasing the talents of local Lesbian musicians. Mary Ann Rossoni, a musician herself, joined the efforts and together they produced the first Goddess Show at the Avon Cinema in Providence. At this sit-down event, the audience of 200 (predominantly Lesbians) enjoyed the sounds of Lesbian solo and group acts singing in a variety of genres. Some songs were original pieces by the musicians themselves. The Goddess Show proved successful both in fundraising and in elevating the visibility of Lesbian artists within the Lesbian community.

In those days, for many, it was still too threatening to be out due to professional, family, and other community concerns. The performers were not ashamed of being Lesbian but worried about the repercussions. In the initial show, only Mary Ann Rossoni and Laura Berkson were formally out as Lesbians. The Goddess Show gave an opportunity for closeted Lesbians to safely perform. More importantly, their music could be heard and appreciated. They initially volunteered their performances, though Mary Ann, who believed musicians should always be paid for working, did insist they receive small stipends.

The Goddess Show offered a rare and unique opportunity for both Lesbian performers and audiences. While many of the event’s performers remained “closeted” for some years, the Goddess Show created a much-needed space for Lesbians to perform and for women to be together in a welcoming women-centered space. Generally, the musicians did not perform music with strong Lesbian themes, but there definitely were undertones of women’s love for each other.

Lesbian musicians, especially if they were out, had limited opportunity to establish broader audiences. Generally, they were underrepresented in most music venues. This was true even for most LGBTQ Pride events as well. Ironically, though these women would have “their night” at the Goddess Show and raised significant (and much needed) funds for Pride events, they weren’t usually invited to perform on the main stages at RI Pride events (a few were, sure, but those performances were generally very limited).

Andy Smith, a writer for the Providence Journal, interviewed Mary Ann about the event in 2001. Unfortunately, the headline read something like “a Rhode Island Pride event.” So, several residents of RI, not really aware of the meaning of Pride, mistakenly thought the show was music about proudly living in Rhode Island. What a shock for them when they entered a room filled with 200 Lesbians and heard the sounds of women musicians not really singing about Rhode Island!

Mary Ann Rossoni planned and organized the Goddess Show for nearly 13 years. She set up the musicians, created the schedule, and generally kept things moving while a crew of volunteers would assist with many other tasks. Over time, The Goddess Show shifted from a sit-down event into a more “club” type atmosphere (for example, at the Hi-Hat Club at Providence’s Davol Square). As more people got involved, the acts started to include a broader array of performers. The annual Goddess Shows continues today at Askew Bar and Lounge, though the focus has changed and it no longer highlights or includes only Lesbian performers.

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In May of 2018, Berry-Jean Murray started a new business with the vision of creating an intentional community gathering space. This business was an opportunity to create a sense of community that had been lost–as a Lesbian, she still longed for and sought the comradery of Lesbian gatherings (bars, concerts, meetings, activism, etc.) of the past.

Berry-Jean had a history of creating such spaces; after arriving in Providence in 1976, she had found it difficult to connect with other women and Lesbians of color in Rhode Island. As a young feminist, an African-American man (whom she admired) once challenged her to decide if she was going to be Black or a woman. For a few minutes she thought she had to prioritize aspects of her identity, only to finally claim, “I’m both of those – AND a Lesbian!” With her best friend Carol Monteiro, Berry-Jean founded Providence Gay Women, which started as a consciousness-raising group (an important community organizing tool at the time).

With this new business, Berry-Jean wanted to create a comfortable space with interesting happenings where individuals could find each other and feel a sense of connection and community. Groups could offer meetings, or musicians could perform, or artists could show their work – a place for everybody, but run by Lesbians, who know how to make that space.

Berry-Jean had attended art shows, poetry readings, and other events at the Brooklyn Tea House (sometimes referred to as “The Brooklyn”) a community space in the Hennessey-McHale Block at 209 Douglas Avenue in Providence’s Smith Hill neighborhood. Anthony Demings, an artist who liked to create paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge, owned the building, but it was at risk of sale and demolition. Built in 1873, 209 Douglas Avenue had previously served the Irish community as a grocery store, then operated for 57 years as the Armenian American Civic Club and the home of the first Armenian newspaper in the US.

To preserve the building’s history and realize her vision, Berry-Jean decided to buy The Brooklyn, renaming it The Brooklyn Coffee Tea and Guesthouse to honor its most recent life. She created the tea and coffeehouse of her vision, and also moved her office to the building and offered some short-term living spaces.

And then...COVID hit. Fortunately, Berry-Jean didn’t have a mortgage to support – but she did have to try to keep the place operating. She used the time to expand the kitchen and add an outdoor dining space. But eventually, due to renovations, licensing, and other challenges, she realized the space she wanted to create was not going to happen. Berry-Jean sold the building in Spring 2024.

The following owners renamed the space The Brooklyn House, and retained a similar mission: bringing community together through art, music, entertainment and events. Today it’s an Italian restaurant. Berry-Jean also continues the work of community-building, and is proud to have been a Lesbian Feminist all these years. In the end, Berry-Jean likes all of herself – and is surviving and thriving. As she says, “I’m a political statement just by living!”

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We have a show that hopefully gets out every woman’s opinion. Well, we can’t do every woman’s opinion, but as many types of views on the topic that we would like to display.

With this, Berry-Jean Murray, Production Assistant and Interviewer, summarized the thinking behind the name of the 1990s public-access television show Obviously Women. As a March 1991 article by Mary Ann T. Rossoni in the Providence, RI based The Third Wave newspaper reported, Berry-Jean and her collaborators Toni Salisbury, Carol Dunbar Skoglund, and Nancy Harrison saw as their charge “to show women in a positive light everywhere doing everything,” as well as “being a forum to bring out issues of the day, not just issues that normally people would think would be a headliner.” Obviously!

The show had its beginnings in another format: Berry-Jean, along with Nancy and Carol, had been hosting a radio show, Airwave Women, on the University of Rhode Island’s WRIU station. The show primarily featured women’s music and news, and continues today with different hosts as Voices of Women. Rhode Island has always had the base of a women’s community, in which Lesbians have always played a critical part, and for Berry-Jean, feminism and Lesbianism always went together. Lesbians have always been a part of the “gay community,” as well, though differences existed between gay men and Lesbian women, especially around women’s issues. So Lesbian participation in Pride parades, for example, was tenuous, and Lesbians were present but not always prominent.

Thirty minutes long and commercial-free, the Obviously Women public access television show emerged because Berry-Jean and friends decided the community needed something more. They were so prideful of themselves as women and wanted to share that pride with anyone who would watch. As Berry-Jean remembers the feeling: “We exist. We’re here. Watch us!”

