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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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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Built in 1828, Dexter Asylum was a "poor farm," an institution housing the indigent, elderly, and chronically unemployed. Poor farms were common before the introduction of Social Security and welfare benefits in the United States, considered a progressive method for dealing with poverty. Their residents followed strict rules and worked for communal benefit, usually in farming, cooking, and other "industrious" endeavors.

The parcel on which the Asylum sat was formerly owned by Ebenezer Knight Dexter. Upon his death, Dexter bequeathed his land to the City of Providence, stipulating that a poor farm must be built upon it within 5 years and that it could not be sold or used for any other purpose.

Dexter's will also described the stone wall that was to surround the property: "a good permanent stone wall, at least three feet thick at the bottom, and at least eight feet high, and to be placed upon a foundation made of small stones, and as thick as the bottom of the wall and sunk two feet deep in the ground." This massive wall ended up taking eight years and more than $12,000 to construct; a report at an 1840 Town Meeting noted that the completed wall was 6,220 ½ feet long and contained 7840 cords of stone!

The Dexter Asylum's residents worked extensive vegetable fields and cared for pigs and a herd of dairy cows; they lived in a large building, strictly segregated by sex. Residents were essentially inmates, indentured for periods of six to twelve months, and could not leave the property without a ticket of permission. Their schedules and activities were determined by a committee and meticulously enforced. Bells signaled work times, meal times, and wake and sleep times. Residents could be put into solitary confinement for up to two days for swearing, and up to a week for refusing to work. Morning and evening meals centered around white bread, with the midday supper consisting of, for example, "stewed beans or peas and pork, brown bread, boiled rice and molasses."

By the early 1900s, the poor farm model was falling out of favor. The city began seeking to sell the Asylum around 1919, but due to the specific wording of Dexter's will, had to jump through decades of legal hoops to clear the land for sale. During the course of the legal proceedings, the main barn and another building burned; an Asylum employee later admitted to setting the fires.

The Dexter Asylum was sold to Brown University in 1957 for $1,000,777. The last inmate moved out that year, and a massive sale dispersed the Asylum's fixtures and furnishings. The land now houses Brown's athletic complex, with a baseball stadium's neat green grass where rows of corn and pasture once stood.

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There are a few things that Rhode Island lacks: adequate parking at the beach, pothole-free streets, and enough Del’s to go around. One thing it does not lack however is prominent figures with the last name “Brown.” To be fair, it was a Brown that co-founded Providence; it was the Brown family that helped bring the school (Rhode Island College) that would become the university to its current location; and it was a Brown that brought the father of the American Industrial Revolution, Samuel Slater, to Rhode Island. But it is often unclear who in this large and influential family was Brown University’s namesake. That would be businessman and philanthropist, Nicholas Brown, Jr. Nicholas Brown, Jr. was born in Providence on April 7, 1769, to Nicholas Brown and Rhoda (Jenckes) Brown. After graduating in 1786 from the school that would eventually bear his name, Brown entered the family mercantile business and worked under his father. Following his father’s death in 1791, the younger Brown partnered with fellow Providence businessman Thomas P. Ives, and together they formed the firm of Brown & Ives – a mercantile partnership that would become one of the longest-lived and most respected trading entities in New England of its time. The idea of a religiously-tolerant institution was conceptualized in 1762 by a Baptist Reverend, James Manning, and two years later Rhode Island College became a reality. Originally located in Warren, the school moved to Providence in 1770 with financial help from the “Brown Brothers”: Joseph, Nicholas (Sr.), John, and Moses. After his uncle, John Brown, resigned his position as treasurer of Rhode Island College in 1796, Brown, Jr. was selected to fill the vacant seat. After Brown, Jr. was elected to the seat, he donated a law library of “considerable extent and value” and paid for several works of great English literature to be added. Years later, in 1804, Brown, Jr. donated $5,000 to the school to be put towards a Rhetoric and Oratory program. Because of his generous donation, school officials renamed the institution “Brown University.” Brown University is a part of the eight-member Ivy League and one of the oldest colleges in the country.  

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Known more for his impact after death than for any particular achievement in life, Providence native Ebenezer Knight Dexter remains one of the city’s most influential figures, having bequeathed the majority of his estate to the town for the establishment of a military training ground and an almshouse for the poor.

