In 1861, five young ladies, attendees of a prominent Providence academy for girls, met together for an afternoon of sewing. Unlike many of their classmates, they were concerned with more than the latest fashions, juicy local gossip, and their future matrimonial prospects. With the country ensnared in the Civil War, hospital supplies and handmade comforts for soldiers were in great demand. In Providence, the wartime economy had also made life increasingly difficult for the city’s poor. Motivated to improve their community, the girls began to canvass their neighborhoods for funds and supplies. After an encounter with a crusty Yankee tycoon who declared that the young lady was “positively irrepressible,” the Irrepressible Society was born.

Nineteenth-century Rhode Island was a world dominated by men. Until 1874, married women had no control over their own earnings. Until 1917, women could not vote. Nonetheless, the women of the Irrepressible Society exerted their independence, refusing to allow men to serve in the society in anything other than an advisory capacity. Initially, even married women could not hold offices within the society, reflecting its inclinations as a “spinster society.”

By the early 1870s, the Irrepressible Society had expanded beyond its humble beginning as a ladies’ sewing circle. They even had a coat of arms: two pairs of scissors rampant on a gold field, crowned by a thimble. Now, most of the actual sewing work was done by needy women compensated for their labor by the society. Although the Irrepressible Society’s mission included “charitable work of the city” more generally, they were particularly concerned with the plight of women without means to support themselves. Providing instruction in hand and machine sewing, the society made it possible for disadvantaged women to find gainful employment and improve their lives.

The Irrepressible Society was also remarkably forward-thinking in regard to the its finances. Acknowledging the impossibility of funding their work solely through donations, the ladies of the society endeavored to make it as self-supporting as possible. By 1929, half of the society’s revenue came from the sale of its goods and clothing. Although some items were made available to impoverished residents of the city at little or no cost, the Irrepressible Society also operated a small retail store. In addition, the society cultivated clients who placed large wholesale orders. For example, the Providence Lying-In Hospital purchased thousands of layette bundles for newborn infants over the years.

Part charitable society and part social club, most of the ladies of the Irrepressible Society were members of well-connected Providence families. Fundraising events hosted by the society were the talk of Providence. In 1884, the society hosted an elaborate “Charity Ball” that quickly became an annual winter tradition. Reviewing another society event, a local reporter began thusly: “The tea party of the Irrepressibles – we have been obliged to write that word three times, because our pen would slip into Irresistibles, as anybody’s would after coming from the blaze of matron beauty and maiden loveliness that lighted up the nice old rooms in which this society held its housewarming last evening.”

In 1929, the Irrepressible Society merged with three other social service agencies in Providence to form the new “Bureau for the Handicapped.” Seven years later, the society officially disbanded, turning all of their remaining funds over to the bureau. Although the new agency would continue to provide many of the same services – including job training, temporary employment, and financial relief – the days of the Irrepressible Society’s croquet parties and elaborate theatricals were over.

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In the early 1900s, Rhode Island was in the grip of a deadly epidemic – the great white plague. Each year, thousands of Americans died from tuberculosis; for children under the age of five, the disease was one of the top ten causes of death. Highly contagious, tuberculosis spread rapidly through crowded urban tenements in cities like Providence. Early tuberculosis symptoms overlapped with many other diseases – fever, weight loss and lack of appetite, fatigue – but as the disease progressed, the most identifiable feature was a persistent cough. By the time a patient was coughing up blood and sputum they were highly infectious. In particular, children, living and interacting with infected adults, were at great risk of contracting the disease themselves.

Sanatoriums for tuberculosis patients sprang up across the country. In Rhode Island, adults with active tuberculosis were sent to a clinic at Wallum Lake in Burrillville. Initially, no provisions were made for children who had been exposed to the disease but were not actively infectious. A Providence Journal reporter noted: “We have no proper hospital accommodations for tubercular children under 14 years. They must, therefore, remain in their tenement homes regardless of the lack of good food, fresh air, and proper care. The need for an all-year-round home for crippled and debilitated children is great. Perhaps no one knows this better than the tuberculosis worker.” Without careful medical supervision and a healthy diet, exposed children’s chances of developing active tuberculosis dramatically increased.

