Providence Waterways: StoryMap

Return to  pvdwaterways.org/storymap 

Welcome to the Providence Waterways StoryMap! We are excited to share our passion for the waterways of Providence with you, through history, narratives, short stories, images and fun facts. This interactive StoryMap puts the power in your hands; to explore it however you want to. Why? One idea kept jumping up and waving to us throughout the evolution of this project: connection.

The Providence Waterways project began during a time when many of us were struggling to feel connected – to each other, to our friends and families, communities, and nature around us. It was a time of isolation and worry. The idea of connectedness became an antidote to that as we thought together about all of the ways water connects people to each other: past, present and future. Through themes from public health to immigration, labor to industrialization and spirituality to our everyday chores, water is ever-present.

It is exactly this powerful connection that we hope for you too, as you explore this StoryMap in the way that best suits your needs. Reading at home? Yes. Going out to visit the sites? Wonderful. A little of both? Perfect. You can immerse in this StoryMap as a group, or by yourself. You can read every word and view every image, or jump around, following your own curiosity. We hope this will lead you to participate in our prompts, share your stories, and help us expand on this project because it’s not done! This is just the beginning. By participating in the project, you can become part of it, too.

So, please, dive into our StoryMap, swim around in these ideas and take a cool drink of the stories we have gathered for you!

This StoryMap is by no means a linear experience! Rather, we've organized it by waterways: The  Great Salt Cove ,  Moshassuck River and West River ,  Seekonk River ,  Providence Harbor ,  Narragansett Bay ,  Woonasquatucket River ,  Mashapaug Pond ,  Scituate Reservoir ,  Providence River , and Blackstone River (Not all of these sections are yet published – stay tuned!).

Use the tabs at the top of your window to jump between sections; you can always return to the Full Map or these Usage Tips!

Identify individual stories by their ORANGE headings. Sections (including waterway areas) are denoted by BLUE headings.

Keep an eye on this map; we'll be adding to it weekly!

This StoryMap is best when viewed on a computer connected to high-speed internet.

Read more about the contributors to this StoryMap on the  Providence Waterways website .

•  Introduction , by John McNiff
•  The Evolution of The Cove: A Graphic Interpretation , by Verónica Borsani
•  A Brackish Basin , by Traci Picard
•  More Than a Grain of Salt , by John McNiff
•  Water/Spring/Fire , by Rekha Rosha
•  The Health of the Water is the Health of the People , by Traci Picard
•  Laundry: From Washbaord to Laundromat , by Traci Picard

Compiled and edited by John McNiff, Park Ranger at Roger Williams National Memorial, images courtesy of same.

This image shows the place that became Providence, circa 1000 CE. The view is from Constitution Hill (near University Heights Plaza) to the southwest. There are no Europeans here yet, although there are stories of visitors in longships from around this time. This is the Great Salt Cove and its environs. A complex road system crisscrossed southern New England, and many of those roads came together here. Why? Because of the resources available here. 

The Great Salt Cove was an estuarine environment that provided nearly unlimited resources. Clams, quahogs and oysters filled the cove. Lobsters and crabs as well. Two freshwater rivers, the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket, fed the cove and there was a freshwater spring on its eastern edge. North Atlantic Salmon would run up the Providence River to these two freshwater rivers. Near where the Turk’s Head building is today was a choke point, where at low tide you could walk across the river. This concentrated the Salmon so that it is said that you could “walk across the river on the backs of the salmon without getting your feet wet”. 

For thousands of years before European settlement, people came from across the region to the Great Salt Cove to hunt, fish, and farm. The Narragansett, Wampanoag, Massachusett and Nipmuc all used the roads that intersected here on the upper Narragansett Bay. 

It wasn’t all just work. Where the State House sits today, hundreds would gather to engage in sports. The game played was similar to a cross between soccer and rugby, with a small leather ball. 

The Europeans adopted the Indigenous highways into their own road system. These ancient roads serve us to this day. For example, Route 1 runs from Boston to New York. Route 6 runs from the tip of the Cape through Providence and out to the west and Route 44 runs from Plymouth through Providence and out west. 