The Airwave Women group took production classes at the PEG - Public Access TV, and created a show for women with a feminist slant. Berry-Jean, a Black Lesbian, was the host of the show – making a statement that women of color were involved in the community. In news, entertainment, interview, and special feature segments, Obviously Women featured everyday women doing interesting things (for example, fixing a lamp) or in “non-typical women roles…women soldiers, women carpenters, women welders.” Stories centered on resources for local women, including the Women's Resource Center talking about violence against women; therapists talking about adult children of alcoholics; and speakers addressing the community issues of homelessness, religion and oppression. The women behind Obviously Women strove to create a public service to let community members know about the resources available to them.

This collective effort lasted approximately two-to-three years in the early 1990s. While the show may no longer be on the air, the bonds that created it remain. In a recent interview, Berry-Jean giggled as she looked at the 1991 article: “I’ll show this to Carol and Nancy and Beth. They’re still around and we all laugh when we’re together.”

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There have always been Lesbians who claimed feminism and proved to be strong supporters of rights for and equality of women. In Rhode Island in the second half of the twentieth century, Lesbians were critically involved in spearheading feminist activist organizations as well as support centers for women in general. Though not necessarily “out” or promoting Lesbian activities per se, Lesbians were actually, in many cases, the primary activists doing an enormous amount of the work. They participated in the founding and/or developing of important organizations such as the Women’s Liberation Union, the Women’s Center, community publications of resources and information, shelters for battered women, women’s health services, and other related social justice causes. The National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter in Rhode Island was also initiated by Lesbian women.

However, in those early activist days (1970-1980s), feminists did not always embrace Lesbians as allies. As mainstream media dismissed the women’s movement as “bra-burning Lesbians,” the national NOW organization, under the leadership of Betty Friedan, “purged” Lesbians from the organization in 1970. While Lesbians were advocating for women’s rights, the women’s movement did not necessarily acknowledge or accept the sociopolitical rights or needs of Lesbians. Lesbians were perceived by some feminists as threats, or at least, as divisive to the pursuit of women’s rights. Conservatives and anti-feminists also castigated those advocating for women’s rights, especially if Lesbians were involved.

But there came a time when those clever Lesbians and straight-women allies used this divisiveness to a strategic advantage, by using Lesbians as bait! The following story was energetically recalled by Cathy Gorman and M’lyn (Marilyn) Hines, Lesbians who attended these events.

In 1977, the United Nations officially recognized the first International Women’s Day, a movement that was built on the foundations laid by womens and labor movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In that same year, feminists in Rhode Island participated in developing the platform for the National Women’s Conference to be held in Austin, TX.. This organizing process took the form of a state conference held at the Meehan Auditorium at Brown University. Locally, the inclusion of Lesbian issues (as well as issues for elders and women with disabilities) were hotly debated. Several conservative churches opposed various positions but feminist activists wanted to come up with an inclusive platform. So, a strategy was developed to announce and hold a Lesbian-positive workshop. That Lesbian-focused workshop would (and did) attract religious far right opponents to protest there. The wording of resolutions on various controversial topics—pro-choice and Gay Rights, rights for women elders, minority rights, and other feminist position statements—was developed by feminists in various workshops in second-floor classrooms without distraction, while Lesbian women from the organization Gay Women of Providence and their allies captured the attention of an onslaught of conservative protesters. As a result, the feminist proposals emerged without disturbance and were brought to the conference floor where a supportive majority voted in favor of women’s equal rights proposals, including sexual and reproductive freedom. The Lesbian workshop had successfully served as bait for protesters, allowing the passage of these key proposals.

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New Bedford has long been conflicted about its historical identity. The city has been, at different times, a world leader in extracting energy from whales and in using energy to produce textiles. Despite a relative lack of physical reminders of whaling, and the abundance of “monuments” to manufacturing—in the form of mill buildings and worker housing—“going down to the sea in ships” is remembered and cherished, while the textile industry is largely overlooked. Very rarely are whaling and textiles remembered and memorialized equally. One exception is this monument, sculpted in 1914 by Hungarian immigrant artist George Julian Zolnay.  The sculpture is known as the Barnard Memorial, after the person who provided the funding, George D. Barnard, who was born in New Bedford but moved to St. Louis and formed a stationery company. At its dedication, Barnard described his idea for the monument: “Why not erect a statue that would show the whaler at home and among his neighbors or a representation of the early New Bedford as I knew it as well as of the present city to continue the story.” Zolnay, a St. Louis resident at the time, accepted the commission to memorialize “all that New Bedford was, all that it is and all it ever will be." At the base of the monument stand seafaring men and women. Standing above them is a blacksmith wearing a thick apron balancing a gear upon an anvil. The inscription reads, “Dedicated as a Tribute to the sturdy whalemen who early won fame for New Bedford and their successors who, inheriting ideals and resourcefulness gave to the city new prominence by creating a great manufacturing center.”

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The failure of the Howland Mill Village experiment may have been the final straw for New Bedford mill owners. By the end of the 19th century, they had decided to get out of the landlord business. Along with the financial and management burden of rental properties, by the 1890s housing reformers began to note the “squalid” and “pestiferous” conditions of the city’s mill-owned tenements, mounting pressure to improve workers’ living conditions. At the same time, advances in loom technology reduced the number of skilled workers, and the need for mill owners to provide incentives to attract them. By the beginning of the twentieth century, contractors built most tenements on speculation, selling them to landlord-investors who rented units to peripatetic working-class tenants. The building form they chose was the iconic New England three-decker tenement. Three-deckers first appeared in the 1850s in New England mill cities like Worcester, Providence, and Fall River. Potomska Mills built what were probably New Bedford’s first three-deckers (now demolished) in the 1870s at the intersections of Rivet and First and Second Streets. In its most basic form, a three-decker consists of three floors with a separate residence on each level, connected by a common entrance and staircase. By 1876, at least one three-decker in New Bedford included stacked front porches, a feature that characterized this form of housing by the beginning of the 20th century. Mill construction peaked in New Bedford in the first decade of the 20th century, along with a pressing need to house French Canadian workers flooding into the city. Between 1908 and 1913, 1,079 three-deckers sprung up throughout New Bedford, mostly in the North and South Ends where the majority of the mills were located. The early flat-roof and gable end forms gave way to the pyramidal hip-roofed version, which is now ubiquitous throughout the city. The typical three-decker utilizes an elongated floor plan, with the kitchen and bathroom in the rear, a multi-purpose work and eating space in the middle, and a sitting room—and sometimes a parlor—in the front.  Bedrooms were on one side or the other. Outside, a narrow side yard led to the back stairs, punctuated at intervals by small laundry porches on each floor. The back stairs served as the main entrance for most three-decker occupants. The three-deckers’ most identifiable feature—the stacked front porches, or piazzas, tucked against a protruding three-story bay—may have been the space least utilized by the tenements’ occupants. Seemingly useless embellishments on houses meant for the working poor, developers and reformers envisioned the piazzas as symbols of respectability. Their architectural detail evoked middle class housing, and their visibility would allow residents to monitor the behavior of their children, and of each other. Impractical for a class of people that had little leisure time, these porches may have proved most useful for storage. The age of the three-decker was brief. By the mid-teens, they had been singled out by reformers as a form of immoral cohabitation and inferior to single-family housing, and by xenophobes who deplored three-deckers as storehouses of immigrants. A 1916 city ordinance restricted wood frame housing to two stories, ostensibly for fire safety, but in reality, to limit the stigma of overcrowded immigrant worker housing. Today, about 1,200 three-deckers survive in New Bedford. Many of them no longer have their front porches, a result of the expense of repair and replacement and the reluctance of insurers to indemnify recent owners from the supposed hazard of three floors of open-air piazzas. In addition, the succeeding waves of Polish, Portuguese, and Central American immigrants may have prioritized other elements of these buildings—vegetable gardens and basement kitchens, for example—as a means to retain elements of their own cultures.