In 1912, the Providence League for the Suppression of Tuberculosis finally addressed this issue, opening a “preventorium” at the Lakeside Home in Warwick. At this bucolic location, tubercular children were treated to a regime of fresh air and exercise. During the summer, children slept on open-air sleeping porches and spent their days playing outside. The children even received their schooling outside, using an open air shelter as their classroom for all but the bitterest days of winter. Only when the “rosy cheeks and cheery voices of the children denote[d] returning strength and vigor” were they sent back to their homes in the city.

A regiment of doctors and nurses supervised the children at the Preventorium. With neither an inoculation nor a cure for tuberculosis, doctors focused on improving the children’s overall physical well-being. Many of the children arrived at the Preventorium underweight for their age. After several months of care on the Preventorium’s simple, wholesome diet, children often found themselves sprouting up overnight, returning home several inches taller.

Two other groups of underprivileged children were also accommodated at the Lakeside Home, strictly isolated from the potentially infectious children of the Preventorium. Each week during the summer, a repurposed Red Cross ambulance stopped at the Quaker Meeting House in downtown Providence. Families gathered at the site hoping that their children might be approved for a vacation at the Lakeside Home. Children who passed the medical inspection piled into the ambulance with their luggage – by a dint of “scientific packing,” the ambulance could accommodate thirty-five children. At the Lakeside Home, these children from Providence’s urban core enjoyed several weeks of swimming, hiking, and playing games. Year round, the Lakeside Home also accommodated a small number of children who were convalescing from illnesses or operations.

Through the 1940s, The Lakeside Home continued to offer itself as a center for convalescents. However, children’s hospitals and better medical services slowly changed the face of medical care in Rhode Island. By the 1950s, modern antibiotics could now effectively treat and cure tuberculosis. The Preventorium grew obsolete.

On September 19, 1950, the Providence Tuberculosis League ended their operation of the Lakeside Home and Preventorium, transferring the property to Children’s Friend and Service for operation as a temporary shelter for homeless or neglected children.

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In June 1830, the residents of Tiverton gathered for the annual town meeting, an opportunity for the freemen of the town to participate in local government. Included on the day’s agenda was a proposal to create a town farm as a refuge for the destitute and mentally ill.

Before the creation of poorhouses, town farms, or asylums, many communities auctioned off the poor, encouraging affluent residents to place bids for their labor as indentured servants. By the mid-1800s, the shift from farm to factory work created a new group of landless, jobless, and itinerant poor — too many to be absorbed into the traditional system. Towns viewed poor farms as a modern, humane way to combat poverty, drunkenness, and deviation from social norms, while allowing people to earn their own keep. Town leaders hoped to reform the poor through labor, while decreasing the burden on taxpayers. Spending on poor relief was often the single largest item in town budgets.

Although the freemen of Tiverton favored establishing a town farm, locating funds and deciding on suitable property was a complicated task. More than a year passed before the appointed committee purchased sixty acres of farmland from the Gray family for $4,300. The town purchased livestock for the farm and gave the committee authorization “to finish the house standing on said farm, in a good and plain manner.” By 1832, the town farm was ready for occupants.

Life was not easy for inmates. Burdened with endless chores, they raised pigs and cattle, and cultivated corn and other “grain, roots and vegetables and provisions.” Inmates lived under the strict supervision of the farm’s caretaker who lived onsite to discipline and reform the poor. The overseers expected the farm to be self-sufficient, with inmates raising enough food to feed themselves.

In 1886, the Overseers of the Poor ceased keeping records for the farm, marking the beginning of a slow transition from a strictly regulated poor farm to a refuge for the elderly and disabled. A 1910 Department of Commerce report indicated that town farm housed only eight inmates, mostly single men and women, who lived in the same house that the Overseers of the Poor had acquired nearly a century earlier.