Design by Verónica Borsani

By Traci Picard

For a very long time, the centerpiece of the land we now call Providence was a large and irregular body of water known as The Great Salt Cove. It was a brackish, or partly salty, waterway where seawater from the upper Narragansett Bay met the freshwater of the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers. The whole area was alive with sea creatures, including oysters, herring, menhaden, eels and crabs. The Cove was not especially deep, and the water rose and fell twice each day, leaving the edges to blend into tidal flats; areas where it was a bit muddy, important habitat for birds and salt-tolerant plants. This ecosystem helped to protect the land around it from excessive flooding, and people could cross using small boats, improvised “bridges” made of stone, or by wading through the water at shallow spots.

When the town of Providence was colonized by Europeans, they settled mainly on the East side of the Cove, first along what is now South Main Street, then branching out up College HIll, into India Point and towards the North End. As the population grew, some ventured over to the West side of the Cove, building bridges which weren’t particularly sturdy and settling on the low-lying and sandy soil around what’s now Weybosset Street and Kennedy Plaza.

Beginning in the early 1800s, people and businesses who were not welcome elsewhere in the city due to class, race, ethnicity, the odor or mess of their work, marginalized legal status--or other reasons why humans exclude others--settled further afield. They mainly made their homes along the Moshassuck near what is today University Heights, building small neighborhoods such as Hardscrabble and Stamper’s; and further towards the Cove in Snowtown and the North Shore. These areas were home to many people, including some who had been enslaved and their children, as well as recent immigrants, sailors, widowed women, day laborers, servants and people involved in gambling, sex work and illicit alcohol sales. The Rhode Island State Prison was then built along the Western shore of the cove, as well as the Providence City Jail and, nearby, a town Workhouse for the very poor.

Because industrialization a bit further upriver made the Cove increasingly more dangerous by the dumping of chemicals, human and animal waste, the detritus of manufacturing and the unwanted offal of slaughterhouses, it developed a poor reputation. Complaints were made regularly to the Town Council, and many people threw up their hands, saying “Can’t somebody do something!” It was proposed that the Cove should be filled in to fix this problem. While one can imagine at least one better way to fix the problem of water pollution than filling in the waterways, this is actually what happened beginning around the mid-1800s. Slowly, and in stages, the hills of Providence were pushed into the water, creating much more land. This land began to seem more valuable to the powerful people, and the railroads, developers and large landowners worked together to displace some of the small communities who had lived around the Cove and its tributary rivers.

At one point, in the early 1900s, the Cove was completely disappeared from the landscape of Providence, and the “Providence River”, a much smaller and tamer body of water shaped by humans, was all that remained of that once-mighty tidal water body. But an evocative little waterway called the Cove Basin was eventually rebuilt, which we can now visit and sit beside, to remember the many stages of The Great Salt Cove and all its stories, buried deep under the heart of the city.

Compiled and edited by John McNiff, Park Ranger at Roger Williams National Memorial, all images courtesy of same.

In 1636, Roger Williams was tossed out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of his dangerous opinions. Williams believed that there should be a ‘wall of separation’ between church and state. He also believed that ‘the foundation of civil power lies in the people.’ 

Roger Williams said there was no amount of money that could have purchased Providence. In 1636, Williams and the Narragansett tribal leaders, or Sachems, Canonicus and Miantonomo, negotiated for the land that became Providence. 

“Having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the sachems and natives round about us...I, in grateful remembrance of God's merciful providence unto me in my distresse, called the place PROVIDENCE: I desired it might be a shelter for persons distressed of conscience.”

Together they agreed that Williams could use the land and the Sachems could have any of the English trade goods they wanted from Williams. This was not a “sale” of land, but the establishment of a relationship agreement. Each party had obligations to the other.

[The editors note that this may be a contested story.]

The English settlement at Providence was different from most New England towns. There was no wall around the settlement. The ancient road, (present day North Main Street) used for countless generations by Native people was still open to them, as well as other travelers. Each settler’s long narrow home lots ensured that they all had some waterfront, some slope of the hill, and some flat land at the top of the hill. The rich resources of the saltwater cove supplemented the food produced on their small farms. In Providence there was neither a central common nor a central meeting house nor church.

A freshwater spring attracted Roger Williams to this site and anchored the community. Williams built his house across the street, and religious and civil meetings took place around its “gushing” waters. The spring remained in community ownership among settlers until 1721. When the land around the spring was sold, the deed stipulated that “liberty is reserved for the inhabitants to fetch water at said spring forever.” As the city grew, however, the spring was eventually hidden under buildings. 

