According to local legend, in 1776 militia from the Head of Westport broke ranks with the remainder of their contingent to eat bread and cheese and to drink from the brook. The brook could also have been named after simple meals eaten on its banks by picnickers, farm and mill workers, and lovers of nature. As its importance to the residents of Westport evolved, Bread and Cheese Brook’s ambiguous name continued to reflect its practical and recreational uses. In the 18th century, the land that forms the Brookside Conservation Area held farms and homes of prominent Westport families including the Babcocks and the Giffords. Bread and Cheese Brook was central to this early agricultural economy, its water important to livestock and its banks a popular spot to dine on produce from fields and pastures In addition to his farm, George Gifford built a grain mill powered by the flow of the brook’s waters. In keeping with Westport’s colorful place names, locals referred to Gifford’s enterprise as Mouse Mill, since it supposedly processed only enough grain to feed a mouse. As Westport’s economy expanded and technology improved, the Giffords converted the Mouse Mill into a shingle and wagon spoke factory. A bit further downstream, where the brook joins the Noquochoke River, more powerful currents powered larger mills in the 19th century. Perhaps mill workers joined farmhands eating a quick lunch beside the brook. In the 20th century, lunch at the brook moved indoors to the Brookside restaurant where diners enjoyed the view through windows. By 2009, the restaurant stood abandoned and Westport voters approved expenditure from the Community Preservation Fund to protect the socially and environmentally important area and to provide public access. Today, the Brookside Conservation Area is managed by the Westport Land Conservation Trust for the benefit of residents and visitors. Although people today might be more likely to bring peanut butter and jelly to the brook rather than bread and cheese, lunching on its banks is still an important part of the brook’s identity along with fishing, hiking, and enjoying the picturesque remains of the century-old Granite Bridge. Although Westport’s economy no longer depends on Bread and Cheese Brook, the health of the Westport River Watershed and the town’s aquifer still rely on this small portion of the river system. The Westport River Watershed Alliance works with the town of Westport to monitor the conditions of Bread and Cheese Brook to ensure its future enjoyment by picnickers, hikers, and nature lovers.

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The water near the landing is part of an estuary, which means that salt water moving in from Buzzard’s Bay meets fresh water washing down the river. It’s a unique and beautiful natural space. At the time of King Philip’s War, in the late 1670s, the west branch of the Westport River (then called the Acoaxet River) was inhabited by a branch of the Sakonnet people led by Mamanuah, whose stepmother was Awashonks, sachem of the Sakonnets who inhabited the west side of Little Compton. The English at that time considered the entire area to be part of Plymouth Colony, whose leaders refused to acknowledge the dual leadership of the Sakonnet people. They preferred to deal solely with Mamanuah, whose land holdings were more extensive than Awashonks’. To reward Mamanuah and his people for their assistance in fighting King Philip, the English granted them deeds to some of their ancestral lands on the Acoaxet River including the area around Adamsville Landing. These deeds became a source of power for the native inhabitants, who sold their land in piecemeal to the English settlers in ways that were “troublesome and costly” to the purchasers. With this land as leverage, Mamanuah’s people were more able to resist the indentured servitude and displacement experienced by Awashonks’ people. However, in the sixty years that followed King Philp’s War, the Adamsville area gradually became English property as a result of systemic colonization, coercion, and indebtedness. An 1861 census report of native peoples in Massachusetts indicated that the west side of the Westport River remained the “most numerous settlement” of the descendants of the Sakonnets, although they no longer held deeds to the land. Official documents can’t tell the whole story of the land. Information included in historical timelines—and in historical tours—is limited, carefully worded and selected, and never neutral. We should always be asking more questions. How did ideas of land ownership differ between the English and the Sakonnets? What role did the threat of violence play in the dealings between these cultures? Today, Adamsville Landing is a common destination for kayakers and canoers on scenic day trips. Maybe, today, as you take this tour, that’s what you’re doing. What does it mean to be paddling here? Who does this land belong to, and what does it mean to own a river? A salt marsh? A forest? Who else has paddled here, and when, and why? How can you engage more deeply and critically with the many, many histories of the land around you?

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The US Rubber Company Mill has a complex history of ownership and use that stretches over 80 years. From its inception as the Joseph Banigan Rubber Company (1896-1910), through its acquisition and expansion as a regional plant of the US Rubber Company (1910-1975), to its current use as the Waterfire Arts Center and other industrial, commercial, and residential uses, this complex is representative of the reinvention and reuse of industrial buildings throughout New England.

The story of the complex begins with Joseph Banigan, Rhode Island’s first Irish-Catholic millionaire. Born in Ireland in 1839, he fled the ravages of the Irish potato famine as a child and came to Providence, where he joined nearly 16,000 of his fellow Irish immigrants. As a young man Banigan apprenticed at the Providence Rubber Company where he learned the industry. In 1889, at the age of 50, Banigan established his own company in Woonsocket. The Alice Factory, named for his mother, was the largest rubber factory in the world.

