Grace Lee Boggs was an activist for equality and labor justice, working with her husband James Boggs in Detroit, and reached a global community with their campaign for workers' rights and understanding across racial and ethnic boundaries.

Boggs was born over her father's Westminster Street Chinese restaurant, Chin Lee, in 1915. Her father had immigrated from China, first to the West Coast and finally to Providence, where he became a successful restaurant entrepreneur, connected to the Chinese commercial community in Rhode Island and in his home country. The family lived on Somerset Street in South Providence for a number of years before moving to New York City, where another Chin Lee Restaurant was opened. Despite the family's financial success, young Grace felt the sting of racism and sexism growing up.

Grace attended Barnard College and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. She lived and worked as a labor and civil rights activist in Chicago, New York, and finally Detroit, where she met and married auto worker and labor leader James Boggs. Her life was spent advocating for workers rights, critiquing the capitalist economic system, and working for interracial and cultural understanding. Grace died in 2015 in Detroit.

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Arshile Gorky was a significant Surrealist painter and a father of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. He was a refugee from Armenia in 1919, where Turkish forces engaged in a mass genocide of the Armenian people.

Gorky, originally named Vosdanig Adoian, was born in Armenia around 1902. His father and half-brother immigrated to Providence around 1908, while Gorky, his mother, and sister remained in Armenia. In 1915, the three Adoians fled Van in Armenia as a Turkish siege threatened mass murder. After years of living as refugees, Gorky's mother died of starvation in 1919. Gorky and his sister, with the assistance of family friends, fled to America. For a number of years, Gorky lived on Pond Street with his father and half-brother. He worked in a factory on Elmwood Avenue while attending the Old Beacon Street School, then the Samuel Bridgham Middle School, and ultimately the Technical High School. Gorky moved to his sister's in Watertown, Massachusetts before eventually settling in New York City, where he studied and taught drawing and painting. Gorky became a practitioner of Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s and was a father of the American Abstract Expressionist movement.

Tragically, plagued by the turmoil and upheavals of his life, Gorky committed suicide in 1948.

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In 1800, Providence had about 7,000 people. By 1900, the city was bursting with over 175,000 and still growing. The downtown commercial district, once centered on a stretch of North Main Street by the Market House, now extended across the Providence River and dominated Westminster and Weybosset Streets. The old wood-frame and Federal-style homes were replaced by brick and stone business blocks. Cathedral Square, which had been lined with handsome residences, had become commercial, too, as the trolley lines opened new fashionable neighborhoods to the west and south.

Entertainment as a form of commerce had grown along with industry and a larger laboring and middle class. After the Civil War, there were resorts like the Sans Souci Gardens near the intersection of Broadway and Jackson Streets where you could see comedic operettas like Little Lord Fauntleroy. The Academy of Music and Howard Hall served as assembly spaces and entertainment venues--featuring the singers of the Pond Street Baptist Church, the African-American singing sensation the Hyers Sisters, and political speakers like Frederick Douglass. Soon "museums" and nickel theaters sprang up around the intersection of Westminster and Mathewson Streets.

Entertainment impresario Colonel Felix Wendelschaefer had been the manager of the Providence Opera House, but he also saw opportunity in the city's westward growth. In partnership with Charles Allen, who had run the Star Theatre in the old High Street Congregational Church for a season, the Colonel opened the Imperial Theatre in 1902 with a gala performance by the Four Cohans to a sold-out house. The luxurious theatre interior was described as Italian Renaissance. The upper floors of the building were dedicated to bachelor apartments, also reported to be the most well-appointed in the city.

However, it turned out to not be easy to draw crowds up the hill to the Imperial. Within a few years, the theatre converted to vaudeville. One neighbor of the theatre was the Women's Political Equality League, who in 1915, protested the vulgar burlesque being offered in the theatre, now dubbed the Colonial. Public boxing exhibitions, too, were banned at the theatre by the police commissioner, another sign of the friction around morals and entertainment in the city.