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“The American holly is quite common here,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “I heard a lark sing, sweet and strong, and heard robins.” Thoreau, a naturalist and philosopher and author of Walden, was describing the rural North End estate of his friend Daniel Ricketson, which eventually became Brooklawn Park. Born in 1813 to Quaker parents, Ricketson was seriously injured in two accidents involving horses, leading to lifelong hip pain and severe headaches. Although he practiced as a lawyer, he dedicated himself to the study of nature and literature. Ricketson purchased the estate in 1851 as a retreat from his main residence, Woodlee, about a mile south on Acushnet Avenue. He named his refuge Brooklawn and surrounded himself with apple orchards, gardens, and grazing cows, and eventually built a farmhouse with wide porches for his family. Ricketson’s first building at Brooklawn was a rustic 12 x 14 foot shack with gingerbread trim, exposed beams on the inside and a small stove for heat. Ricketson called it the “Shanty.” He covered two interior walls with slips of paper on which he wrote ideas and sentences from his favorite authors, some of them his friends, like Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Ellery Channing, who all visited him at the Shanty. Two years prior to Ricketson’s death in 1896, the city of New Bedford acquired Brooklawn intending to use it as a public park. In 1892, the landscape design firm of Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliott had submitted a plan to construct a chain of public parks in the city linked by a promenade and wide parkway, reasoning that “nothing is so refreshing to the tired townspeople as pure rural landscape.” The parkway would loop around Rodney French Boulevard to Rockdale Avenue, Hathaway Road, and Ashley Boulevard (then called Bowditch Street), ending at Brooklawn. The plan received approval but stalled due to changes in political leadership and a national depression. The city eventually built some of the parks independent of the proposal, including Hazelwood Park, Buttonwood Park, and Brooklawn Park. The city’s mill workers enjoyed Brooklawn Park’s duck pond, sledding hill, and ice skating rink with a warming house designed by New Bedford architect Louis E. Destremps. In 1958, Storyland opened at the park, featuring climbable nursery rhyme scenes, a spouting Moby Dick, and a real F-94 Starfighter jet plane. The city tore down Ricketson’s farmhouse in 1971, and ten years later, it declared the Shanty, which had fallen into disrepair, a nuisance and dismantled it. Persistent rumors claim the Shanty was stored at the city yard, but it has yet to be rediscovered.

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On July 13, 1969, physician and chronicler of Black life Dr. Carl Russell Gross opened the Evening Bulletin, clipped the photograph seen here, and placed it into a file marked “Military.” In the photo, we get a glimpse of Major General Roger Reckling Blunt (1930- ), a fourth generation Rhode Island serviceman as he inspects new West Point cadets. He looks confident and we know from other documents collected by Dr. Gross that, early in his career, Blunt gained a reputation for being innovative and demonstrating “a skillful ability to analyze…obstacles and develop thorough solutions.”  Major General Roger Reckling Blunt was born in 1930. Reflecting on his youth, Blunt’s mother told a local newspaper that he was “unsure what he wanted, but he did want a good education.” He pursued his education for many years after graduating from East Providence Senior High School in 1948, which stood at this address. He went on to attend Brown University for two years and acquired a General Liberal Arts degree. In 1956, Blunt graduated from West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree, ranked 72nd out of 479 graduates, and was the only Black graduate in his class. Six years later, Blunt received a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering as well as a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1962, Blunt attended the Nuclear Power Plant Engineer School in Virginia to become a Certified Nuclear Plant Engineer, later taking an Engineer Officer Career Course at The Engineer School of Virginia.  Blunt’s commitment to education complemented his participation in the armed forces. Within the Blunt family, he represented the fourth generation of military service. His great-grandfather, Captain Robert W. Blunt, commanded the First Separate Brigade of the Rhode Island Militia (BRIM), a segregated unit that trained at the corner of Knight and Cranston Streets in Providence. Blunt’s grandfather, Captain Harry W. Blunt, commanded the same unit and served in the Spanish-American War. Blunt’s father, Captain Harry W. Blunt Jr. was presented a gold sword by the members of his company. Major General Blunt later used his father’s sword to cut his wedding cake when he married DeRosette Hendricks at West Point in 1956.  When Blunt first decided he wanted a career in the military, he told his mother, “Mom, if I go, I’m going as far as I can.” Blunt made many advancements throughout a career that began in 1958 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. While lieutenant, Blunt worked for the German American Assistance Program as part of the 37th Engineers, the largest organized combat group in the U.S Army. He worked as Assistant Operations Officer in charge of the German American Construction Assistance Program, where he organized and operated a technical school for Atomic Demolition Munition specialists. From 1956 to 1965, Blunt worked for the U.S. Corps of Engineers as Project Manager, Technical Operations Officer, and Project Officer. In 1965, Blunt was promoted to Major, at which point he supervised a group of officers and a battalion of 700 men. Blunt transferred to the U.S. Army Reserves in 1969 and was appointed Major General in 1983. He received the Distinguished Service Medal in 1986.  In the image preserved by Dr. Gross, Blunt is 36 years old and assigned to teach at the Department of Tactics at West Point. He was the first Black officer to be given a teaching assignment at the military academy.  By the end of his active military career, Blunt would go even farther with the start of his own construction company and later as CEO and Chairman of Tyroc Construction and Chairman of the Board and President of Blunt Enterprises, Inc.