Finally, in the 1930s, the spring was uncovered and became the centerpiece of Roger Williams Spring Park. When the Roger Williams national Memorial was created, the Roger Williams Spring Park was incorporated into the memorial. The Hahn Memorial, as it is now called, is one of the most significant features of the memorial landscape. It consists of  a small, (1/10 acre) courtyard that opens off North Main Street. It was designed by architect Norman M. Isham and constructed by the city of Providence in 1931-33. The centerpiece of the memorial is an octagonal limestone well curb traditionally held to contain the source of the Roger Williams Spring.

The park was given to the city of Providence by Judge Jacob Hahn in memory of his father, Isaac Hahn, the first person of Jewish faith to be elected to public office from Providence. The memorial contains two bronze plaques mounted at the main entrance gate on North Main Street. The Hahn Memorial is significant under National Register criterion for its association with the history of commemoration in Providence and as a representative example of early twentieth-century landscape design by architect Norman M. Isham. The Hahn Memorial is also a contributing resource in the National Register-listed College Hill Historic District. 

The spring gushed forth from the hill-side in a copious stream, issuing from a shallow pool, and from boiling quicksands, and flowed down to the adjacent river. -Author Unknown

In 1830, the area around Canal Street was bustling with activity that dramatically changed the landscape of the Blackstone Valley. The Blackstone Canal, which began across Canal Street from Park Row, was an economic lifeline. The canal linked Providence’s seaport to Worcester, Massachusetts almost 50 miles north. Horses pulled barges filled with cotton, iron rods, and bushels of oysters upstream. They made the return trip with finished goods like chairs, cloth, iron castings and hogsheads of cider. Workers used hand carts and wagons to move goods back and forth between the canal and sailing vessels anchored in Providence’s deep-water port, about a mile away.

“The two Unions between Worcester and Providence – the first was as weak as water, the last as strong as iron.” – A toast at a railroad meeting between railroad officials, November 11, 1847

by Rekha Rosha

Take a walk through time with  Rekha Rosha  in this piece which introduces us to The Great Salt Cove through a speculative lens. Using our senses and our imagination, let’s explore this short story of the Cove which used to be the centerpiece of Providence. Is it a memory? A dream? An impression? It is all of these, and more.

Right there, if you can believe it, he said, and she tried to imagine it: an entire house submerged in flames. The shattered glass windows creating a wide dark space no one will enter for decades. In time, he explained, the house crumbled until, the scar of it covered up.

They got out of the car. Colonial history was his latest obsession. Before that it was bird watching, and before that mushrooms. 

This was their third quaint picturesque town that day. 

She looked around. To her left the downtown shimmered in the heat. Its emptiness somehow made it feel hotter and sadder. 

He gestured at the field on the other side of the river, directly across from where they stood. It was, he explained carefully, “important.”

She tuned him out a bit; she found herself doing that more and more these days. After fifteen years of marriage she had learned the essential art of tactically not hearing. 

Suddenly, his voice came back into focus. It sounded like he said, “Now, it is burning again.” 

He went on, “Then, the war-torn field became a factory. Wool mills, of course, but also butchers and tanneries--all along the river bank heading north.” She could taste the lye of tanned hides souring in her mouth, imagined hot blood curdling and darkening as it hit the cool water.

He pointed east, “That’s where the mall went.” 

She instantly pictured the big tent of concrete. They were both from a place very similar to this place. 

“Remember giant cookies?”

As he faced her, his left eyebrow lifted imperceptibly. It was a quirk she had found charming when they were first seeing each other. It had seemed old fashioned, like a movie actor who had aged into soap operas—self-awareness verging on camp. The faint whiff of nostalgia invoked by the teen pursuits of mall watching and food court sampling made his face charming, again. 

But, they were past that now. Turning 40, or maybe it was 50, had made it harder to see themselves as charming. These days they saw themselves as … what? She tried to put her finger on it.

“Oh, look!” he shouted and began walking sideways down the slope toward a blackberry bush just above the river’s edge. She watched knowing she couldn’t stop him once he caught on to an idea. Didn’t matter what it was. 

She looked down the embankment and thought of the mollusks concealed in their primordial ooze. Under the rot. Under the lye.

She knew they would have to sell the house. They couldn’t afford the taxes. She didn’t want to move; she loved that house. That’s what the argument in the car had been about. The house she loved but the garden—it was her life. The shady areas full of Japanese painted ferns, ginger plants, and vinca, and sunnier spots brimmed with echinacea, lavender, and roses. 