Born in Providence on April 26, 1773, Dexter enjoyed the advantages that came with being a member of a prominent, wealthy family. His mother, Phebe Harris, and father, Colonel Knight Dexter, both had family that dated back to the original settlers of Providence, and his father was a part of the town’s business elite. In his younger years, Ebenezer acquainted himself with several prominent men, including Rhode Island Governor James Fenner, U.S. District Court Judge David Howell, and Rhode Island Senator David Howell, Jr. In addition to his successful career in real estate and trade, his connections to Rhode Island’s political elite helped him to gain the position as U.S. Marshal for Rhode Island.

Because of his success in business, Dexter was able to retire at an early age. In retirement he lived quietly, and it was not until his death in 1824 that he made his biggest impact on Providence. In his will, Dexter left the town of Providence two separate plots of land that were to be used for the benefit of those living in the area. One, a nine-acre lot on the West Side, between Cranston Street and High Street, became the Dexter Training Ground and per his wishes, was to be used as a gathering spot for townspeople and as a training site for the state militia. Notable uses of the site include the failed attack by the Dorrites during the Dorr Rebellion in 1842 (the fuse to the cannon, aimed at the state arsenal, was extinguished by mist in the air), and as the point of muster for the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored) during the Civil War in 1863.

The second plot of land that Dexter left to the town was his 40-acre Neck Farm on Providence’s East Side. Feeling “an ardent desire to ameliorate the condition of the poor, and to contribute to their comfort and relief,” Dexter wanted an institution built on the property that would aid the destitute of Providence. For 129 years, Dexter Asylum gave food, shelter, and opportunity to the city’s poorest citizens, in exchange for their labor. In 1957 the property was sold to Brown University and the buildings were demolished soon thereafter. All that remains today of Providence’s first indoor relief facility is the imposing eight-foot high, three-foot thick stone wall, built in 1832 to surround the asylum.

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“While there is life, let us act. Let not the damning sin of his murder rest upon us . . . Rhode Islanders, Americans! Have you thought of this? Are you prepared for this? Will you permit this?”

This rallying cry graced the windows of a bookstore adjacent to a coffee shop in Providence’s Market Square, thanks to a fierce Dorr supporter and bookstore owner, Abraham Herman Stillwell. A boyhood friend of Dorr’s, Stilwell was a descendant of the first English families to settle Providence and, like Dorr, a member of the elite class. From 1831 to 1867, Stillwell operated his shop, and during the Dorr Rebellion, he promoted his friend’s cause by pasting handbills in the store windows. As his granddaughter, Margaret Bingham Stillwell, later describes, “Businessmen walking down College Hill to their offices were startled to see that the southern facade of the bookshop had been turned into a bulletin board. They hurried to see what it meant. At times, they stood almost shoulder to shoulder as they read the handbills pasted on the windowpanes. Grandfather studied their faces, as for the first time they read a statement by Thomas Wilson Dorr that had not been distorted or deliberately garbled by the charter-controlled press. He had forced leading citizens to face facts.” For supporting Dorr, Stillwell apparently lost many customers but did not recant. His appeal to the authorities to release Dorr from prison in 1844 demonstrates the fervor that propelled the People’s Party:

“I appeal to you, in the name of a heart-bleeding father! -- in the name of a heart-broken mother! -- in the name of a crushed and suffering people! -- in the name of him who surrendered his liberty that others might be free! --in the name of Justice! -- and in the name of God! -- Pause not, faint not, rest not, until right is established. Undo the work of darkness. Break the bonds of Tyranny. Open the prison doors. You may do this without other than the force of Truth, without other than the force of Right, Without other than the force of Law! -- If we cannot do this, we are SLAVES.”

Later in life, when posing for a portrait, Stillwell’s likeness could not be captured in a pleasing way until the artist made mention of the Dorr War. At this reference, the painter’s “subject’s blood pressure went up, his face suffused with color, a new look of determination came into his eyes. Noticing this personality change, [the artist] kept [Stillwell] discussing politics all through the sittings, with the result that in the portrait he appears as rosy and rugged as an English country squire."