Ruth Manchester, a lifelong resident of Tiverton, recalled playing with the caretaker’s children and visiting the town farm’s kitchen for cookies and other baked treats as a child in the 1920s. Although the town farm still ran a small dairy — selling milk to Ruth’s family and other Tiverton residents — it was no longer the agricultural venture of earlier decades. With the establishment of the Social Security Act in 1935, other options became available to those, particularly the elderly and indigent, who had once found themselves at the mercy of the Overseers of the Poor. Tiverton’s Town Farm continued to operate until 1955, at which time it became a private rest home that finally closed in 1982.

Today, a small cemetery containing the unmarked graves of inmates marks the town farm. The farmhouse where inmates lived for more than a century has been demolished and only the names of the Overseers of the Poor are preserved in the town’s records. The names and identities of those who lived and worked on the Tiverton Town Farm are lost to history.

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Within the granite and brownstone walls of Providence’s imposing Gothic courthouse, Manuel shifts nervously from foot to foot. For the second time this year, Manuel stands alone before a judge, awaiting his sentencing. The son of Portuguese immigrants, Manuel’s struggling family has no money to spend on an attorney; the right to free legal counsel is decades away. Earlier in 1925, Manuel had been arrested for violating property rights and committing theft. This time, he was picked up by the Providence Police Department because of truancy. After reviewing Manuel’s record and listening to the testimony of the arresting officer, the judge is finally ready to announce his sentencing – “Six weeks at Sockanosset.” As the judge slams down his gavel, a look of relief creeps across Manuel’s face.

From 1881 until 1985, the Sockanosset School for Boys served as a juvenile detention facility and reformatory. Rhode Island citizens had first determined the need for such a facility as early as 1847, when the Providence City Council approved the establishment of a school for the “confinement, instruction and reformation of juvenile offenders and young persons of idle, vicious or vagrant habits.” For three decades, children of both sexes were sent to the Providence Reform School in Tockwotton House in the city’s Fox Point neighborhood. By 1880, however, concerns over the school’s management and new approaches to “reforming” juvenile delinquents led to the creation of two new institutions: the Oaklawn School for Girls and the Sockanosset School for Boys.

In 1881, construction of the new boys’ school began on the Howard Reservation in Cranston – a site that already included the State Asylum for the Incurable Insane, the State Prison and Providence County Jail, and the state-run almshouse. Five stone cottages were built between 1881 and 1895, each with its own schoolroom and a dormitory intended to house up to fifty boys. The school complex also included a house for the Sockanosset Superintendent, an infirmary, a gym, and an elegant stone chapel. By locating the reformatory on pastoral land away from corrupting urban influences, the founders were following the prevailing doctrine of the nineteenth century: urban chaos and idleness engendered lawlessness. With that belief foremost in their minds, the school’s administrators kept the boys busy on the Howard Reservation’s 225 acres of farmland.

The early years of Sockanosset were highly regimented.  The boys spent hours doing physically demanding activities like farm chores, building repair and construction, and coal shoveling. However, forward-thinking school administrators began to shift towards a program of education and rehabilitation. Social reformers insisted that the crimes of juveniles were typically motivated by social circumstance. Roy L. McLaughlin, the Superintendent of Sockanosset during the 1920s, noted that “most of the boys come from ‘broken’ or ‘badly bent’ homes.”

Sockanosset slowly shifted from a reformatory designed to contain and discipline the unruly to a school where classes and vocational training focused on preparing boys for life after Sockanosset. A key part of this training were the vocational classes offered by accomplished craftsmen. At one point, Sockanosset boasted a blacksmith shop, a carpenter shop, a farm school where they raised much of the food they ate, and a printing shop where they printed The Howard Times. Items created by boys at the school were the showpiece of the Rhode Island exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During its height in the early twentieth century, Sockanosset was known as a respected vocational school. Some boys may have been truant or committed minor offenses in hopes of being sentenced to Sockanosset. As in Manuel's situation, boys being sent to Sockanosset knew they would receive regular meals and practical vocational training.

