Thomas Davis, the namesake of Davis Park, was born in Ireland in 1806, and came to the United States in 1817. Unlike most of the Irish immigrants who would come to Providence, Davis was not Catholic, but instead a member of the Westminster Unitarian Church. Both his religion and financial success allowed him to move into the powerful elite of the state despite his foreign birth. Davis served as a member of the Rhode Island Senate from 1845 to 1853 and then a single term in the U.S. House from 1853 to 1855. In 1869, Davis and his second wife, Paulina, a prominent social activist in her own right, moved into a mansion with extensive grounds totaling thirty-four acres at the corner of Chalkstone Avenue and Raymond Street.
As one of the nineteenth century centers of the Industrial Revolution, by 1880, Providence was a city of over 100,000 people. During this time, a national movement arose for the preservation of green space for recreation. The Providence Parks Commission was founded in the 1880s with the original purpose of preserving the Cove Basin – the original tidal basin of the Providence River that the railroad companies wanted to pave over. The Commission advocated urban green space, specifically “a chain or system of smaller parks” throughout the city. Many particularly believed that a park was needed in the Tenth Ward, a populous and geographically large area.
Meanwhile, Thomas Davis’ fortunes had taken an extreme turn for the worse. His wife Paulina died in 1876. His businesses failed completely. In 1880, he even lost his right to vote because he could no longer meet the requirement to own $134 of property that naturalized voters such as himself were required to possess. Davis decided in 1890 to sell his mansion and grounds to the city for $75,000, enough to restore his financial security but considered a bargain price for the city. Davis died on July 26, 1895.
The new park was named Davis Park in honor of the former owner and became home to baseball games, children’s pageants, and scenic strolls for local residents. After World War II, the city government made the controversial decision to donate all the land to the federal government for use as a Veterans Administration hospital. Those that opposed said that construction of a hospital in Davis Park “means taking away from thousands of growing youngsters their only available recreational ground.” The city and the VA attempted to allay this concern by setting aside a small section of the old park that would include a baseball diamond and tennis courts. This plan immediately proved to be fraught with problems though and was abandoned. Children were instructed to use nearby O’Brien Park (at the corner of River and Regent Avenues) instead.
Eventually, the VA allowed neighborhood children the use of a playground, and in 1953, ceded eight acres back to the city, which would then include a larger park with baseball and softball fields and a basketball court. Davis Park has remained a major center of recreation for the people of Providence. As Valley and Smith Hill are now home to a large Hispanic population, a statue of César Chávez has been added to the park. The installation of wrought iron fencing, the creation of a walking track, and the planting of community gardens that have further beautified the area. Although most of those who use the park are probably not familiar with early social advocates Thomas and Paulina Davis, their name and legacy live on at Davis Park.
]]>When Liz Camp, a resident of the Reservoir Triangle neighborhood, heard that developers wanted to build over two dozen townhouses on an open plot of land near Mashapaug Pond, she knew she had had to do something to halt the construction. After years of campaigning, when the governor’s office told Camp that her persistence was driving them crazy, she knew that “something” was finally working.
In the fall of 1990, a developer had purchased 4.6 acres of land on the southwest side of Mashapaug Pond that had previously been preserved as open space. With plans to build twenty-five new homes and lay two new streets, Reservoir Triangle residents worried the construction would “ruin the community” and cause traffic problems. “We want[ed] this space to be open space,” Liz Camp recalled. “We want[ed] the city to buy the property or the state to buy the property. And we want[ed] it to be open spaces. So, we became activists, neighborhood activists.”
Generating any sort of grassroots change in the neighborhood, let alone creating a new park, seemed impossible in the early 1990s. One Reservoir Triangle resident told a Providence Journal reporter that at a city hall meeting, none of the officials had even heard of their neighborhood. A newspaper article mockingly described residents’ vision for the area as “floating a dream of a clean Mashapaug Pond.”
Reservoir Triangle homeowners persisted. Meeting in one another’s living rooms, they organized calling campaigns and discussed strategies for making their voices heard. The Mashapaug Pond Action Committee was born.
After a long battle against the local government and frustrating political inaction, the Reservoir Triangle residents succeeded. The city finally bought the land from the developer, guaranteeing its preservation as public space. In 1994, after the city solicited input from residents regarding how they would like the space to be used, Murphy-Trainor Park was built on the land saved by the Mashapaug Pond Action Committee.
Murphy-Trainor Park is now one of three open, public spaces around Mashapaug Pond. And continued public pressure from neighborhood residents and activists has resulted in major zoning overhauls in the past years: Several properties near Mashapaug Pond that were formerly zoned for light industrial use are now preserved as public spaces. These new open areas include J.T. Owens Park and the Community Boating Center, as well as a park currently in development behind Alvarez High School.
Following in the footsteps of Liz Camp and the Mashapaug Pond Action Committee, other community-based initiatives, like the Urban Pond Procession, have also brought neighborhood residents together to raise awareness about issues with Mashapaug Pond. Murphy-Trainor Park itself, once a rallying point, is now a space for further community organizing.
Discussion Questions
If you were a resident in the Reservoir Triangle, what would you have done to help raise awareness about the construction and the pond’s pollution?Why is it important to have green spaces or parks in cities? Why do you think parks are such important spaces in neighborhoods?
What issues in your own community need to be addressed?