This location at 17 Canal Walk is the former location of Stillwell's bookstore.

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Prominent textile manufacturer Henry Lippitt, his wife and six children lived in this opulent Italian Renaissance Revival house, a testament to the burgeoning wealth of industrial Providence. Lippitt’s business ventures and investments proved so successful that he could afford to begin construction on the house in 1863, at height of the Civil War.

Henry Lippitt’s proclivity for the intricate processes of textile manufacturing lent itself to other areas, as well. He designed innovative systems for heating and plumbing for his new home on Hope Street that had never been used before in non-commercial buildings. Perhaps concerned that his heating system would not function as well as he imagined, Lippitt included a financial penalty in his contract with the construction company in case the heating did not work when the family took up residence in the winter of 1865.

Henry Lippitt was not the only innovator in the Lippitt family. His wife, Mary Ann (Balch) Lippitt, promoted the oralism (lip-reading) method in the education of deaf children. The Lippitt’s daughter, Jeanie, had lost her hearing at the age of four due to a bout with scarlet fever. Mary Ann Lippitt advocated high-quality education not only for Jeanie but for deaf children across the state: she founded the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, still in operation today.

The Lippitt House remained in the family for 114 years. Preserve Rhode Island now operates this National Historic Landmark as a museum.

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Success, ambition, and glamour dominate this block of Benefit Street. John Brown became wealthy from his family’s shipping business, which included privateering, the China Trade, and Triangular Trade. John, along with his brothers Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses, financed the voyage of the slave ship Sally in 1764 that proved a disastrous endeavor, both in loss of life (109 of 196 enslaved Africans died before the ship reached Jamaica), and financially (which convinced all the brothers but John to discontinue their involvement in the trade).

John Brown had this luxurious home built for his family in 1786. The family had previously lived in a townhouse across the street from his brother’s home at 50 South Main Street, which still stands today. One of the grandest in the United States, the Power Street mansions played host to presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. Washington visited in 1790 on his first tour of Rhode Island since becoming president, as he had avoided it while Rhode Island remained a hold-out on the ratification of the Constitution.

The house passed through several Brown descendants until 1901 when it was purchased by Marsden J. Perry, a utilities and transportation magnate. Perry made significant changes to the property in the spirit of colonial revival, filling the house with early American antiques as well as the most complete collection of Shakespeareana in the world. Perry reportedly wanted to acquire a particularly rare folio, and when he lost the bid, he decided to get rid of his whole collection, which became the founding collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Only two months before Washington would burn at the hands of British troops during the War of 1812, Providence would witness the destruction by fire of a major monument atop the East Side. A victim of arson, the First Congregational Church (1795) was destroyed June 14, 1814. The structure that burned was the congregation’s second church; the first was situated on the present site of the Superior Courthouse on South Main Street. An unnamed man, presumed to have suffered from mental illness, placed a lighted candle inside one of the exterior columns. Writing 72 years after the fact, historian Welcome Arnold wrote that “it was supposed that . . . [he] wished to see what kind of a sight the two steeples would make burning and falling to the ground.” Although the town offered a reward for the person responsible, they never prosecuted anyone for the crime. The church was rebuilt soon after, designed by Providence architect John Holden Greene. The Federal-style building has classical arches and urns combined with soaring pointed Gothic style windows with delicate tracery decoration. Originally the First Congregational Church, the congregation became associated with the Unitarian movement and eventually changed its name.

If the church is open, have a look inside; after taking in the spare and tasteful elegance of its interior, note the tight rectangular pews that are arranged in sequence along the ground floor and mezzanine. Spaces for contemplation and devotion? Yes, but also prime real estate in a city that was leading the Industrial Revolution and, by 1816, was well on its way toward becoming one of the most affluent cities in America. By 1910, Providence was second in the nation in terms of per-capita wealth.

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This home of Declaration-signer Stephen Hopkins (1707 – 1785) is among the oldest still standing in Rhode Island and the oldest in Providence. Hopkins lived here with his family and at least seven enslaved people in eight rooms that are now chock-full of antiques, Hopkins’ personal heirlooms, and general 18th-century objects.