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When the US Naval Academy in Annapolis was created by an Act of Congress in 1845, its admissions policies were codified into law. Members of Congress have the privilege of personally nominating the majority of candidates in each class. This is the story of one such candidate, Captain Reeves Ramsey Taylor (1929- ), nominated at 18 years old and the only Black student to graduate with his class in 1953.  Captain Taylor was born in 1929 and lived most of his early life at 60 Carrington Avenue in Providence. As a young man, he took an interest in the environment. Taylor once wrote a letter to the editors of the Providence Journal about the smoke coming from factories and its effect on people and the city. He was a member of the Sea Scouts and spent two summers as a seaman on fishing vessels. This enticed Taylor to the idea of a career on the sea. He set his sights on Annapolis, the US Naval Academy in Maryland.  While a student at Hope High School, Taylor involved himself in a variety of clubs. He was a member of the band, orchestra, track team, and Omnibus club, which concerned itself with race relations. As part of the band and orchestra, Taylor played the saxophone and clarinet. While Taylor was very musically inclined, he was also into photography and had his own dark room at home. He did some work for Hope High School’s “Blue and White” yearbook as well as for the Hope Log newspaper. Taylor graduated from high school in 1947 on the honor roll and in his last year won the Anthony Medal for English composition.   After high school, Taylor attended Brown University, where he joined the Naval Reserves Officers Training Corps (NROTC), one of eight programs like it in the country initiated under the direction of Brown University alumnus, Senator Theodore Francis Green. The Navy was one of Rhode Island's largest employers at the time. In 1947, after Taylor earned the highest mark on the US Service Academies joint civil service exam, Senator Green nominated him for the US Naval Academy—Taylor was said to have a 13 point lead in his score. The year before Taylor had scored second.  After graduating from the Academy in 1953 and over a distinguished military career, Taylor flew 65 Vietnam missions from the carrier USS Constellation. He led a Minority Recruiting Program for the Navy. In 1968, he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal. Four years later, Taylor went on to receive the Air Medal-Strike/Flight as well as the Meritorious Service Medal. Taylor received the same Meritorious medal two years later. Taylor retired from the Navy as a Captain in February of 1975.

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It was Monday, April 23, 1928. The Providence Public School Committee was holding its regular meeting at Central Fire Station on the eastern edge of Burnside Park. The room was packed. Charity Bailey (1904-1978), an accomplished pianist and recent graduate of Rhode Island College of Education, was there to give a public statement against Superintendent Isaac Winslow, who, according to multiple accounts, told Bailey that he would not appoint a Black teacher to work in the school system. Bailey, at 23 years old, had already shown herself as a gifted musician and educator. In the years leading up to the hearing, she performed with her sister Amy at the Pond Street Church and delivered a memorable performance of the spiritual “Wish I Could Die in Egypt Land” for National Music Week at Brown University’s Sayles Hall. A writer for the Providence Journal captured the scene: “Both in the rendition of the weird, dirgelike piano accompaniment and in her singing of the haunting, plaintive melody, Miss Bailey approached an artistic triumph. Prolonged applause compelled her to give an encore number, the only one of the evening.” At the same time, Bailey applied for teaching jobs. Despite strong letters of recommendation from her professors, supervisors told her that there were no vacancies. And so, Bailey advertised as a governess.  A year later Bailey was fed up. She and a member of the school committee met with Winslow, who explained that Bailey had fulfilled all of the requirements but was “not in a group of candidates eligible to become teachers.” Bailey and her mother then contacted attorney Joseph G. LeCount, legal counsel and cofounder of the Providence Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the oldest NAACP branches in the country.  On April 23rd, a crowd of teachers, students, and community members filled the school committee’s meeting room in the fire station to capacity. LeCount set-up an improvised witness stand. He questioned Bailey first, then Winslow. The following day the Providence Journal printed a partial account of Winslow’s testimony. A few blocks over at the Evening Tribune, the paper’s news editor, John Carter Minkins, an African American, published a big story with extensive testimony from Bailey and Winslow, as well as reactions from the crowd. “I think it’s a lot of bunk,” said one committee member after listening to Winslow defend himself.  Later, local activists leveraged Bailey’s case to mobilize Black voters toward the Democratic Party. They ousted at least one member of the school committee who had backed Winslow and elected Democrats into high offices in exchange for support on civil rights.  Like so many promising educators at that time, Bailey left the oppressive culture of Providence for New York City, where she worked for the Federal Works Progress Administration, studied piano at Juilliard, and taught music at The Little Red School House.  Between 1954 and 1956, Bailey hosted the television show, Sing a Song, a pioneering, interacial children’s program. She recorded albums and published a bestselling book, Playtime with Music, in which she shared her progressive philosophies. Bailey challenged the traditional teachings of music appreciation. As she argued in Playtime, musical rhythm and word pattern should be felt and enjoyed by children without preliminary instruction because, “Children, like all of us, do best and learn most from that which they love to do.”

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In a 1936 Providence Journal exhibition review, the work of college student Mary Howard (1908-2011) fascinated art critic Robert Wheeler. He wrote, “It will be a strange thing if this young artist doesn’t go on a long journey. There is a rough vigor in everything she paints.” With a life spanning 102 years and an artistic career of abundance, Wheeler’s words were something of a prophecy. While Mary Howard experienced a gap in her creative productivity due to the demands of caring for her family, her “rough vigor” would sustain her artistic spirit throughout her life.  Born in 1908, Mary Cupit Howard was raised in a home on Thayer Street. In her youth, Howard developed a passion for art and found ways to finance her education during the Great Depression. After graduating from Hope High School, her skill proved strong enough to land a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She attended RISD from 1927 to 1933 and gained valuable lessons from her painting professor, John F. Frazier. Following her success at RISD, Howard’s family sold some property, which funded her studies at Yale University. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale in 1935.  During her formative college and early career years, Howard produced acclaimed art and received many awards. Howard drew praise for her moody landscapes, her strongly-composed still lifes, and her exquisite portraits. In a studio on Eddy Street, Howard made prints and paintings. Her painting “Portrait of a Girl” won the prestigious Ives Award at RISD. It was displayed with the work of other RISD students in a young artists exhibition in 1932.  In 1936, Howard was the only woman in the state chosen to work on the RI Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the agency created to fund and oversee public works projects and that provided income during the financially challenging 1930s. In November 1936, an exhibition was held at 30 Benefit Street featuring work by the young artists of the FAP-WPA. Among these artists was Mary Howard, who, in the words of Wheeler, evoked a “tonic sadness” through her atmospheric and memorably dark landscapes. Howard’s other works for the FAP-WPA included small prints of fishermen’s shacks, old houses on Benefit Street, and a large mural for the State House cafeteria depicting a family enjoying a picnic, described as “a delicately colored pastoral scene symbolizing the production and consumption of foodstuffs.” During the WPA years, Howard also painted a portrait of RI Governor Theodore Francis Greene, displayed in the Library at the University of Rhode Island until at least the 1960s.  After her marriage to Atlanta-born artist Wilmer Jennings, Mary Howard (now Jennings) was busy running a household and participating in social and civic clubs. She had three children, Corrine, Wilmar, and Laurel. Later, Howard put her vigor into teaching; She earned a Master’s degree in Education from Rhode Island College in 1969 and, for 17 years, worked in the Providence public schools as a third grade teacher. After retiring, Jennings began painting again and joined the Providence Art Club, Wickford Art Association, and RI Watercolor Society. With her lifelong talent and artistic spirit, Mary Howard Jennings created atmospheric paintings and lasting public works. She died on February 12, 2011.