As the century progressed, however, a lack of funds and overcrowding at the school necessitated the termination of the very programs that had made Sockanosett so forward-thinking for its time. After over one hundred years of operation, the school finally closed in 1985.

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On January 3, 1791, Ann Arnold walked into the newly founded Slater Mill and onto the pages of history as one of the first nine employees hired by the mill. She was probably about ten years old.

As the industrial revolution swept across the western world, many factories, including Slater Mill, capitalized on child labor. Pliable young children could be easily taught the skills needed to operate the mill’s spinning frames, could be paid less than adults, and were less likely to incite trouble than adult workers. Some factories hired children as young as four years old. At Slater Mill, Ann Arnold joined a workforce made up of boys and girls between the ages of seven and twelve who worked six days a week – twelve hours a day in the winter, sixteen hours a day in the summer. They spent more than twice the amount of time that today’s kids spend in school working at the mill each day.

Ann Arnold and her fellow workers picked cotton clean and worked the mill’s carding and spinning machines. The roar of the Blackstone River and hum of the water-powered machinery filled the air. Fine cotton lint coated the floor, clung to the workers' clothes, and clogged their throats. If the mill supervisor thought the children were not working hard enough, the children were fined, further reducing the small paycheck that they took home each week. The children were expected to spend Sundays, their one day of rest, at a mill-sponsored Sunday school where Brown University students provided basic schooling.

For her hard work, Ann Arnold brought home a regular salary: a luxury compared to farm life. The rest of her family toiled all day on the family farm, working just as hard as Ann did in the factory, but without the assurance of a regular paycheck.

As Slater Mill expanded, more workers were needed to run the carding and spinning equipment. Mill operators adopted the “Rhode Island System” of labor where entire families were hired to work together in the factories. Nonetheless, children remained a key source of labor. In 1830, fifty-five percent of all millworkers in Rhode Island were still children.

Long after Slater Mill closed its doors in 1895, child labor continued to be a contested issue. In the early 1900s, organizations such as the Consumer's League of Rhode Island fought to limit child labor. Early legislation restricted the number of hours that children could work and set age requirements for factory work – unscrupulous mill owners seldom enforced these rules. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act made it illegal to employ any child under the age of twelve in the United States. However, children like Ann still work in factories throughout the world today, enduring harsh conditions to support them­selves and their family.

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All across America people ridiculed and smashed Henry D. Cogswell’s fountains, but this one survives in downtown Pawtucket.

Cogswell – a dentist, millionaire, and crusader in the temperance movement against alcohol – had not always been a wealthy man. Born in Connecticut in 1820, young Cogswell sunk into poverty after his parents died. As a teenager he walked fifty miles to Pawtucket to start work in the mills. He managed to become a dentist, and in 1847 he set up a local practice. Lured to California by the Gold Rush, he made a fortune in real estate.

The newly-minted millionaire assumed an ancestral coat of arms and began to call himself a “capitalist,” but he never forgot his penniless past. He determined to uplift the working class through charitable deeds.

As Cogswell saw it, drunkenness led to pauperism. If poor people had an alternative to alcohol – like clean, cold water to drink – they might renounce liquor. And so, starting in 1878, Cogswell arranged to send free drinking fountains to towns throughout the United States.

Cogswell’s actions might have been well-intentioned, but he made some regrettable design choices. His fountains often came topped with a statue that resembled Cogswell himself. This figure, which he referred to as the “Guardian of the Fountain,” held a scroll in one hand and a glass of water in the other. Engravings at the base commanded passersby to work hard and avoid dissipation.

The fountains proved irresistible targets for vandals. Drunken revelers, rowdy art lovers, and citizens who deemed the statues to be in poor taste all moved to destroy them. Wherever he appeared, the “Guardian” suffered attacks, including topplings with a lasso, lake immersions, and a kidnapping.