Over the almost 45 years that Hopkins owned this house, at least 19 others resided there as well. Among these residents were Hopkins’ first wife Sarah and their seven children; his second wife Anne and her three children; enslaved woman Fibbo (Phoebe) and her two enslaved children Primus and Bonner Jr.; and four enslaved men St. Jago, Prince, Toney, and Adam. Quakers were among the first to speak out against slavery in the colonies. Despite mounting pressures from the Society of Friends, Hopkins emancipated only St. Jago among the people he owned, and lost his membership in the Society as a result. St. Jago went on to work as a sailor and has living descendants today.

The house played host to such luminaries as George Washington in 1776, on one of his four trips to Providence. Then-governor Nicholas Cooke wrote to Washington that “General [Nathanael] Greene [a Rhode Islander] having informed me that your Excellency proposed to set out for Providence this Day I do myself the Honor to acquaint that a House is prepared for you and your Lady.” Martha Washington did not accompany her husband to Providence, and in fact, Hopkins himself was not even present for Washington’s visit: he was at the time attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Stephen Hopkins became embroiled in the first violent act of resistance to the British Crown in the colonies during the infamous Gaspee Affair, which predates the Boston Tea Party by a year. Serving as Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court in 1772, Hopkins was strongly encouraged to make known the names of the men who had set fire to the British customs ship The Gaspee and kidnapped its captain, Lieut. Dudingston. The Crown wanted Hopkins to provide “a full and particular account of all the proceedings had and done by him for discovering and bringing to justice the persons who committed the aforesaid offence.” Hopkins promised to do so “without loss time.” Though he may have agreed to investigate the “offence,” Hopkins, a staunch patriot, apparently had no intention of doing so, as there is no record of any such written account.

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If the walls of University Hall could talk, they might tell you about the time they met George Washington (although don’t believe them if they tell you he slept here). The first building constructed on Brown’s campus, University Hall, has played host to wounded soldiers during the Revolutionary War as well as our nation’s first president, during his visit to Rhode Island in 1790. The Providence Gazette reported that despite Washington’s habit of not going out in the evening, he made his way from his lodging at the Golden Ball Inn to University Hall to accept the invitation of Brown University undergraduates. In a patriotic display, students outfitted each of the Hall’s windows with candles aglow.

Renowned for “The Brown Curriculum,” an innovative approach to undergraduate education instituted in 1970, Brown University’s philosophy states that students, who are free to design their own curriculum, are “the architects of their own course of study.” Founded in 1764 by Baptists as the College of Rhode Island, the school moved to Providence in 1770. The institution changed its name to “Brown University” in 1804 after a generous donation by Nicholas Brown, prominent Providence businessman and alumnus of the school.

With over 250 years of history under its belt, Brown University understandably boasts many styles of architecture. One of the most noticeable structures on campus is the Carrie Tower (1904). Paul Bajnotti commissioned the tower to honor the memory of his wife, Caroline Mathilde Brown, grandaughter of Nicholas Brown, Brown University’s namesake.

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In the mood for a seance? If you were a member of the cultural elite in 19th-century Providence, all signs would have pointed to yes. East Side artists and intellectuals attended seances held in private homes, which also played host to literary salons that engaged with the hot topics of the day. These topics included Spiritualism, which had given rise to the mania for seances, and Transcendentalism, the philosophical movement that advocated for the inherent goodness of man and nature. Today we associate Transcendentalism most readily with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts, but Rhode Island had its share of luminaries involved in the movement, including Margaret Fuller and Sarah Helen Whitman. Margaret Fuller, journalist, educator, and advocate for women’s rights, briefly took up residence as a teacher in Providence’s Greene Street School. Whitman, born and bred in the city, associated in Fuller’s circle and was a well-known poet. Fuller, Whitman, and many other artists and writers would often gather in what quickly became a 19th-century cultural hub of Providence: the Athenaeum on Benefit Street.

 This Greek Revival-style library generated more than just abstract ideas and elevated conversation: love blossomed here between two writers. Having spotted her first in a rose garden and where he fell madly in love, Edgar Allen Poe courted Sarah Helen Whitman in the Athenaeum in 1845. Their courtship was short-lived, however: Whitman called off their engagement in 1848 when Poe’s sobriety came into question.