By the 1930s, Providence had entered a slow and painful decline. The theater became seedier, a true "scratch house," a place where you scratched yourself from the fleas jumping off the seats. The apartments became the Del Mar and police reports reflected the change in clientele. After World War II, as the city's decline accelerated, the theatre ended up as an abandoned ruin sitting next to the Grace and Hope Mission. No clearer example of the changes in the city's fortune can be found.

The building was taken down in the late 1960s as part of I.M. Pei's plan for the redevelopment of the Weybosset Hill area, including Cathedral Square, thus adding another layer in the life of the city.

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In 1889, the Young Men's Christian Association opened a grand new Romanesque Revival building on a prominent corner of Westminster Street in Cathedral Square. The building contained a gymnasium, auditorium, classrooms, libraries, parlors, and reception areas. The Y, which had been formed in 1853, the second in the United States, had been born out of anxieties around industrialization and urbanization. Young men coming from the country were vulnerable to the temptations of the corrupt city, so a group of evangelical churches created a space for white Christian men. In the 35 years from the creation of the YMCA to the construction of this grand new building, the organization adapted--and would continue to adapt--to the changing needs of the growing city. The YMCA had been formed to provide moral instruction, but this new Y also offered professional and language classes, skills training, an employment bureau, as well as a gymnasium. The library was open to all--men and women--as were the lectures and events. Over time, the organization opened its doors wider, dropping its religious requirements. Confronted with accusations of racism and segregation around World War I, the Providence YMCA affirmed that its open-to-all policy included Black residents of the city.

Similarly, an evangelical Christian organization for women was established in 1867, initially focusing on boarding houses for single women who worked in the city. The Young Women's Christian Association, along with a similar organization that was formed in 1889, the Providence Evangelical Young Women's Christian Association (the two merged in 1902), also offered lectures and classes, including some focused on technical skills like telegraphy, typewriting, and stenography. In 1906, the YWCA opened a brick building on the corner of Jackson and Washington Streets, which still stands today, offering more rooms for women to meet the continuing demand for good housing. A YWCA gymnasium was opened on the top floor of the Columbia Bicycle Building on Snow Street in 1898.

As the city's population peaked at close to 250,000 around World War I, both organizations continued to expand and adapt. Unfortunately, the grand YMCA building was obsolete within 25 years. The Stone, Carpenter and Willson building was demolished to make way for an office block in the transformed square. A new, larger building with accommodations was built on Broad Street, where it still stands today, now adapted to providing support and services to the city's homeless. Both the YMCA and YWCA today focus on mind, body, and spirit. Each organization also focuses on social justice and open doors, reflecting the evolution of these organizations as well as the city and communities they serve.

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In September 1878, a "magnificent" new high school was dedicated on Pond Street from plans made by prominent Providence architect William H. Walker. The old high school at Benefit and Waterman Streets had been overcrowded for years. The expansion of the school system--both the number of students served and the buildings that served them--was one of Mayor Thomas Doyle's major achievements during his eighteen years as mayor. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th Century, the city had always played catch-up to its exploding student population and the complex needs of its diverse, global youth.

The public school system around 1878 included one high school, eleven grammar schools, thirty-five intermediate schools, and forty primary schools, serving over 12,000 students, both boys and girls as well as Black and white. See Maritcha Lyons' story about the integration of the public school system in 1866. Mayor Doyle's sister, Sarah Doyle, was principal of the girls' department of the high school and an important advocate in the fight for equal education for women.

The battle over public education in Rhode Island had been fought for centuries already. Town leaders in the 17th Century struggled with creating a common school and how to pay for it. Under pressure in 1800 from newly influential groups like the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, the General Assembly created a state-financed public school system, but reversed course in 1803 in a conservative backlash. Providence had to fund its public school system independently until the state passed a new public education law in 1828.

A schoolhouse was first built on Pond Street in 1819. This stretch of the street became a focal point for city schools, with a grammar school first, then the English High School (1878), the Manual Training High School (1892), Classical High School (1897), and Central High School (1921). This concentration led to the redevelopment of the school campuses in the late 1960s. Most of the old schools were demolished, including the English High School, to make way for new, modern school buildings and a more campus-like feel, with playing fields and open space.