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]]>On a frigid February in 1904, fifty riders and horses gathered at frozen Mashapaug Pond for an afternoon of racing on the ice. Beyond the pleasure of competition, the races gave local residents a chance to admire each other’s horses and to appreciate the conclusion of the ice harvesting season. When conditions made racing on the pond impossible, riders turned Reservoir Avenue into a speedway and spectators lined the street to watch, even when the weather turned bitterly cold.
Over the decades, Mashapaug Pond has remained a popular spot for recreational activities – though the pond isn’t without its share of risks. Reports of children falling through the ice in winter or drowning in the summer were common through the mid-twentieth century. Yet throughout the twentieth century, local youth continued to explore and play on Mashapaug Pond, ice skating in the winter when the pond froze, and exploring hidden clay caves on the pond’s coast. Today, with fewer children swimming in or skating on the pond, such incidents of danger are rare. But residents still worry about the health risks posed by pollutants in the pond water.The legacy of pollution has impacted the pond’s use as a recreational site. In the past, fishing on Mashapaug Pond was a source of food for some. However, contamination from the Gorham Manufacturing Company’s silver factory and pollution from stormwater runoff has made the pond’s fish poisonous to eat. Still, residents who fish for fun report catching large-mouth bass, yellow perch, carp, and even the occasional snapping turtle. A community boating center provided kayaks, canoes and lessons for people eager to get on the water before city officials grew alarmed at hazards caused by algae blooms and shuttered the site. Since 1999, though, a local dragon boat racing team has practiced on Mashapaug Pond between May and October.
Now, pass by J.T. Owens Fields on the western bank of Mashapaug Pond on any spring or summer day, and you’ll hear the sounds of baseball, softball and T-ball. Elmwood Little League, established in 1951, has brought hundreds of young ballplayers to the fields every season. The fields were dedicated to John T. Owens, a Providence native and famous amateur baseball player, nicknamed “Happy Owens” by local fans. Owens was killed as a serviceman in World War II, and the park created in his name now sports three baseball fields, two tennis courts, and a playground, all adjacent to an expansive view of Mashapaug Pond.
A large open space in a congested city, Mashapaug Pond and the three public parks along its shores call to children eager to explore and play. And although the horse races are unlikely to return, residents still hope that one day, Mashapaug Pond will be once again safe for swimming.
Questions
How have pollution and environmental changes affected the way people enjoy Mashapaug Pond and the activities they enjoy?What might the future look like for Mashapaug Pond? Does this future include swimming, fishing, baseball, or horse racing on ice? How could recreation change in the future?
What sorts of things do you like to do for fun? How do you think that’s different from what people did for fun a century ago? Why?
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]]>Native peoples had already lived on the land near Mashapaug Pond for many centuries when Roger Williams arrived in Providence in 1636. The pond’s very name comes from two Algonquin words: ‘massa’ and ‘pug’, meaning ‘large standing water’. In Pre-Contact time the pond provided local Narragansett, with a wealth of resources. Families built weetooash, or temporary dome-shaped homes, on the shores of the pond for summertime usage as they fished in the pond and gathered plants and herbs from its sandy banks. Nearby, gardens of squash, corn, melons, and sunflowers flourished. Along with daily lifeways such as hunting, fishing, gathering the Narragansett enjoyed the pond for community celebrations that included storytelling, dancing and drumming.
Although native families were displaced from around the pond as Providence’s Euroamerican community expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of them managed to retain their connection to the land. Tall Oak Weeden, who shares both Pequot and Wampanoag ancestry, recalls visiting family members who lived near the pond. In the early twentieth century, his great-grandfather had moved from Connecticut to Providence, settling in the ethnically diverse community of West Elmwood. Beautiful cherry trees and small gardens once filled the neighborhood, and in their free time, his family members enjoyed fishing and ice skating at the pond. The Pond Street Baptist Church served as an important space for the Native American community to come together. To Tall Oak Weeden, “It was like the Indian town reconstituted itself in a sense, from the original Indian town that was there that the settlers felt needed to be moved.”
By the 1960s, new development, such as the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, again forced Native American families away from the pond. The Pond Street Baptist Church relocated, and the neighborhood of West Elmwood, where African American, Native American, and Euroamerican families had lived side by side, was bulldozed. Contamination of the local environment, through Gorham’s pollution and storm water runoff, also had a direct impact on Native American families’ ability to interact with the pond.
Mashapaug Pond continues to be an important site of memory for the Indigenous community including the Narragansett, Wampanoag and other local tribes of the southern New England region. The Rhode Island Indian Council and the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum serve as important spaces for community life and cultural preservation keeping these memories alive through programs, exhibits, books and other cultural education opportunities. As such, memories of the community’s connections to Mashapaug Pond are preserved. The name of the pond, and nearby street names such as Niantic, Algonquin, and Narragansett, serve as testimony to the deep connections that Native Americans have to the region.
In September of 1936, the editorial in Narragansett Dawn, a monthly publication by and for the Native American community of Rhode Island, ended with the statement: “Rhode Island Knows Now - THE NARRAGANSETT STILL EXISTS!” Although weetooash no longer dot the shores of pond and the lush gardens are gone from the vacant lots in West Elmwood, the Narragansett presence still exists near Mashapaug Pond as well.
Discussion Questions
Why do you think people chose to live around Mashapaug Pond? Why do you think people today choose to live there?Imagine the area as an early indigenous settlement before Providence was founded in 1636. What images, sounds and smells come to mind?
How did the establishment of the industrial park affect the indigenous community in ways different from others living around the pond? Why do you think this is?
What are contemporary efforts by Native people living in Providence to preserve their culture?
For more (including 2 images & 4 audio files) view the original article
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