 In the next century, Providence inspired the work of another creative writer, H.P. Lovecraft, who set his novel “The Shunned House” (1924) in a colonial house down the street from the Athenaeum, at 135 Benefit Street.

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As you stroll the streets of the East Side, pay attention to the street signs: many of the streets you pass bear witness to some of the significant people and structures that have come and gone, making and remaking the city. Power Street, for example, runs the property line of 17th-century original resident Nicholas Power. Meeting Street, once known as Gaol Lane, was the site of Providence’s early jail. And Transit and Planet Streets commemorate perhaps the first worldwide scientific collaboration: the 1769 observation of the transit of Venus, organized by Joseph Brown, one of the four prominent Brown brothers of Providence, and an early astronomer and architect.

Among these other scientific pursuits, Joseph Brown designed the Market House (1775), which he intended as a magnificent landmark to the wealth of the colonial city at the heart of the bustling waterfront. The ground-level arcades originally provided open stalls for fishmongers, butchers, and produce vendors, while the upper floor housed government functions. A Masonic Hall occupied the third floor, added in 1797. During the 19th century, Market House served as City Hall during a 30-year debate (1845-75) over the construction of a new City Hall. It has housed classrooms for RISD since the 1950s. Market Square, always a site for news, gossip, and shopping, was the site of a colonial tax protest against the British on March 2, 1775 when the people of Providence burned tea. On September 7, 1897, Emma Goldman, a noted anarchist and feminist, was arrested for unlawful “open air speaking” and charged with attracting a crowd in Market Square. Nowadays you are more likely to encounter a RISD student’s art installation.

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The Rhode Island School of Design, most commonly known by its acronym RISD, is an internationally acclaimed leader in art and design education. Established in 1877 by 34 members of the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission, the school embarked on a radical experiment in education: combining the study of art, craft, and design, from sculpture and textiles to furniture making and glass production. The red brick Waterman Building (1893) is a Venetian Renaissance landmark that was built to house art galleries, classrooms, and studios. At the base of the hill is the Metcalf Building (1915), created to look and function as a textile factory to teach students about the practical manufacture of fabrics, as well as their design. RISD offers more than a traditional fine arts school education, with an emphasis on creative thinking, industrial design, and superior craftsmanship. RISD’s campus, which began alongside the Brown University campus on College Hill has since expanded into Providence’s downtown area.

Founded in 1877 (the same year as the school), the RISD Museum boasts one of the country’s finest collections of art from across many cultures, time periods, and media, from ancient Egyptian artifacts and early American decorative arts to French Impressionist paintings and cutting edge film and video. The museum supports the school’s original focus on industrial arts education in many forms from textiles to jewelry design. The museum’s groundbreaking exhibitions, educational outreach, and extensive public programs continue to form the foundation of a thriving creative culture in the city of Providence and beyond.

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As the population of the East Side grew in the 18th century, residences sprang up quickly along Benefit Street. Intended for “the common benefit of all,” Benefit Street encouraged the construction of homes higher on the ridge of modern-day College Hill while still remaining within existing property limits. This was possible because of the very narrow, but long, plots that Roger Williams designated for the new community of Providence in 1636. These plots began at the edge of the Great Salt River and Cove, and extended up the hill. Colonists typically used the higher land to plant fruit orchards and graze livestock. Unlike many other New England towns, the Providence settlement faced the waterway, rather than surrounding a meeting house. The emphasis on religious liberty explains this choice: since colonial authorities in Rhode Island could not force men and women to worship, the Church did not serve as the center of the community, literally or figuratively.

This unique orientation of the settlement did not mean, however, that Providence townspeople did not worship. Most did so, and they first used private homes before a meeting house was constructed to better serve the religious needs of the community. Roger Williams founded the first Baptist congregation in the U.S. in 1638. In 1775, while Providence enjoyed economic success, the Baptists made a new and bold move in erecting this magnificent building, the First Baptist Church. The largest surviving wooden structure from Colonial America, it combines the simple hall of a traditional New England meeting house with the most fashionable English architectural features, such as the steeple, modeled after a version of the one at St. Martin in the Fields (1724), on Trafalgar Square in London, by architect James Gibbs. Brown University, founded as a Baptist college, has held its annual commencement in the church every year since 1776.