Her soul wilted slightly at the thought of getting back into the car, knowing the argument would pick itself up where they had left it. She wished she still smoked. Watching the curling wisps of ash, time becoming entirely her own to spend however she wanted.

He marched up the slope holding his hands out towards her. The dark purple juice already staining his large, creased hands. She plucked one out and ate it. It was sweet and sour. She thought she would hit a seed but there were none. He smiled and nodded and looked up into the sky. “Such a beautiful day. We really lucked out about the weather.” She nodded.

As she belted herself in, he looked at the dash and frowned. “We have to get gas.” She knew he’d wanted to wait until they got closer to home; he had a thing about getting gas at a station away from home. He also liked to get the number of gallons and the dollar amount to end in a whole number before releasing the pump. She knew all of this without him ever telling her.

Yes, she thought, they had pushed their little wheel of love up through the years and that had preserved the essential newness of their life together. Yet, she slid her car seat back, entropy had overcome them. The effluence of all their previous decisions continued to rise. Now, they would have to sort through the options their past had deposited in their present.

Crossing the bridge, she willed the river of Providence to hold them even as she felt relief at the blast of air conditioning and the forward propulsion. The sky began turning a bright orange as she imagined the two of them sinking beneath the water, into the silt and then, later, washing up onto the shoal of someone’s distant memory.

By Traci Picard

There are a few themes which come up over and over through the history of public health. Early on, access was vital: How can we know if our water is clean enough to drink? If not, how will we make it so? How can we get enough of it, and how can we transport it efficiently? How should we manage our waste and keep it away from our drinking water? And who the heck is dumping that smelly offal upstream?

Eventually, though, people began to wonder, in what ways does water spread or contribute to disease? How can we protect ourselves against what we can’t see? How can we best clean our bodies, our homes and our stuff? How can we keep our bodies from going under the water, and our homes from being inundated?  Let’s go through a few important challenges in the history of Providence infrastructure and public health:

Providence was directly connected to the Atlantic world and beyond in many ways, but one key connection was germs. We may sometimes hear the past framed as isolated, compared to the present, a “globally connected world”. But beginning in the 1700s, the port of Providence was a major public health concern because people and goods were arriving from all over the world. Providence’s citizens wanted the porcelain cups and fine silks, the workers and the books, the molasses and the quinine gathered from foreign countries...but not the infectious diseases which sometimes arrived alongside these goods. Over time, a variety of strategies were put into place to help prevent these outbreaks, with varying degrees of success. Inspections of goods and people sound great in theory, but only if the Captain was both honest and observant, and the inspector had the skills to truly read the signs of illness and determine the risk. Quarantines may have helped determine if anyone aboard was ill, but they were hardly foolproof. Airing out, sunning and smoking goods worked great for the germs killed by exposure to UV light, time or mildly antimicrobial wafting of smoke, but this describes only a certain percentage of diseases.

A sparsely populated land does not need an organized system to manage waste, because there’s plenty of room to absorb it. But as Providence began to grow, so too did the issues with waste management. In addition to collecting waste in chamber pots indoors, many colonists built privies, or “necessary houses”. We’d commonly call this an outhouse today, but they were not always separate from the main house or building; they may be attached or in the basement. These were usually a hole dug in the ground, attached to a “vault” or cesspool lined irregularly with wood or rocks. Without significant maintenance they could get quite foul. 

Modern outdoor bathrooms use rotation, dry matter layering and regular turning to mitigate the issue of anaerobic bacteria, but a stagnant, leaking vault suffered without these methods. In addition, since parts of Providence were built on infill, the swampy or sandy soil, high water table and occasional flooding compounded the problem. It wasn’t just an odor that was of concern, though – human and animal waste pose a threat to our drinking water supply. Many complaints were lodged throughout the mid-1700s to mid-1800s about this situation, and slowly, change came to the city. The early attempts at sewers were not really a huge improvement. These transferred the problem from individual properties onto the streets and waterways. Rivers and bays may carry some things away, but the idea that we can put anything we want in there and it will “disappear” hasn’t really borne out. Waste would drift around, getting trapped in the partially filled Cove or coming back upriver when the tide flowed back in. The mid-1800s saw waves of action around some key issues of public health. This effort was bigger than Providence, as it was happening in fits and starts across the industrialized world. As early activists worked to expand the thinking around disease, some cities began to let go of miasma theory and embrace change. 