Today's Providence school system comprises 41 schools serving over 24,000 students who speak 55 different languages and trace culture and heritages to 91 countries. Providence still struggles to provide the basics of an education for its young people. The challenges of defining what a public education means also remain as complex and controversial as they were over two hundred years ago.

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Eva Belle Clemence lived and worked in Providence as an independent artist, a difficult space for a woman to find success in early 20th-Century America.

Clemence was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1869, but her father Martin was from Rhode Island, tracing his lineage back to 17th-Century Providence. He had made a career as an actor, but ill health forced him to give up acting and take up graining, a popular faux finishing treatment in many 19th-Century homes. He had encouraged his daughter to act as well, and she was remembered for her childhood roles in stage plays like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Rip Van Winkle, and William Tell. Like her father, Eva Belle gave up acting and eventually took up painting.

In a profile from 1913, Eva remembered a family friend showing her how to paint flowers on porcelain, something she excelled at and which became a focal point of her career. She painted Colonial clock faces, belt buckles, hair pins, even rocks. Recognizing the difference between work as a commercial artist versus the fine arts, she said she didn't have time for headaches. She was a member of the Providence Art Club, the Providence Watercolor Club, the Handicraft Club and the Basement Studio Group.

In 1913, at the age of 44, Eva married John P. Evans. When Central High School was being built, her family home at 17 Spring Street was purchased by the city and demolished. Eva Belle and John moved to boarding houses and later an apartment on Providence Street. She died in 1947.

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In the summer of 1840, Perry Davis was sick. Physically, debilitatingly sick. His businesses had failed, one after another. His family was living in penury. He had, however, an enterprising spirit and creative mind. He concocted a combination of opiates, ethyl alcohol, and herbs, and miraculously, he felt better. He dubbed the tonic "Perry Davis' Vegetable Pain-Killer" and even trademarked the term, which we still use today. He began hobbling from door to door, walking as far as Boston to share his new miracle drug. Not surprisingly, a mixture of highly addictive narcotics and alcohol found its market. Davis' Pain-Killer was the beginning of a phenomenon of patent medicines and tonics in the 19th century. Davis moved his family and his manufactory to Pond Street and became one of Providence's wealthiest and most philanthropic citizens.

Davis' elixir travelled the globe, becoming one of the first global brands. He was a devout Baptist and interestingly a life-long temperance advocate. He sent free cases of his "medicine" to Baptist missions around the world and dubbed himself Dr. Davis. His product was promoted door-to-door, in pharmacies and apothecaries, and in newspapers, magazines, and trade cards. The Pain-Killer was one of the first medicines to not address a specific ailment, but to promise freedom from pain, any type of pain. Ague-wracked sailors, injured mill women, gouty fathers, female complaints, babies' scratches or colic, all could be cured with the Pain-Killer. Davis said it was a medicine cabinet in a bottle, and trade cards showed winged cherubs carrying the elixir next to the words "Joy to the World." At the time of Davis' death in 1862, during the Civil War, the Pain-Killer was so crucial to the Union Army that they took control of the factory on Pond Street.

While making a fortune from his product, Davis engaged in city politics. He built a handsome brick church at the corner of Stewart and Pond Street. His own brick mansion stood beside the church. His son Edmund, richer still, built an extravagant brick mansion right on Westminster Street near the factory. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 began to limit the availability of patent medicines, but Davis' tonic continued to be sold into the 1940s.

Today, only images and paper ephemera of Perry Davis' life remain to help us understand the contradictions of this world and the judgments we might make about a man whose fortune was built on the fleeting promise of an escape from pain.

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Providence's population grew at an extraordinary rate throughout the 19th Century, from about 50,000 in 1850 to 175,000 in 1900, driven by the region's ever-expanding industrial complex. Providence was at the heart of New England's industrial boom--that boom was started and maintained by the production of cotton and woolen cloth.

No titans sat higher on the apex of industry than Benjamin Brayton Knight and his brother Robert. Irish, Italian, and other immigrants of the 19th Century provided the labor that created the spectacular wealth of these two men. Here on this corner bordering the interstate is where B.B. Knight built his showplace around 1861: a mansion in the French style with a high mansard roof, expansive gardens, and a brick carriage house with greenhouses behind it. The service buildings sat on a narrow alleyway called Angle Street, which was also a center of African-American community in this neighborhood. Just a few yards down Broad was Hoyle Street, one of the most impoverished enclaves of Irish immigrants in the city. These strong contrasts reflected the reality of urban life in 19th Century Providence: wealthy, working class, and poor, living shoulder to shoulder.