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For the better part of the 20th century, the Occomy family called 85 John Street their home. Walter Calvert Occomy and Nellie White Occomy, noted humanitarians and members of the city’s Black churches, purchased the house in 1914 and it was a hub of academic and civic pursuits. Looking back at the lives of the Occomys’ three daughters gives us some sense of a family whose activities shaped the past in ways that resonate in the present.  Ruth Occomy (1891-1945) came first. Born in 1891, she graduated from Hope High School and assisted at the Providence Shelter for Colored Children, where she decided to enter nursing. The Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx—at the time one of the few training schools that admitted Black students—initially rejected her application, citing her small stature. Known for her strong personality, Ruth persisted in gaining an acceptance, completed her degree in 1921, and followed up with a year of courses at Columbia University Teachers’ College.  While Ruth studied nursing, her younger sisters, Katherine (1893-1980) and Nell (1897-1953), attended Hope High School. In 1910, Katherine and her husband Lawrence welcomed a son. After a few years, Katherine moved to New York City where she worked as a maid and presumably pursued her career as a dancer. In 1919, the youngest Occomy sister, Nell, graduated with a teaching degree from the State Normal School (now Rhode Island College). Because of discriminatory hiring practices in Providence public schools she moved to Harlem to seek work.  Nell flourished in New York City. She taught junior high and, like Ruth, enrolled in a post-graduate program at the Teachers’ College. In the 1930s, she honed her talents as an arts and culture writer, weighing in on debates of national importance like birth control, writing profiles of Black playwrights, and working as editor-in-chief of The Krinon, magazine of Phi Delta Kappa, a Black sorority founded in 1921 in New Jersey.  Ruth’s profession took her further from home. After a 1927 send-off that included lectures and a chorus of 200 men at Olney Street Baptist Church, Ruth sailed to London to study tropical diseases with Dr. Pauline E. Dinkins. The two then departed for Monrovia, Liberia, where Ruth worked as a missionary nurse for several years. Even when seriously ill with malaria, Ruth was not ready to abandon her post, explaining in a letter to her parents that the hospital had noticeably improved the health of a community living in the “most humble of circumstances.”  Regardless of where their careers took them, the Occomy women felt the pull of home. Nell returned to 85 John Street with her husband Leslie E. Becker for the birth of their first child. She enjoyed friendships with Providence artists, including Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. Ruth returned to the Occomy home in the 1930s to stay. She practiced nursing until suffering from an illness that ended her life in 1945. Katherine came home in the 1930s and lived at 85 John Street for the next five decades. She worked as a palm reader and raised her son, while living at home with mom, dad, brothers, grandchildren, and a handful of family friends. Katherine’s activities garnered less publicity than her sisters’, but even so we know something significant about her. She fulfilled her mother’s desires for an enduring family legacy through 85 John Street:  “I give and devise to my daughter Ruth E. Occomy for and during her natural life the real estate situated at #85 John Street, then to the survivors of my children and their heirs [to] forever share and share alike” - Nellie White Occomy, 1941

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Excitement buzzed in the lecture hall at the opening of the 21st Annual Exhibition of the Rhode Island School of Design. Members of the RISD class of 1900 were awarded their diplomas, while other students received prizes. Among the award recipients was young Thomas R. Lewis (1880-1958), a student artist who earned a scholarship based on his abilities in the evening life drawing class. Addressing the lively crowd was Professor Poland of Brown University, and at the time President of RISD, who proclaimed, “The people of Providence and of Rhode Island are beginning to feel that we have made for ourselves a place that nothing else can fill, and that we are essential to the public wealth.” If anyone in the building manifested the words of Prof. Poland that night, it was Thomas R. Lewis, who later broke the status quo as a Black entrepreneur and made essential contributions to RI’s economy through jewelry making and philanthropy.  Born on April 5, 1880, in Providence, Lewis was raised in the pre-World War II caste system where Black men were largely limited to work in physically demanding fields. As a popular athlete in high school, Lewis could certainly find work as a waiter or bellhop. However, while employed as an errand-runner at Gorham Manufacturing Company, Lewis became interested in a career as a silversmith. A Black jeweler in the early 20th century had little hope of being hired, and Lewis’s family was not supportive. Lewis’s mother died during his childhood, and his father and sister thought his goal of becoming a jeweler was not viable. Eventually, Lewis was forced out of his home. He continued to practice his craft and attended evening classes at RISD while living in a small room with a friend.  Lewis graduated with a certificate from RISD in 1902. He worked as a laborer for at least another year at Gorham before finding a place with a small manufacturer where he produced, according to his employer, designs of “extraordinary quality.” After six years there, Lewis ventured into forming his own company. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Thomas R. Lewis Company employed an integrated workforce, with upward of 65 employees, and created designer goods that sold in luxury stores such as Saks and to the high-end cosmetics manufacturer Richard Hudnut. Lewis’s designs included lavish cigarette cases, powder compacts, and exquisite dog collars.  In 1925, a lacquer explosion in Lewis’s shop at 171 Eddy Street sparked a fire and led to damage throughout the building. Despite this, Lewis enjoyed continued success in the jewelry industry by producing great designs and giving back to his community. Most notably, the Lewis Company aided in the employment of men and women from Providence’s Black communities. Lewis knew many of his employees from their childhood, and taught them the skills they needed to work with diligence. A philanthropist, Lewis was involved in the YMCA and What Cheer Tennis Club where he sponsored social events and helped to put up tennis courts on Willett Avenue in East Providence.  At one point in his career, Thomas Lewis was reported to be one of the highest paid jewelry manufacturers in Providence. He was a respected member of the New England Manufacturing Jewelers and Silversmiths Association. While wider acclaim proved elusive, Lewis took pride in his work, his designs, and his community. In pursuing his dream, Lewis became a pioneer in the jewelry design and manufacturing industry. He died in 1958.