From the early days of colonization, people threw “garbage” into water – things that they needed to “go away”. And seemingly, that happened! I can’t see it anymore, so...it’s gone? The idea was that all of this water could dilute and absorb our waste. And water does dilute: one drop of dye doesn’t color the whole Cove red, of course. But as the population grew, the amount of waste grew. As human pressure was put on the waterways, reducing their size, damming and domesticating their flow, their ability to dilute and absorb was diminished. A few workers throwing in a bucket of offal or a chamberpot’s contents is one thing, but as work industrialized, so did the pollution. Factories built pipes which poured their waste directly into our waterways, including toxic dyes and chemicals. Over time, these substances have changed according to industry and invention. Some folks made money, but the waterways paid the price. Plants and animals were harmed and killed. People who lived nearby suffered. The soil was coated in a layer of heavy metals and PCBs and signs began to go up: NO SWIMMING. NO WADING. NO DRINKING. NO FISHING. 

The Narragansett Bay, Great Salt Cove and the rivers and streams were all once part of a natural, healthy system, balanced and self-regulating. As colonists began to build Providence into a city, they took many steps which damaged this system. Each one individually may not seem like a significant problem, but the total influence of all of these steps has brought us to a place of environmental concern. The building of a “modern”, industrial port city required massive structural change to the land. Hills and bluffs were flattened to fill in swamps and coves. Irregular shapes were made straight and square with massive piles of sand and garbage. Rivers were dredged, and dredged, and dredged some more. Pesky eelgrass was pulled up, wharves made of the trees which used to shade the land reached out into the bay and coal ships steamed right up the river and unloaded. And then came the pavement...vast quantities of tar and cement made the surface of Providence completely impermeable, so rainwater would no longer absorb but ran off into the waterways, carrying whatever was in the way right into the bay.

Decisions were made throughout the history of Providence which directly affect those of us living here today. We are now trying to make our way through the consequences of past actions. It may be tempting to say “they didn’t know” what they were doing, and people in the past certainly did not have the tools we have today to study and understand the consequences of pollution. But there are many examples throughout history of someone saying “hey! Let’s stop this destruction!” and being ignored. Did the decision-makers move their homes away from the pollution? Did they see the problems, smell the problems they were contributing to? Did they go into the dirty water? Did their kids eat the toxic fish? Maybe people didn’t know what the breaking point was, but they must have known there was one, that eventually consequences would appear. 

We raise these issues today, not to place blame on people who aren’t here, but so we can stop replicating harm. To prevent future dumping, spills and “accidents” before they happen. There is nothing we can do about past actions taken. Our power lies in what WE choose to do going forward. What waterways will we protect, value and care for? The future requires it.

By Traci Picard

Laundry, a conveniently modern chore for many people today, has changed a lot since Providence was founded. Most of us now put our clothes, of which we have a closet full, into a machine and turn it on. Done. So why is this relatively minor necessity so intimately connected to waterways? To people in the early days of Providence, this chore loomed large in the weekly schedule, and it revolved around water.

Clothing and textiles were very precious before industrialization. Huge amounts of labor went into their making, and the cost of materials was high. It was not abnormal to have only two outfits, and a couple of layering pieces. And people got dirty - contact with soil was more common than today. Literally no one of any other era went from a shower to a car to an office. Average people got wet, they walked, they sweated and cooked and fed the chickens and stepped in piles of....whatever. They dug holes and emptied buckets and built stuff. Even the elite couldn’t avoid all contact with slurpy soups and smokey fires and horse sneezes. Therefore, washing was necessary.

Laundry was hard, especially for those who had a big family. And it was dependent on water, which had to come from somewhere, and usually had to be transported. (In some areas, people were likely to do laundry right at the riverside, but this was not as common in Providence due to saltiness.) The water would be heated by fire and the precious-yet-disgusting laundry had to be pummeled and pounded, scrubbed and shaken about. Most clothes items were bulky, and there were no quick-dry fabrics or wrinkle-free blouses. As the society of Providence developed, class systems solidified and those who were able to assign their chores to others did so. Laundry was a task that was usually considered women’s work, and people with the means to do so gave the job to “the help”:  servants, indentured, or enslaved women who touched the most intimate garments of the elite, so they could keep up appearances and maintain a “civilized” society.