When Mark Twain spotted a Cogswell fountain in Rochester, New York, he remarked, “It has a putrid, decomposed sort of a look that is offensive for a delicate organism.” Others agreed. In 1885 an unidentified party dispatched the Rochester statue by bashing it to bits with crowbars.

The Pawtucket fountain escaped the mobs, perhaps because it came decorated with a heron rather than Cogswell himself. Residents welcomed it with speeches and song when it arrived in 1880. The fountain provided water, “God’s Free Gift to Man and Beast,” from high spouts for humans and lower spouts for horses, dogs, and any other animals in need of refreshment. On the foreheads of the cat-like gargoyles, one can still see marks made by rings where drinking cups once hung.

When the fountain became inconvenient downtown, the city transferred it to Oak Grove Cemetery. But mourners deemed it too cheerful for that spot, even after they had the word “Welcome” removed from the bottom of the base. The fountain moved to Slater Park in 1904 before the city finally restored it to its original location in 1990. At that time, a time capsule found embedded at the top of the column yielded soggy papers and an Indian Head penny.

Today Pawtucket’s Cogswell fountain is one of few still in existence. It stands defunct, a monument to a man who excelled at making money but botched giving it away.

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In the 1780s, a visitor traveling through the Blackstone River Valley might have smelled the rich aroma of roasting cacao beans wafting from a small wooden building as they passed through the hamlet of Central Falls. Americans consumed chocolate products with a passion in the late eighteenth century, and for nearly two decades, Central Falls was a center of chocolate production, earning itself the title of “Chocolateville.”

Chocolateville’s namesake mill opened in 1782, operated by confectioner William Wheat. Wheat, who had previously established a chocolate-making business in Providence, moved to Central Falls to take advantage of the power provided by the Blackstone River. His chocolate mill was one of America’s earliest water-powered chocolate manufacturing facilities.

Within the mill, imported cacao beans were roasted and ground into a chocolate slurry, with plenty of sugar and spice added for taste, before being shaped into small blocks. Don’t think of a delicious chocolate bar when you imagine these blocks – even after processing, the chocolate of this era was chalky and gritty. Most people purchased chocolate to use in baking or in concocting the fashionable beverage of “drinking chocolate.”

“Drinking chocolate” or “hot chocolate” became enormously popular during the late 1700s; Thomas Jefferson even predicted that it would overtake tea and coffee in usage. In 1773 alone, over 320 tons of cacao beans were imported into the American colonies. By this period hot chocolate was affordable to nearly everyone and was frequently served in coffee houses, where colonists would gather to talk about politics and the news of the day. When colonists boycotted tea during the American Revolution, hot chocolate was favored as an alternative drink.

Chocolate was also sought for its supposed medicinal powers. Thought to aid everything from the stomach to the brain, people used chocolate as a home remedy for illness. At least one doctor in the period even prescribed chocolate with a biscuit as part of one’s preparation for a smallpox inoculation.

Chocolate production connected the small community of Central Falls with the wider Atlantic world. Caribbean and South American slave plantations provided William Wheat, and other New England chocolate manufacturers, with cacao beans. Once processed, Wheat found a ready market for his chocolate in the bustling port cities of Providence and Newport. It’s even thought that chocolate from Wheat’s mill may have fed European soldiers fighting in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars – a far cry from the waters of the Blackstone.

However, Chocolateville didn’t last. The chocolate mill changed ownership in 1784, and as economic tides shifted, cotton production soared in the region – surely a blow to the area’s chocolate aficionados. Following a major flood in the early 1800s, the empty and dilapidated building became known to locals as “the Quail’s Trap.” By around 1834, all traces of the mill that gave “Chocolateville” its name were gone. In recent years, Central Falls has reclaimed its identity and nickname, opening the Chocolate Mill Overlook Park. Visitors can imagine the smell of chocolate drifting over the park, linking the area to its tastiest product.