Benjamin Knight and his brother Robert grew up on a farm in Cranston; both went into business at a young age. Benjamin in dry goods, while Robert began working in the mills he would later own. Well-connected, the brothers were able to leverage capital and opportunity to expand their business interests. Their partnership B.B. & R. Knight was formed in 1849 with the purchase of the Pontiac Mill. During the Panic of 1873, a catastrophic economic crisis on a scale of the Great Depression, the once-wealthy Sprague family lost their textile mill empire to bankruptcy, and the Knight brothers scooped up more properties, becoming one of the largest mill combines in the world.

At the time of Benjamin's death in 1898, the firm owned 21 cotton mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, housing a total of 11,000 looms, 400,000 spindles, and employing close to 7,000 people. They also owned fifteen mill villages where housing and goods for sale were owned and managed by the company. Many of these mills employed the new arrivals to this country, and in Knight's own mansion, young Irish women worked as servants as they struggled to gain their footing in a new and confusing world.

After the turn of the century, New England mills entered a period of decline, and after Robert and Benjamin's deaths, the business was broken up. But, their signature brand "Fruit of the Loom" still exists. Knight's extravagant mansion, a monument to the wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a single person, was demolished in 1915 to make way for a car dealership, which too met the wrecking ball when the neighborhood was bulldozed for the interstate in the late 1950s.

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Maritcha Lyons was an African-American teacher, writer, and activist who testified before the General Assembly as a 16-year-old girl to desegregate the Providence Public School System. In 1869, she was the first African-American to graduate from Providence High School.

Lyons was born in New York City in 1848. During the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, Black people, homes and businesses were targeted and attacked, including Maritcha's family. The Lyons fled the city, ultimately resettling in Providence. Her father made and sold ice cream and other frozen desserts and her mother was a hairdresser. They lived at 16 B Street, two doors down from the celebrated painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and his wife, Christina Bannister, also a successful hairdresser and activist. The Providence public school system was segregated at the time, and there was no high school for students of color. Black community leaders like George T. Downing had petitioned for equal access to the city's schools for years, but the requests did not gain traction until the end of the Civil War. Because of her testimony, Maritcha became the first African-American graduate of Providence High School in 1869. She went on to become a civic leader, educator, writer, and activist in Brooklyn, New York. Lyons supported African-American anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells and co-founded the White Rose Mission in Brooklyn, New York, an organization that offered support to Black immigrants from the South and West Indies.

Maritcha Lyons died in Brooklyn in 1929.

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The Second Free Will Baptist Church (SFWBC) is one of the oldest Black congregations in Providence, formed around 1830 by a group who left the African Union Meeting House, itself formed from the departure of African-American congregants from the white-dominated First Baptist Church in 1819. By the early 1840s, the SFWBC had a church on the west side of the growing city, and in 1842, a new church building was erected at the corner of Pond and Angle Streets, where it would remain for over one hundred years. From its origins, church members were politically active, choosing to join the Free Will denomination because of its opposition to slavery rather than the Baptist convention, which countenanced bondage at that time.

From 1846 until the Civil War, Reverend Edward Scott, himself a man who escaped slavery in Virginia, led the congregation and organized annual Emancipation Day parades to agitate for abolition in this country. Reverend Scott also led the community in action to advocate for equal rights for people of color. Another notable congregant included Sissieretta Jones, the most famous African-American soprano of the late 19th Century, singing at the White House and Carnegie Hall as well as internationally. The activism of the church continued into the 20th Century with pastors like the Reverend Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, an educator, college president, and political activist. Congressman Joseph E. Newsome was also a member of the church, chair of the Board of Trustees, and church organist. While attending a conference in Ivory Coast, Newsome learned of the struggle of Liberian students in the midst of civil war and organized an exchange program that brought many Liberian students to Providence. Many of those students became residents of Providence and members of the church. They continue the church's tradition of providing a haven for immigrants and refugees in a dangerous world.