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Providence’s tightly-knit community of artists and collectors created the Providence Art Club to congregate, create, and display art. It is the second oldest art club in the country after the Salmagundi Club in New York City. The westernmost of the club’s four buildings is the Fleur-de-Lys Studio (1885), built by Sydney Burleigh as workspace for himself and fellow club artists. Designated a National Historic Landmark, the studio is a masterpiece of Arts and Crafts architecture with finely rendered detail. On the street level corner is inscribed the phrase “Fair among the Fairest.” Not everybody appreciated this building; H.P. Lovecraft found it so revolting that he set his horror story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) there.

Among the founders of the Providence Art Club was Edward Mitchell Bannister, a celebrated African American landscape painter. Bannister’s work Under The Oaks earned him first prize at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, although he had to overcome prevalent racist attitudes. Bannister discovered from a newspaper that he had won the prize, and when he arrived at the gallery to claim it, the clerk demanded to know “what it was to [him].” Bannister later wrote: “In an instant, my blood was up: the looks that passed between him and others in the room were unmistakable. I was not an artist to them, simply an inquisitive colored man; controlling myself, I said deliberately, ‘I am interested in the report that Under The Oaks has received; I painted the picture.’ An explosion could not have made a more marked impression. Without hesitation he apologized, and soon everyone in the room was bowing and scraping to me.”

Bannister’s wife, Christiana Bannister, is historically significant in her own right. An entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “hair doctress,” Bannister ran successful hair salons in Boston and downtown Providence which allowed her husband to pursue his art career.

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Rhode Island is perhaps inordinately proud of its superlatives and firsts: first to establish religious freedom, first to rebel against the British crown, longest hold-out before ratifying the newly minted Constitution.  And, in the 20th century, Rhode Island grabbed the title of longest workers’ strike in the US. Brown and Sharpe, once headquartered here, holds that dubious honor. The strike began in 1981 and lasted through the late 1990s. The strike is only one of many significant moments in the storied history of Brown and Sharpe, which began operations in 1833 on South Main Street in Providence.

Joseph Brown, clockmaker and mechanical designer joined forces with savvy businessman Lucian Sharpe, and the wildly successful Brown and Sharpe company took off, revolutionizing the machine-tool industry. Manufacturing everything from the Wilcox and Gibbs game-changing sewing machine to the machine that produced Shredded Wheat cereal to the universal grinding machine that created an effortless spin of a car’s wheels, Brown and Sharpe had an immeasurable impact on the daily lives of Americans for two centuries.

Gorham Manufacturing Company, which also formerly operated in this area, had an equally transformative influence on Rhode Island and beyond. A behemoth in the world of silver manufacturing, Gorham produced high-quality goods, including flatware, dishware, decorative objects, and statues in both silver and bronze, beginning in 1831 and continuing to today.

In addition to Brown and Sharpe and Gorham Manufacturing Company, the buildings along Steeple Street are the former homes to other sites of industry and innovation: a jewelry factory and the restaurant Al Forno, which invented wood-grilled pizza.

These buildings are testaments to Providence as an early powerhouse of American industry. They preserve the scale and density of buildings in this commercial area before 20th century demolitions created the open spaces of the surrounding parking lots.

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Rhode Island had one of the earliest public education systems in the country, housed in this building beginning in 1800. The structure today is home to the Providence Preservation Society, formed in 1956. PPS leased the old schoolhouse from the city for its headquarters in 1960 and undertook its restoration.

The Providence Preservation Society grew out of the urgent need to rescue eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings in the College Hill area of Providence’s East Side from demolition. The College Hill Study of 1959, sponsored by PPS, the City of Providence, and the Housing and Home Finance Agency, was an early example of urban revitalization using preservation and rehabilitation rather than demolition and redevelopment. PPS has saved the historic character of whole neighborhoods and has grown into a citywide advocate for preservation.