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Step through the doors of the Modern Diner, slide into a window booth or snag a stool at the counter, and order two eggs, toast, and a side of hash browns. Order up!

In 1940, the Modern Diner opened on Dexter Street in downtown Pawtucket. Patrons could choose a booth along the diner’s windows or perch on one of the stainless steel stools that lined the narrow countertop separating the diners from the small galley kitchen. The Modern Diner quickly became a bustling breakfast hub serving up large plates of eggs, bacon, pancakes, and daily specials including the Rhode Island favorite, the “Cabinet,” a coffee flavored drink akin to frappes or milkshakes.

Small prefabricated eateries began to appear in American cities in the early twentieth century, replacing traditional food wagons as a source of casual cuisine. By the 1920s, the term “diner” had entered popular lexicon. Diners reflected popular styles, and by the 1930s, many diners featured aerodynamic shapes, curving silhouettes, and bright chrome accents – all hallmarks of the “Streamline Moderne” style of the Art Deco movement. Inspired by the sleek trains that crisscrossed the country, particularly the elegant new “Zephyr” trains of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, designer Roland Stickney created the “Sterling Streamliner Diner.”

From 1939 until 1942, Sterling Streamliner diners were fabricated by the J.B. Judkins Coach Company, of Merrimac, Massachusetts, a company primarily known for its custom car bodies. Sales of diners offered an alternative market for companies affected by the decline of automobile sales during the Great Depression. Selling at around $15,000, Judkins’ Sterling Streamliners were the ultimate diner, with porcelain-clad exteriors and interiors accented with mahogany trim. They were built in four-foot modules that could be easily shipped and assembled at their final destination. Advertisements even marketed this feature with the claim that additional sections could be added as patronage increased. Unfortunately, only seventeen Sterling Streamliners diners were produced before the United States’ entry into World War II curtailed most civilian industries.

Today, the Modern Diner is one of only two Sterling Streamliners still in operation. It gained widespread recognition in 1978, becoming the first diner added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Modern Diner also gained notoriety after attracting the attention of Disney. In the early 1990s, Walt Disney Company sold thousands of shirts featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse standing before the Modern Diner and its iconic neon sign. While attempting to tap into the origins of Americana, the company overlooked copyright laws and soon after, the owners of the Modern Diner filed suit against Walt Disney Company and won.

At first glance, the Modern Diner retains its historic 1940s appearance. After it was moved to East Avenue in the 1980s, however, an additional structure – containing modern amenities like an expanded kitchen and restrooms – was attached to the rear of the diner. Although the diner’s menu has expanded over the years to meet the tastes of new clientele, the traditional diner fare of breakfast is still their specialty.

Ready for breakfast?

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Despite the rain, a troupe of bicyclists and mustached men costumed as knights, clowns, pages, and a prince paraded through the streets of Pawtucket. Thousands of people from Rhode Island and the adjoining states thronged the streets. For a week, all of Pawtucket celebrated one hundred years of cotton production with lavish decorations, elaborate parades, and both horseback and bicycle races. One might wonder why bicycles featured so prominently at a festival of cotton, but in Pawtucket, the two have had a long and interconnected history.

Slater Mill, which gained early fame as the first cotton spinning mill in the United States, changed hands many times over the course of the nineteenth century. By 1865, it was owned by the Spencer family of Pawtucket.

Around this time, velocipedes, commonly called “boneshakers” for their rough effect on riders’ bodies, were gaining popularity. These early bicycles, made entirely of wood, were eventually enhanced by the introduction of lightweight metal frames and air-filled tires. These improvements in safety and comfort brought about the American bicycling craze of the 1890s.

Anticipating this fad, Henry L. Spencer opened a bicycle shop on his father’s property in downtown Pawtucket – in a structure adjoining the old Slater Mill building. Spencer did a booming trade, becoming the second proprietor of bicycles within the state. As profits expanded and interest in bicycling increased, he transformed the third floor of Slater Mill into a riding rink and bicycling school where customers could practice the art of riding bicycles in a supervised setting.