When the city announced in the early 1960s that it would purchase and demolish the church's home on Stewart Street, the congregation entered a period of crisis and uncertainty. Deacon Ralph Simmons was among those who chose to keep the congregation together and build a new home on Chester Avenue in South Providence. Deacon Simmons is the living memory of the church. He joined the congregation in the 1940s and has been gathering, preserving, and sharing the church's history since that time.

Today, the church building contains the pews and old woodwork of their former home on Stewart Street and embodies a long tradition of activism, community, and welcome.

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I want to thank Deacon Ralph Simmons for his hard work over many years gathering and preserving the archives of the church and for his generosity in sharing that work.

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During the early 19th Century, textile mills, like Grant Mill in the city of Providence, were being built across Rhode Island. The textile industry required hands to work the many machines that produced the new wealth, and Providence’s population grew dramatically with this industrial expansion. From 7,000 inhabitants around 1800, the city had near 20,000 in 1835 and 50,000 in 1860--seven times the 1800 population in three generations.

The pull of the new industries drew people from not just local and regional farms and towns, but from across oceans too. A new wave of immigrants began to pour into Rhode Island in the 1820s, first to build canals and railroads, and later to labor in the mills. This wave was drawn largely from Ireland, reaching a peak during the Irish Famine of the 1840s. In 1860, about 10,000 (or 20%) of the inhabitants of Providence had been born in Ireland. When American-born children of Irish immigrants are included, they made up about 40% of the total population of the city, a radical transformation.

Back in the 1830s, when there were only a few hundred Irish families in Providence, the first Catholic parish in the city was organized to serve the spiritual needs of these new arrivals. Father John Corry, an Irish immigrant himself, was appointed parish priest and began to look for a site to build a church. He found it impossible to buy a plot of land himself. Protestant-dominated Providence did not want to sell land for a Catholic church. Prejudice against Catholicism--and Irish immigrants in particular--was widespread. Francis Hye, one of the few Irish arrivals to become a citizen at the time, was able to purchase a plot along High Street where the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul stands today. He bought the land from Isaac Mathewson in Duty Greene’s store near Hoyle Square, today’s Canonicus Square. When Mathewson learned that Hye intended to transfer the land to the Catholic diocese, the story goes, he offered to buy back the lot at a significant premium, but Corry refused, realizing the value of the land and its position in the westward growing city.

The first Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul--the first Catholic parish in the city serving these new immigrants from Ireland--was dedicated in 1838. In 1872, when Rhode Island was elevated to a Catholic diocese, the newly appointed bishop planned a grand new cathedral to serve the ever-expanding Catholic population of the city. The Cathedral became a monument to the Irish Catholic experience in Providence, facing hostility and prejudice, but ultimately reweaving the fabric of the city to become central to its civic life.

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I want to thank Diocesan Historian Reverend Robert Hayman for his hard work assembling a history of the Catholic Church in Rhode Island and his generosity in sharing that work.

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While redevelopment often erases a city's past, the constant re-building of a city over time also leads to the loss of historical memory. One such site is 755 Westminster Street, a historic building from 1899, which replaced the High Street Congregational Church originally built in 1835.

In the 1830s, Providence was still in the first phase of industrial expansion, growing from less than 7,000 people around 1800 to almost 20,000 by the mid-1830s. At the time, churches were often at the center of people's lives and informed how they understood their place in the world.

Congregationalism is a Protestant sect that still exists today and was born out of the Puritan faith brought to this area with the English immigrants of the 17th Century. By the 1830s, Congregationalists were one of the leading faiths in Providence, along with Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists: all Protestants. The Second Great Awakening, a religious movement that was spurred--in part--by anxiety around changes in society caused by industrialization, revitalized religious life in the early 19th Century. At the time, many churches focused not just on an afterlife, but on reforming the living world through moral practice and belief. They often supported the education of women, the strict observance of the Sabbath day, total abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and notably, the abolition of slavery.