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The Jewish Orphanage of Rhode Island (JORI) began as two separate organizations. In 1908, initially headed by the South Providence Ladies’ Aid Society and Mr. Herman Paster, the first charter for a specifically Jewish children’s orphanage was granted to “support and maintain orphan children between the ages of six and twenty one.” Very soon after obtaining the charter, the Ladies Aid Society withdrew their support to organize another home. At the same time, Mr. Paster obtained another charter, called Machzeka Hadas Orphans on Willard Ave in South Providence, which housed 17 children within its first few months of operation. The home operated by the South Providence Ladies’ Aid Society and their co-sponsors, the Montefiore Lodge Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Association, was named Hebrew Orphans Home and Day Nursery, located at 151 Orms St. next to the present day Sons of Jacob synagogue.

In January of 1910, the two homes merged and created The Jewish Orphanage of Rhode Island with Mr. Maurice Karpeles as President of the board. This new leadership was committed to obtaining a centrally located building to house the dependent children of the Jewish community, and purchased a large Victorian home located at 1213 North Main Street. This new forty-five bed location was led by superintendent Mr. Henry Woolf, along with board members such as Mrs. Ida Silverman, Mrs. Ida Bolotow, Col. Harry Cutler, Mr. Jacob Shartenberg, and countless others.

With the growing number of children living in the orphanage, the board decided it was time to purchase land and build a home that could accommodate more children, and allow them the comforts of a real home and of their community. In 1922, the board purchased land on Summit Avenue in Providence, and the cornerstone was laid on October 21, 1923. Construction of the New Jewish Orphanage of Rhode Island was completed, and the building was dedicated on October 5, 1924. This new state of the art home came fully equipped with tennis courts, a basketball court, and plenty of room for the children to enjoy the outdoors while making friends with the neighborhood children.

Throughout the years, the home saw several Superintendents, who in their various ways kept life for the children as normal as possible. Perhaps the most remembered Superintendent, Mr. Maurice Stollerman, was brought to JORI in 1926. Mr. Stollerman was ever the children’s advocate. He attempted to appoint guardians for all children considered full orphans so they might have an established emotional connection with a family during their time in the home. He also initiated steps that allowed the children who would be aging out of the home an easier transition to life on their own.

The children placed in the Jewish Orphanage were often sent to the home because their families could not afford to provide for them. Mr. Stollerman saw to it that if they did have a living parent or relative, that the families could regularly visit their children. Additionally, siblings in the home were often kept together, in the hope that they would feel some semblance of normalcy.

Though this orphanage was a home for displaced children, they were treated as the sons and daughters of the community, and were always taken care of spiritually, emotionally, and physically. The whole orphanage would participate in the Passover seder, and attended religious confirmation classes and services at Temple Emanuel. They held an annual Thanksgiving dance, at which funds for the home would be raised, and the children would put on plays, and showcase their musical talents in the JORI Band. Life at the Jewish Orphanage was not like life in many of the other institutions in Rhode Island.

The orphanage operated until 1942, when foster and adoption arrangements were made for the eight children who remained in the home.

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It was 1905, and five orthodox Jewish men from Pawtucket signed incorporation papers for a synagogue to be called The Congregation Ohawe Shalom. The only problem was that they had no money for a building, so they were forced to worship in a variety of buildings in the city. By 1918 they had raised $80,000 to buy land on which to build a synagogue. The congregation had grown to more than 350 families, most living in Central Falls and Pawtucket. The land for the new synagogue, at the corner of High and Jackson Streets, was less than a block from the border with Central Falls.

However, before construction could begin, an old theater on the site was razed, and a three-story tenement house was moved to the back of the property. It became the venue for the congregation’s social events. The Ohawe Shalom Synagogue was dedicated in 1921, and for decades, it was the only one in the two cities. The two buildings became the lodestar for the immigrant Jewish families in the neighborhood, many of whom had arrived in this country from Eastern Europe and Russia, with no money, few skills, and little education.

The synagogue is still there, but the building behind it is gone. As the Jews migrated to the suburbs, membership sharply declined. The synagogue finally closed in the late 1970s, and today it houses the Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church.

A few blocks from the synagogue, along Central Street in Central Falls, were small stores--delis, grocery stores, even junk shops--owned by the Jewish immigrants in the neighborhood. Drive down this narrow street to see a few remaining shops, although they are no longer owned by Jews. Or you could have walked the half a mile to downtown Pawtucket to shop at Shartenberg’s, the largest department store, which was at the corner of Main Street and Park Place. The business was founded by Jacob Shartenberg, a German Jew, in the late 1800’s as The New Idea Store.

Soon after the turn of the century, it became Shartenberg’s, and for decades it remained one of the most popular and prosperous businesses downtown.

By the end of the 20th century, the building had been demolished and replaced by a parking garage. But for more than a century, Mr. Shartenberg and other Jews who emigrated from Germany in the mid-to-late 1800’s played an important role in the business life of downtown Pawtucket.

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The founders of the Sons of Jacob, an Orthodox synagogue, had a vision: a soaring edifice in the North End of Providence that would be a symbol of their prosperity and place in the new world.

Having fled the pogroms in Russia and Poland and unrest in Austria in the late 1800s, they were determined to prosper in Providence. Their first synagogue was begun in 1896 when a small group of men met on an upper floor of a house on Shawmut Street and Chalkstone Avenue, right in the middle of a dense Jewish population. Those founders then purchased land on the corner of Douglas and Orms Street, and in 1906 finished construction on the first floor. At a cost of $50,000, they now had a home!

In 1906 Sons of Jacob was not the only synagogue in the neighborhood. The surrounding blocks were filled with Jewish families and businesses, and there were over two dozen houses of worship chartered in the neighborhood, then called the North End and now Smith Hill. However, as the demographics changed, the smaller congregations gave their scrolls to Sons of Jacob and joined themselves to this, more substantial, group.

In 1922, the upper floors were added to accommodate the worshippers; the second floor was for the men, and the third floor for the women, as is the custom for separate seating for men and women in Orthodox congregations. The finished building, designed by Harry Marshak, a local architect, was modeled on a building erected in 1836 in Kassel, West Germany, thus giving another tie to the founders’ former lives. With a substantial building, Rabbi Isaac Blik became the first full-time spiritual leader.