Residents of Pawtucket were proud of their unique and varied industrial heritage. Henry L. Spencer, alongside cotton magnates and textile industrialists, was numbered one of Pawtucket’s prominent citizens worthy of mention in an illustrated history of the city published in the 1890s. The varieties of industry undertaken at the old Slater Mill building in less than a century – from cotton spinning to bicycling – were described as the “epitome of the progress of the century.”

When Pawtucket hosted its weeklong celebration to mark its “Cotton Centenary” in 1890, it was no surprise that bicycles featured prominently in the festivities. The centenary featured many contests, including horseracing and a regatta, but the bicycle races, held on the final day of the celebration, were the most popular. Three races took place: an intensive three-mile race that drew participants from around New England, a one-mile race limited to local riders, and a half-mile boys’ race. It is likely that William F. Almy, the triumphant winner of the boys’ race that day, as well as many of the other local contestants, had learned to ride at H.L. Spencer’s Bicycle Rink, a prominent sponsor of the day’s festivities.

Outside of Pawtucket, the bicycling craze had far-reaching effects. By 1896, noted suffragist Susan B. Anthony believed that “the bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world” and a group of cyclists called the League of American Wheelmen quite literally paved the road for the automobile by lobbying for safer streets.

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Sam Patch swung his hat and leapt off the cliff, cutting through the mist towards the seething whirlpool below. A roar rose up from the massive crowd of over 8,000 people. The outcome of this feat – at High Falls in upstate New York – would send reverberations across the nation.

Sam Patch's jumping career began several decades earlier at Slater Mill in Pawtucket. From the age of seven, Patch worked in the mill, scuttling between looms, clearing bobbins of cotton, and replacing them with empty ones. Eventually, he was promoted to a coveted weaving position. He toiled for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, starting at five in the morning. In the summer the mill was hot and humid, and during lunch breaks Patch would join other boys in jumping off the mill dam or nearby bridges into the cool tidal pool at the foot of the Pawtucket Falls. Soon this leisurely activity turned into a competition, with each boy jumping from higher and higher-still factory windows.

In 1824, mill owners demanded that workers accept steep wage cuts and a shortened lunch break. Patch, along with his fellow workers, protested against these unfair practices. Continuing conflict with mill management may have been one factor that precipitated Patch's subsequent move to Paterson, New Jersey, where he found work at another mill. Upon hearing that a bridge was to be built over the Passaic Falls, Patch declared that – once built – he would jump from it. On September 30, 1827, he jumped as promised from Clinton Bridge, drawing a large, incredulous crowd.  The press went wild, dubbing him the “New Jersey Jumper” and launching his career as a daredevil stuntman.

Patch's career hit a high point in October of 1829, when, as part of his east coast “Jumping Tour” he became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls. Waving to crowds assembled on both the American and Canadian sides of the Niagara River, he kissed the American flag before hurling himself one hundred and thirty feet down into the churning river.

One month later, Patch found himself poised above High Falls in upstate New York. However, this leap went terribly wrong.

Patch's body dropped like an arrow, when suddenly his legs separated and set his body spinning. As he struck the water, a terrible thwack echoed through the air. Audience members held their breath – one minute – two minutes – three minutes – but there was no sign of the daredevil. Rumors rippled through the crowd: could he be hiding in a cave at the base of the falls, poised for a triumphant reappearance? It took four months to find his corpse, frozen in a block of ice six miles downstream.

Sam Patch lived on in the American imagination as hero to a budding proletariat culture: democratic, hard-drinking, sports-obsessed, and loving of melodrama. Amidst a rapidly changing social structure, Patch's trademark phrase – "Some things can be done as well as others” – hinted at what we now call the American dream: a belief that human ingenuity can generate endless, perhaps even extravagant, possibilities.

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Imagine the Fox Point waterfront in the 1940s. Cargo ships lined up to get into crowded docks. Longshoremen bustled along the busy quays. Crowds waited to welcome packet ships bringing new immigrants and news from Cape Verde.