Since 1958, PPS has offered the Festival of Historic Houses, which gives the public a behind-the-scenes look at the interiors of some of the city’s most architecturally and culturally interesting residences and buildings. PPS also publishes the annual Most Endangered Properties List to raise public awareness of the threat to the city’s architectural heritage. One success story is that of the Fox Point Bath House on Wickenden Street. The Bath House was constructed in 1926 in a move to provide bathing facilities to areas of the city without indoor plumbing. The bathhouse was used as a library in the 1950s and 60s, but fell into disuse in the 1970s. Facing vandalism, infestation, and other signs of decay, the building made PPS’s Most Endangered Buildings List in 1998, 1999, 2002, and 2003. Thanks to efforts by community preservationists and city officials, the Bath House was restored and is now used as an elementary school library.

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Providence began as a sleepy farming village along the Great Salt Cove and The Great Salt River (the Providence River, today). It stayed that way into the eighteenth century, even while seaports like Newport amassed incredible wealth through the triangular trade which leveraged the sale and labor of enslaved Africans for massive profits. While Newport’s economy declined after the Revolutionary War, Providence’s fortunes turned around thanks in part to successes in the China Trade by men like John Brown. Brown even oversaw the enlargement of India Point to increase the surface area of the port to allow for more wharves–and bigger profits. Sumptuous goods from faraway lands made their way to Providence, which was quickly becoming a cosmopolitan 18th-century hotspot. Spices and silks from the East Indies were hoisted off of ships and trucked up the hill, dotting storefronts along the harbor. The distinctive smells from chocolate and paper mills and spermaceti candleworks permeated the air. As Providence became a burgeoning industrial powerhouse in the nineteenth century, the Great Salt Cove had to yield to progress and its ensuing infrastructure. By 1898 the Cove was filled in and covered with train tracks and commercial and manufacturing buildings. 

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A visionary and independent thinker, Roger Williams (c. 1603 – 1683) was warned by the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts Bay Colony to refrain from spreading his “new and dangerous opinions.” Williams’s “opinions” did not sit well with many of his neighbors for several reasons. First, he believed that “Natives are the true owners” of the land in the New World. Williams had made a point to learn Native languages and cultivate strong relationships with the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and the Narragansett sachem Canonicus, and he accused colonists of making unfair deals with the Wampanoags and Narragansetts in order to acquire their lands. Second, Williams took issue with the Puritans’ insistence on forcing community members to worship. He believed that a person’s faith should not be a matter of the state and that he/she should not be persecuted for it. When Williams refused to back down, the authorities in Massachusetts Bay ordered him to leave the colony.

Banished and alone in the dead of winter, Williams made his way through Plymouth Colony and, in 1636, he eventually settled on land given to him by the Natives he had befriended. Grateful for his good fortune, he named the place “Providence”, believing that God’s providence had led him to this spot. There, joined by a group of followers from Massachusetts Bay, Williams founded a community where all could think, worship, and act in accordance with their own conscience without fear of persecution by the government. This spiritual and intellectual haven to some was considered a hotbed of heresy to others.

Congress authorized the creation of the National Memorial on the site in 1965, and the 4.5-acre park opened to the public in the 1980s.

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At the crest of Smith Hill, once pastureland for a sleepy colonial town, sits a marble giant, the Rhode Island State House. Designed by the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, responsible for the design of the Boston Public Library (1895) and renovations to the White House (1902), the domed building fitted in white Georgia marble was built (1895-1904) during a period of industrial prosperity for Rhode Island. In fact, thanks to the successes of textile, machine-tool, and jewelry manufacturing, to name only a few, Rhode Island emerged as one of the most prosperous states in the nation at the turn of the twentieth century. The State House stands as a testament to that wealth.

Inside the State House, a Royal Charter Museum showcases the Colonial Charter granted in 1663 by King Charles II of England. The Charter represents the first official sanctioning by a monarch of a colony that guaranteed religious liberty. In addition to the Charter, the Museum also displays materials that tell the fraught story of early relations between Rhode Island’s indigenous people, the Narragansetts, and English colonists. These materials include the original deed to Providence secured by Roger Williams and signed by Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomo. Thanks to his friendship with the Narragansett leaders, Williams would claim that, unlike other colonial land deals, “It was not price or money that could have purchased Rhode Island. Rhode Island was purchased by love.” Many assume that the statue atop the State House dome depicts Williams. However, the gold-covered bronze figure actually represents Rhode Island's Independent Man, embodying the spirit of freedom of thought and action that Williams espoused.

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