While the economic expansion of Providence was tied to the cotton produced by enslaved people in the South, that expansion also reshaped society and produced social movements that targeted the roots of those changes. Many Protestant sects, following the early moral leadership of the Quakers, became staunchly anti-slavery. In 1836, this movement gathered itself for the first meeting of a statewide organization dedicated to the abolition of slavery. They met at the High Street Congregational Church, newly built on this site. Over 200 people gathered here for speeches and lectures and famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison made an appearance.

The Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society continued to agitate for the end of slavery until after the Civil War when the U.S. Constitution was amended to abolish it. After the war, the High Street Church reorganized, and the building became the home of the State Normal School, a teachers' college that eventually became Rhode Island College. For a short time in the 1890s, the church was the Star Theatre, which burned in 1899 and was replaced by the brick business block that still stands at 755 Westminster Street...another layer in the evolution of the ever-changing city.

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The redevelopment of Cathedral Square in the late 1960s left few traces of what this busy city intersection once was. One of those remaining traces is the Arnold-Palmer house, moved in 1967 through the prescient preservation efforts of the Beneficent Congregational Church, to its current location at the corner of Pine and Chestnut Streets.

When the house was built, Cathedral Square was changing from a place where farmers weighed their produce on a hay scale to a posh residential district. The local economy had been transformed by the rise of finance and industry in New England. The need for labor drove immigration. All the new people and new jobs created new markets. The newly wealthy from this economic expansion were merchants and mill owners who built fine brick homes like the Arnold-Palmer House.

Daniel Arnold did well in the economic expansion of the 1820s and 30s. His trade focused on flour, but he speculated in cotton as well, as did almost all of the merchants who built their homes in the square at this time. Around 1830, five Federal-style brick mansions were built in a row on the north side of the square. Architectural historian Norman Isham has attributed these residences to skilled and prolific Providence builder John Holden Greene, whose signature monitor roof and fine craftsmanship argue for this attribution. Another merchant, Orray Taft, built his house at the corner of Jackson Street. His business focused almost exclusively on the cotton trade with Southern ports like Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. Emma Taft, Orray's daughter, remembered that her father had spent his early business years in Savannah where he had met Greene, who was there to build a church.

Connections between Southern cotton ports and businessmen like Taft and Arnold--as well as architects like Greene--demonstrate how tightly bound Rhode Island's industrial economy was with Southern cotton and the enslaved people who produced it. Those ties would remain as long as there were cotton mills in Rhode Island.

By the 1850s, Arnold's house was sold to Joseph Palmer, who, through the firm of Palmer & Capron, manufactured gold rings in Providence's growing jewelry business. By the 1950s, the demographic and economic decline of the city altered Cathedral Square from the wealthy residential square and busy commercial district it had been. The house had become the Grace & Hope Mission, a nonprofit focused on providing support and services for the most vulnerable in the city. By the late 1960s, the wrecking ball threatened, and thankfully, the congregants of the Beneficent Congregational Church preserved this rare piece of the past.

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In the early 19th century, the agricultural and mercantile economy of Providence was transformed by the Industrial Revolution in America, begun in nearby Pawtucket at Slater Mill. One essential ingredient for this transformation was capital. Money. The ability to gather funds from investors who were willing to extend potentially risky loans to entrepreneurs who were developing new methods of production.

Here, in Canonicus Square, there still remains one such institution formed at the time of the early industrial expansion that was driven by cotton and woolen mills. Citizens Bank now sits at the intersection of Westminster and Cranston Streets on the site of the old Hoyle Tavern (another institution of finance and exchange from another age). Citizens Bank, however, got its start just a few dozen yards east where the High Street Bank was established in 1828. The first bank established in Rhode Island was the Providence Bank in 1791, organized by local merchants who took advantage of the young country's new banking laws to pool their capital to fund ventures in shipping and industry.

By the early 19th century, smaller mechanics and entrepreneurs were opening banks to aggregate capital for their projects. Around the time the High Street Bank was formed, Rhode Island had more than 60 commercial banks, the largest number of banks per person in the country, and the highest per capita amount of funds and notes in circulation. This capital greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution.