Many of the longshoremen who worked the docks had themselves come into this port on the packet boats.  Until the 1950s, most of the packet boats were repurposed schooners and aging whalers. Crewed by skilled seamen, these vessels made regular trips between American ports and the islands of Cape Verde off the African coast, transporting people, letters, food, and freight.

Cape Verdean immigration to Providence, and greater New England, began the early nineteenth century, when men from the islands were recruited by whaling companies looking for good seamen and inexpensive labor. By the early twentieth century, Portugal’s oppressive colonial rule of the islands, combined with drought and starvation, forced families to consider leaving Cape Verde. Many immigrants moved to Providence and New Bedford, joining family members and friends already in the United States.

The waterfront neighborhood of Fox Point, bounded to the north by Power Street, became the heart of Cape Verdean Rhode Island until the late twentieth century. Today, some Cape Verdeans still live in the area, but most were forced to relocate as urban renewal projects dramatically changed the neighborhood. Beginning in the 1950s, Brown University also bought and developed land in the neighborhood; the ensuing gentrification made it prohibitively expensive for working class families to live there.

At the same time that longtime Fox Point residents were being forced to move elsewhere, the Fox Point docks were also changing. After World War II, “containerization,” the increasing use of shipping containers, drastically decreased the numbers of jobs available on the docks. Many longshoremen actively resisted the changes. In 1971, a historic strike on the west coast shut down the ports for 130 days. The Cape Verdean longshoremen who worked in Fox Point were members of Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the first labor union in the United States founded by Cape Verdeans. Local 1329 played an important role in the national labor union and in the lives of the Cape Verdean longshoremen and their families. Ultimately, resistance to automation was not successful and by the end of the twentieth century almost ninety percent of longshoremen jobs had been lost to automation.

These docks are filled with the memories of work, change and resistance, and the journeys of people and things from Cape Verde to Providence. Though the Cape Verdean community is no longer concentrated in Fox Point, more Cape Verdeans still live in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than anywhere else except Cape Verde. Many of them still gather each year in India Point Park to celebrate the islands’ independence from Portugal on July 5th, a day filled with festivities, educational events, and food.

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He looks surprised to see her but who can blame him? Goddesses do not often descend from the heavens and communicate with humans. The goddess Liberty hands a spear to a young farmer, still holding his plow. Leave your work in the fields! Take up arms and fight for freedom! History, the future, demands it!

William Granville Hastings (1868 – 1902), an extraordinary young sculptor, designed this classical Civil War memorial, Liberty Arming the Patriot. Gorham Company of Providence cast the memorial in bronze, and it was installed in Park Place in 1897.

Below Liberty and the farmer there is a Union artillery battery, men in the heat of battle, led by Rhode Island’s General Ambrose Burnside at Antietam Bridge. And on either side, two female figures: the Scribe of History, writing on a tablet; and Eternity, identifiable by her fern.

Rhode Island would see over 25,000 men go to battle during the course of the Civil War. Moved by the troops’ service, the Rhode Island Ladies’ Soldiers’ Memorial Association worked for eleven years to raise money to build the memorial, “conducting donations, public subscriptions, and entertainments.”

Many Ladies’ Soldiers’ Memorial Associations developed during and after the Civil War to support the troops, sending clothing, nursing the wounded, raising money for “the cause”, locating the bodies of the dead, and commemorating the fallen troops. Col. Elliott F. Shepard once claimed, “They were the ladies who, if they had been men, would have been soldiers.”

William Granville Hastings was born in Surrey, England, three years after the American Civil War ended. He won awards in art school for his renaissance-style vases, and he moved to Paris, France, to apprentice with artist Jules Dalou, who was known for producing realistic figures. At the age of twenty-three, Hastings immigrated to the United States to work as a designer and sculptor for the Gorham Manufacturing Company in New York. He received the commission for Liberty Arming the Patriot five years later, in 1896.

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