Laundry emerged as one of the few jobs available to women, including those freed by emancipation, widowed, newly immigrated or just poor and in need of work. There are numerous examples in the early 1800s of women who took in washing at home, or in tenements and boarding houses across Providence. And these women used water, LOTS of water. Each time they had to wash, they first pumped and scooped, hauled and heated, rinsed and steamed. The water of Providence rubbed their hands raw and gave them dishpan hands, but for many it was a path forward, a way to make a life in a very limited opportunity landscape. 

Institutions such as hospitals and orphanages often built a separate building for laundry.  Larger laundries were built and maintained by Ladies’ Charitable Societies as a way to distribute this work to those in need. Women and children in workhouses and asylums worked at laundry, sometimes  in exchange for low wages or room and board. The job was considered gendered “women’s work” and “unskilled” labor, and offered little room for advancement, but if you’ve ever had a laundry mishap, you know that in addition to strong muscles, laundry does actually require skills to do well. 

Around the turn of the 20th century, entrepreneurs in Providence began to embrace the changing laundry landscape as a business opportunity. Amidst great waves of immigration, many young women took on work in factories. This meant they had less time to devote to household chores. Women and men also arrived here alone, to make a life in boarding houses or apartments without access to the space and tools to do laundry. Commercial laundries sprang up across the city, taking in workers’ wash for a fee. Chinese immigrants and their families had opened several laundries in Providence, beginning in the 1870s. For more on this history, see: Insert link to Chinese laundries in Pvd here?

While the tools of laundry didn’t change much for centuries, the period of industrialization and invention in the mid-1800s moved laundry from tubs and washboards towards new ways to heat and move water, agitate the textiles and wring out and press them. Detergents and soaps were invented and marketed using new ideas of a modern and “sanitary” future. Clothing and cloth became more widely available, cheaper and more abundant, which meant more laundry to wash. The first electric-powered washing machine was invented in 1908, the first laundromat opened in Texas in the 1930s, and the first automatic washing machine came onto the market in 1951.

We still have a multi-tiered system of laundry in Providence. We can see some people carrying bags of laundry into the laundromat, while other folks drop off dry cleaning or hire a service to do it. Many households own a home washing machine and dryer, yet this is by no means a universal truth and laundry is still washed by hand and hung on lines to dry. The process of cleaning our clothing has changed a lot since early Providence. But there are still echoes of the important questions laundry raises: What does laundry tell us about how we assign value to work, and to the people who do that work, in our culture? What role does doing laundry play in our lives today, how does this compare to the past, and how does the laundry experience vary for different people? The next time you need to wash a load of sweaty socks and malodorous workwear, give thanks to the many phases of laundry that have come before and the waterways that make it all possible.

 Learn more! 

•  Bloody Swamp and the Wild Place , by Sam Coren
•  Amphibian Pool , By Greg Gerritt, with Sam Coren
•  Difficult Topographies , By Sam Coren (published by  Contingent Magazine )
•  Historic Death by Waterways , By Traci Picard

By Sam Coren

At the northern edge of the North Burial Ground, between a bus terminal and a ballpark, there is a semi-hidden grove along the Moshassuck River called “the Wild Place”. It is easy to miss-- these days. But if you had passed through here, say, in the summer of 1910, a strange and pungent stench would have bit your nose while mosquitoes feasted on your exposed flesh. 

Back then, the Moshassuck was surrounded by marshlands--”swamps” where flowing water slowed and settled. There was no ballpark, and certainly no riverside benches, for the river was badly polluted and the swamplands widely shunned. People knew this place as “Bloody Swamp,” likely because the waste of Pawtucket slaughterhouses pooled here among the cattails, skunk cabbage, and hardy wetlands trees. Meanwhile, upstream bleachery and dye house mills released millions of gallons of toxic waste into the river daily, along with sewage from the cities of Pawtucket and Central Falls. 

Pollution posed a serious hazard to all kinds of life around Bloody Swamp, and city officials recognized that something had to be done. Sadly, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. Around 1915, laborers for the city filled the land and narrowed the river to move the pollutants more quickly downstream. What you see today is the result: a relatively new landscape where few traces of the ancient marsh--for a brief time steeped in blood--remain.  

Twenty years ago, an artist named Diana Jackson used to walk past here on her way to catch the Providence to NYC bus. The river was dammed up with trash, so Diana started clearing the site. Her efforts soon attracted others who worked or lived nearby. Later she adorned it with paintings, plantings, a miniature free library and a garden of rocks in the form of a spiral. There is a bench for visitors to sit and take a breath, eat some lunch, doodle, smoke, or read a book while enjoying the cool river breezes. 