After a few years, Banigan returned to Providence to find that the city’s industrial base had changed; machine tool manufacturing now surpassed textile production. With the rechanneling of the Woonasquatucket River, the introduction of rail service along the city’s expanding industrial corridor, and the availability of process water (water that is no longer clean enough to drink but can be used in a factory), a number of new manufacturing firms moved to the banks of the river. Banigan purchased a building owned by the Saxon Worsted Company and constructed a number of new buildings to house the production of rubber shoes and boots.

While building his rubber empire, Banigan did not forget his Irish heritage and humble beginnings. He donated generously to the city’s orphanages, the Lying In Hospital (now Women & Infants Hospital), the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Home for the Aged, and St. Maria’s Home for Working Girls. After Banigan’s death, his business was sold to US Rubber Company, which shifted its production from footwear to rubber tires and rubber thread.

US Rubber doubled down on Providence in what the Providence Journal described as “one of the largest real estate transactions that has ever been recorded in this city.” The company expanded, purchasing the idle ALCO buildings in 1918 and began outfitting them for the manufacture of solid and pneumatic tires. In its adaptation of pre-existing buildings for new uses, the US Rubber Company was typical of expanding manufacturers of the period.

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In 2009, a group of volunteers stepped into the Woonasquatucket River at Donigian Park wearing waist-high heavy rubber boots and sturdy gloves to protect against the river’s pollution. Donigian Park in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence had once been a major destination for thousands of Providence residents who, in the 1880s, visited both Donigian and Merino Parks to enjoy a swim, a picnic, and the greenery. But by 2009, the park had become a defacto dump. On that single clean-up day, volunteers pulled out 150 shopping carts and two tons of automobile tires from the river.

Even in the 1880s the city should have warned residents against swimming in the Woonasquatucket. While mills, factories, and other industries used the Woonasquatucket River as a power source to engine their factories, they also used it to remove garbage and other waste from their buildings. Trace amounts of metals like zinc and cadmium, used to set dyes on fabrics, and pesticides containing mercury and arsenic, used to prevent insect damage to wool and cotton, made their way into the waters. But the biggest source of trace metals came from the production of the machinery used in these water-powered factories. Tin, iron, copper, and pewter used to make tools and parts regularly escaped into the air, soil, and water or were buried as a simplistic means of waste disposal. Most of these facilities used some type of volatile or semi-volatile organic compound to clean machinery and tools such as trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, known carcinogens. Many of these pollutants can still be found in river sediments today, more than 100 years after they were released.

Specific attempts to reduce the emission of at least some metals began in the 1950s and 1960s, but legislative requirements for industrial pretreatment of wastewaters did not come until the 1972 Clean Water Act. As more activist environmental movements took hold in the 1980s, concern for the status of the river and its importance to the city and the surrounding neighborhoods grew. In 1998, the federal government designated the Woonasquatucket River as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers, commemorating its role in the nation’s industrial history.

Shortly after, The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council formed to improve the environmental, recreational, and economic assets of the river and its watershed. Thanks to their efforts, Donigian Park is once again a beautiful urban refuge.

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The Woonasquatucket River (woon-AHS-kwa-tuk-it) has been at the center of Rhode Island’s uniquely layered history of invention, innovation and multiculturalism.

The Narragansett and Wampanoag tribes who first settled the region called the river “where the salt water ends.” The river flows approximately 19 miles from the headwaters northwest of Providence, 300 feet above sea level, and flows steeply downward before joining with the Moshassuck River to form the Providence River, which in turn flows into Narragansett Bay. The lower part of the river closest to the Bay is tidal. The rich wildlife drew Native Americans here to forage for berries, to fish and to hunt small game. The lush wooded river valley made it home to fox, coyote, rabbits, white tail deer, otters, and raccoons, along with occasional bear and moose. Trout, salmon, herring, eels, bluegills, pumpkinseeds, catfish, turtles, swans, mallards and hooded mergansers lived in and on the river.

In 1636 a treaty gave the land between the Moshassuck and the Woonasquatucket to Roger Williams. Shortly thereafter, European settlers started to manage the river to profit from its riches. The river's swift drop made it particularly easy to utilize. Farmers used waterwheels to grind their grains, to saw timber, and to power other small industries. After Samuel Slater harnessed the Blackstone River in 1790 to run his textile mill, other businessmen built along the Woonasquatucket. More and more factories followed suit until nearly every foot of the river’s drop was used to turn a factory water wheel. The heavy dependency of factories on the river’s flowing water made dry summer months particularly challenging.

In January 1824 the Rhode Island General Assembly issued a charter to the newly established Woonasquatucket River Company, formed by leading merchants to construct reservoirs along the Woonaskquatucket River to collect spring rains and to hold a supply of water during dry months. The founders pooled their capital and constructed four reservoirs: Slack’s, Sprague Lower, Waterman, and Stillwater. This experiment proved so successful that it became a model for industrial rivers around the world.

Stillwater Pond (now Woonasquatucket Pond) is the largest reservoir on the river itself. Improvements in waterpower management spurred technological and business innovations, including the first power loom and the first mutual system of insurance originated by Zachariah Allen at his Allendale Mill. The river has a total of 18 dams, testimonies to the interaction between the river and the industries it supported.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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