By the late 19th century, New England was the most capitalized region on the planet. Local merchants and leaders of the new industries were the founding partners of the High Street Bank, like Amasa Sprague, owner of a number of cotton mills and a governor of the state. Within a few steps of the bank, original founders Duty Greene and Robert Knight had stores that were also places of exchange and deal-making. Robert Knight's two nephews, Benjamin and another Robert, later became the most significant cotton mill owners in the country. Having an uncle on the board of a bank would have been a valuable connection for these early entrepreneurs.

Around 1800, Rhode Island banks reported capital stock from investors of a few hundred thousand dollars. By about 1860, the Rhode Island banking system had capital stock of $18.7 million; over half a billion dollars in today's money. As the city's economic fortunes declined in the mid-twentieth century, so did its financial sector, leaving only a few traces of this crucial component of Providence's once spectacular economic growth.

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Reverend Edward Scott was a political activist and anti-slavery agitator who had, himself, escaped from slavery in Virginia before becoming a minister and community leader.

Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1812. He freed himself as well as others, eventually settling in Maine where he became a Baptist preacher. He led the Second Free Will Baptist Church (also known as the Pond Street Baptist Church) from about 1846 until 1864, living first on Angle Street as a boarder with the Gears family, also members of the church, and eventually with his wife at 54 Pond Street. Scott also worked as a clock and watch repairer with a shop at 98 High Street (today's Westminster Street).

In 1848, Scott led a public meeting that was widely attended to protest the expulsion of an African-American passenger from the Stonington and Providence Rail Road, one of the last unintegrated rail systems in New England. After 1854, he led the August 1st Emancipation Day celebration that promoted abolition in this country. The event included an invitation to all to march in a procession through the city and ended with speeches and a collation on Smith Hill. After Federal troops captured the South Carolina coastal islands during the Civil War, Scott travelled there to work with the Freedmen's Aid Society--helping the newly emancipated people adjust to freedom.

Reverend Scott died in South Carolina around 1864.

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Right here in the heart of the city lies a trace of an ancient trailway used by the Indigenous Peoples who inhabited this region for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. This stop is located on a ridge of land looking east over the floodplain of a tidal marsh--today's downtown Providence. Much of downtown was an estuary, flooded at high tide except for a finger of land that pointed toward the east side about where the College Street bridge is today.

The Pequot Trail, leading from the tribal lands of the Pequots and Niantics in today's Connecticut, then through Narragansett lands, followed the high ground here into the marsh to that easterly pointing finger where you could wade across the river at low tide to reach the Wampanoag lands on the other side. The trail continued north to the lands of the Massachusetts, Nipmucs, and other tribes.

Weybosset (the street you're on) is a Narragansett word meaning the crossing or half-way point.

Narragansett villages, large and small, could be found every few miles along these trails and highways throughout Rhode Island. A complex network of Native communities existed across southern New England, estimated as high as 100,000 people when Europeans arrived.

This native society and its culture were disrupted by devastating conquest after the explorations of this region by Europeans in the late 16th Century. Just imagine the shock and confusion of the survivors of the "Great Dying" years of 1617-1619 when some coastal communities suffered mortality rates as high as 90%, the Wampanoag being particularly affected. Over the next fifty years, scholars estimate more than 30,000 English people arrived on the New England coast, establishing settlements, first trading and living peaceably with these First Peoples, and then as English encroachments increased, coming into greater conflict, culminating in the brutal and bloody King Philip's War of 1675-76.

Today, we still remember some of those First Peoples who lived on these lands. Massasoit and Metacomet, father and son and leaders of the Wampanoag people in peace and war. Narragansett leaders Canonicus and Miantonomi who sustained the English colonists but were ultimately betrayed by them. In 1638, Canonicus and Miantonomi made an agreement with Roger Williams over this land whose meaning is still debated today.

Despite conquest, disease, forced assimilation, and the impacts of industrialization and urbanization, the First Peoples of Southern New England have survived and continue to practice and preserve their history and tradition. Today, the Narragansett Indian Tribal Nation is one of many tribal nations that preserve their history, continue their culture, and pass down their traditions. For more information about that history, spend time exploring the First Peoples of Rhode Island Rhode Tour.

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