Examine the first floor with its murals around the Ark. Look at the names inscribed on the windows and walls. How proud they were of their new-found success! Go upstairs and marvel at the ceiling medallions depicting the zodiac. The pictures over the front bimah, or speaker’s platform, describe Perkei Avot (teachings of the fathers). The huge chandelier, with its massive weight and brilliant light, adds gravity and grace to the structure. These incredible illustrations, as well as the Zodiac scherenschnitte (cut paper work), were done by Sam Shore, the first president of the synagogue after it moved to Douglas Avenue.

As time went on, the area changed. One factor was the construction of Routes 146 and I-95, when a huge swath of buildings was destroyed and people were forced to move. Another factor was the increasing wealth of the residents, and their desire to live in more up-scale areas. Some went to the suburbs of Cranston and Warwick, and others to the East Side of Providence.

While the people moved, the building remained. The vibrant community was no more. Even while a minyan, the gathering of 10 Jewish men over the age of 13 to have public prayer, continued to be held most mornings, the building gradually deteriorated. Without a thriving community willing to do repairs, problems with the roof and buttresses arose.

The Rhode Island Jewish Museum was founded in an attempt to save the building as an artifact of great cultural importance. It is the last surviving and active synagogue of that era in Providence. When repurposed as a Museum, its legacy will be saved for future generations.

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This area was almost totally Irish when I and my compatriots from Austria and Romania began our life in Providence in the early 1880’s on Robinson St. After 1900, Russian Jews fleeing pogroms came to South Providence. Most arrived with little in the way of possessions – perhaps treasured candlesticks, a prayer book and some clothes stuffed into a box.

There was work at jewelry factories like Ludwig’s or Lederer’s. Others of us peddled - walking the streets with a pack on our backs until we were able to save enough money to buy a horse and wagon. The pay at the factories was $3 per week, but rent was only $4 per month. Few people in the neighborhood owned a single-family house.

My family lived in a four room flat in a new three tenement we bought on Willard Ave: the other two flats were rented out. We were lucky to have gaslights and a bathtub in the bathroom. My neighbors, who were not so fortunate, went to the nearby bathhouse. There were, of course, very poor people living in our neighborhood. They received help from Jewish volunteer aid agencies, such as the Montefiore Ladies Association and the South Providence Ladies Aid Societies.

My home was a stopping point for many immigrants until they could find a job and a place to live. We often had “guests” staying with us, sometimes for a month or more. They were newly arrived immigrants – either our relatives or ‘landsleit’ (Yiddish), who were people from our town in Europe who had no family to take them in. Their arrival meant doubling up on bedrooms or giving up the parlor to a family. Even with the crowding, no one was turned away. We helped them find work and get settled.

We also had health insurance through beneficial associations. For a small sum weekly, you could join a beneficial or assisting society which offered a form of insurance. Some offered sick benefits like the Miriam Association while some had death benefits to pay some funeral expenses.

It was difficult to find kosher food in the neighborhood before the turn of the century, but by the 1920s we could buy kosher meat around the corner from my house. Although many of us went to separate synagogues to pray in the familiar tongues of our native lands, we had one social center where celebrations and meetings took place - Bazar’s Hall. Bazar’s even hosted a branch of the Providence Public Library where the Yiddish books were extremely popular.

Education was of utmost importance and we children actually attended two schools. First we attended the nearby public elementary school, and after our regular school day, we went to the Talmud Torah (Hebrew School) on Chester Avenue. It had a dual purpose as spelled out in its charter: “For Hebrew Education and to keep children off the streets after school hours...”. High School is where we first met people from outside of our neighborhood.

This was our life. Up until World War II, South Providence was a vibrant Jewish community. After the War, people began to move to other parts of the city, and to the suburbs. Urban renewal – hospitals, schools, and parking lots – have since taken over my neighborhood, which now only exists in photos and memories.

Author Geraldine "Jerry" Foster shares her family's personal experiences of life in the heart of Jewish South Providence from the early 1900s to today.

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Jews can have religious services any place, but you need hallowed ground for a burial. Although the Newport cemetery was established in 1677, Touro Synagogue was consecrated in 1763.

Touro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Rhode Island, established by the Sephardic Jewish immigrants originally from Spain and Portugal, who, fleeing the Inquisition, had next gone to Amsterdam and London, then to Brazil and finally Barbados. Arriving in Newport, they set up businesses dealing with shipping and commerce. Finally settled, they needed to buy land for a cemetery. While their congregation, Nephuse Israel (Scattered of Israel), did not have a building, they are considered the second oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. Land was bought by Mordechai Campanal and Moses Pacheco at the corner of what is now Kay and Touro Streets.

Who is buried in the cemetery? Almost all of those early settlers had Hispanic names: Alvares, Levy, Lopez, Rivera, Rodriguez, Seixas, Touro, and, interestingly enough, Hayes (see Longfellow’s poem below). Some of them died at a young age: Jacob Lopez (1755 - 1764), while others far exceeded the life expectancy of their era: Mrs. Judith Levy (1700 - 1788). In total, there are 44 burials, with the most recent being Edwin Rosenstein (1866). As a specifically Jewish cemetery, only Jews were buried there.

A fence was put around the plot, for which Judah Touro, Abraham’s brother, donated $11,000 in 1842. However, by 1850 the cemetery was rarely being used, as the Jewish population of Newport had fallen. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited the site and wrote a melancholy poem, The Jewish Cemetery at Newport, about how deserted it was;

The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes;

Alvares and Rivera interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!

The groaning earth in travail and in pain

Brings forth its races, but does not restore,

And the dead nations never rise again.

In contrast to this view, Emma Lazarus, the famous Jewish poet who wrote the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, wrote a rebuttal of Longfellow, In the Jewish Cemetery at Newport, with a feeling of hope at the end:

For youth and happiness have followed age,

And green grass lieth gently over all.

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,

With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,

Before the mystery of death and God.

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Solomon Treital is believed to be the first Jew to settle in Woonsocket. This scholarly and deeply religious man arrived in 1866, and soon established himself as a clothier in the downtown Market Square.

Treital’s brother, Max, arrived two years later, and a few more Jews followed, but it wasn’t until the big migration of Europeans to American shores in the 1880s that a Jewish community began to take shape in Woonsocket.

By 1894, the city directory recorded 28 Jewish names, and by 1900, there were at least 65 Jews living among the 28,204 people in the growing textile-mill city.

According to the “History of Congregation B’nai Israel,” the first Jewish congregation organized in 1883 as Congregation of the Lovers of Peace. Most of the congregants were laborers, craftsmen, peddlers and merchants, and Solomon Treital was their first president.

Although they were devout, the Lovers of Peace were not wealthy, and they could not afford their own synagogue. They first worshipped in a loft over a store near Market Square, and then in a building on Main Street, and then went “from loft to loft, from meeting hall to meeting hall for one and half decades.”

At the start of the 20th century, the young congregation had grown enough in numbers and solvency for Treital to declare that the time had come to found their own house of worship.

The “History of Congregation B’nai Israel” reports that “through tremendous self-sacrifice on the part of each congregant,” the congregation in 1904 was able to purchase a vacant Presbyterian church at 200 Greene Street, giving Woonsocket’s Jewish community its first home.

The squat Queen Anne at the corner of Greene and Bernon streets had, among its selling points, a cavernous room suitable for a sanctuary and just enough room on its tiny lot to build a sukkah, or hut, for the holiday of Sukkot.

The Jewish community, newly renamed Congregation B’nai Israel, mustered its meager resources and set about remodeling the old church into a synagogue. And so it was fitting, when consecration ceremonies were held on July 31, 1904, that “citizens of all faiths were in attendance.”

By 1913, the congregation had grown to 85 members, and by 1914, the city had a very active YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) and YWHA (Young Women’s Hebrew Association). By 1917, CBI was able to hire its first ordained rabbi.

The congregation continued to grow, albeit slowly, over the following decades, and the Greene Street synagogue thrived. The building wasn’t big enough to host all the events that the Jewish community held, so halls and homes were frequently used for social activities, but the temple was the focal point.

“It was a vibrant Jewish congregation,” said Irwin Shorr, who was among the last boys to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in the building, on Oct. 21, 1961. “I think at the height of its existence, there were at least 200 Jewish families in Woonsocket.”

Shorr, who now lives in Olney, Maryland, said services were held in the sanctuary on the main floor, while the downstairs held a kitchen and rooms that were used for junior congregation, parties, holiday events and receptions.

Life for Woonsocket’s Jews “revolved around Jewish life when I was a kid,” Shorr said. “My Bar Mitzvah was the most important event of my life. Period.”

In 1962, Woonsocket’s Jewish community proudly dedicated its magnificent and architecturally important synagogue on Prospect Street. This new building had more than enough space to consolidate Jewish life under one roof, with room for everything from a Hebrew School to a Judaica museum.

As for the old Queen Anne, for the next 40 years or so, it was sometimes vacant and sometimes the home of religious groups, until a theater company took it over. And then, around 2000, Pastor Mike Kropman purchased the building for $30,000 for his Church of the Acts.

Kropman describes his church as non denominational. Which is why the Star of David carved into the wall above the bimah, the plaque honoring members of the 1904 “Committee on Building,” and the frame of a sturdy sukkah still stand as testament to Woonsocket’s first synagogue.

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This site was famous during the revolution for an iron forge called Hope Furnace (across the street from the mill) which declined after 1800 to be replaced by the Hope cotton mill.  The Hope Furnace was initiated by Governor Stephen Hopkins, and the Browns, the well-known wealthy merchants of Providence, along with other partners in 1765.  It was named in honor of Hope Brown, mother of the four Brown brothers, Nicholas, Joseph, John and Moses who founded Brown University and Moses Brown School.  The furnace starting making bar (“pig”) iron and nails, then, during the Revolution, cast cannons and cannon balls.  The vast number of Hope cannon went to privateers (pirates) outfitting their commerce raiders in Northern seaport towns to attach British ships.  Between 1778 and 1781 about 3,000 high quality cannon were produced for military and naval use.  Eight of these field pieces were in a battery used by General Washington at the siege of Yorktown.  In 1806 The Hope Cotton Factory Company bought the Hope Furnace Estate and mill privileges and built a 44-by-22 ft mill.  In 1821 it was sold to two partners who built another mill which burned in 1844.  A Providence based partnership bought the site and founded the Hope Company, building the present  large stone mill, four stories high with full basement, 183-by-55 feet, which began operating in 1847 with 430 looms producing 40-inch sheetings and employing 165 workers, 65 males and 100 women.  The railroad arrived in 1874 and ran one freight and six passenger trains daily. More buildings were added in 1871, 1891 and 1916.  In the early 1900s the mills manufactured lace and the complex was known as the Valley Lace Company and continued until 1972 when various commercial tenants occupied the buildings until the complex fell into receivership. In June, 2020 Paramount Development Group of Boston bought the property planning to “use the latest design and technology to rejuvenate the 18th century mill and all of its hydro-electric capabilities” and develop it into 193 affordable and market rate apartments.  Also a Hope Historical Museum is planned for the small square building on the front right of the building which was the mill office.  Planned completion is by the end of 2023.

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Rhode Island Governor Charles Jackson built the first cotton mill here in 1825.  By the late 1880s the mill was owned by Christopher Lippitt and Company and produced sheeting.  Fifty workers were employed and 120 broad looms were in operation. By 1901, the mill was owned by B. B. & R. Knight and stood three to four stories high. The Knights went out of business in 1928-1929.   In 1932, the site was bought to operate a linen-supply business.  Today, only a one-story, stone outbuilding and some smaller structures survive.  In the modern era the property passed through various owners and is currently occupied by a landscaping company.

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From cotton and bookcloth to fuel cells, films and printing media these two 150 year old mills are state-of-the-art! The Arkwright Company of Coventry, R.I. began in 1810 as a textile mill owned by James DeWolf. Two mill buildings were constructed, one of which burned down in 1851. With the construction of a new building in 1883, the company became Interlaken Inc., and was engaged primarily in the manufacture of cloth for book binding.  It was purchased by an English firm, Winterbottom Mills, in 1892, but continued operating under the Interlaken name. Interlaken absorbed the nearby Harris Manufacturing Company in 1900 making Interlaken the largest bookcloth manufacturing company in the world at the time.  A new plant was built in 1922 to manufacture tracing cloth for architects and draftsmen; it was called Arkwright Finishing Company, and was nominally a separate business until a formal merger in 1959 as Arkwright-Interlaken, Inc. The name was changed to Arkwright Inc. in 1973. It gradually phased out its textile operations and moved to the coating of film. The last cloth was produced in 1983.  Arkwright was bought by Dietec Group, headquartered in Cles, Italy in 2008.   Winterbottom, the parent firm, was bought out by Venesta International in 1961.  Venesta was bought out by Ozalid Group Holdings in 1972, who were in turn bought out by Oce Van Der Grinten (a Dutch firm) in 1977.  Now the north complex is occupied by SIHL a global manufacturer of films, printing media, thermal papers, packaging films, etc. 

Response Technologies, a material science and engineering company in West Warwick, moved to the south complex (next to the river) in early 2020, and in December, 2020 was acquired by Bell Textron to advance its fuel cell technology offerings.  Meanwhile a part of the company in West Warwick was renamed Response Medical and is in the forefront of producing high quality medical masks.

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