When you enter the Wild Place, you see a trail leading into a small forest. A generation ago, instead of trees, the land here was covered in knotweed, a so-called “invasive” plant that thrives along the banks of urban rivers. Knotweed is vigorous, and not much else could grow. 

Then came a group called Friends of the Moshassuck, who wanted to help the land support different kinds of plants and wildlife without using herbicides. They planted native hardwood trees--six trees a year for two decades--with the goal of shading out the knotweed beneath a growing canopy. They drew water from the Moshassuck River for the thirsty seedlings. 

The birth of a forest cannot be rushed, but this one seems to be doing well! The knotweed has mostly given way to oak, maple, redbud, walnut, tulip, black gum, and ash trees, and “the restored site,” as FOM reports, “will eventually mimic New England's original forests, providing not only species diversity but greater vertical structure that benefits wildlife.”

Come to the Wild Place--everyone is welcome!

By Greg Gerritt, with Sam Coren 

About ten years ago, Greg Gerritt, the watershed steward for Friends of the Moshassuck, found a population of Fowler’s Toad tadpoles in a small rainwater-fed wetland in Providence’s North Burial Ground. Ever since, Greg has watched, studied, and filmed the little guys in an effort to understand the ecosystem of the rainwater pool and the creatures that inhabit it. 

So far as anyone knows, they are the only population of Fowler’s toads in the city, and the first to be reported in at least a hundred years. 

Many seasons of study and observation led Greg to an understanding that the pool collected all of the stormwater runoff from the area, and that it held water for 3 weeks. It would continue to stay relatively full if each week it received at least .9 inches of rain in no more than 2 storms (it takes nearly a half inch of rain to work through the obstacles and runoff into the pool.) 

The vegetation at the pool is changing rapidly, however. Cattails squeeze out nearly everything else, and the water is getting shallower thanks to the silt that is carried in from the watershed during storms.

Amphibians are the most endangered taxa among the vertebrates, with extinctions rampant. Many amphibians are dependent upon wetlands, which are also endangered. 

Friends of the Moshassuck recognized the need to protect this special place, and proposed that the center of the pool be deepened, to extend the toads’ breeding season for a few additional days each season before the pool went dry. 

In 2018, FOM did a small excavation to deepen the pool about 6 inches over a 10’ x 25’ area in the center - in partnership with the Providence Parks Department and with a permit from the RIDEM. 

The pond is a critical habitat for the toads, not to mention tree frogs, migratory birds and wetlands plants. But that’s not all. It also functions as “green infrastructure,” absorbing and filtering runoff from surrounding roads. In this way, the pond helps to protect the river, and ultimately Narragansett Bay, from lawn fertilizers and other pollutants.

There are very limited sites in RI where it would be appropriate to enhance or create amphibian habitat while managing stormwater. It takes a special site, but the work FOM has done in the North Burial Ground has influenced people working with spadefoot toads to create habitat. Their work can also serve as an inspiration, and perhaps a model, for other green infrastructure projects here in Providence and beyond.

Friends of the Moshassuck has a YouTube channel,  MoshassuckCritters , which documented the entire process and project. 

Please check it out to learn about these tadpoles and other critters!

By Sam Coren (published by  Contingent Magazine )

Providence’s North End is a landscape of ancient valleys and rivers. But the rivers, especially, get lost in the built overlay. Unlike the nearby Woonasquatucket or Providence Rivers which have benefited from thoughtful efforts of renewal and restoration, the West River goes mostly unnoticed, and those who attempt to follow its path likely get lost in the process. (continue reading article through  Contingent Magazine )

Read the article online at  Contingent Magazine 

By Traci Picard

Waterways are a source of life, and a source of death. People faced serious concerns in early Providence as they navigated life with and around water. This is a selection of causes of death associated with waterways in the Providence area according to Arnold’s Vital Records of RI, 1636-1850. Arnold sourced these from Providence-area newspapers, and most but not all deaths occured in the Providence area. We invite you to explore this history by walking around the North Burial ground, Providence's first municipal cemetery. You may find more stories, carved in stone.

Note that in some cases, what was reported might be considered today an inaccurate cause of death. The determination of cause of death has come a long way since this time, and these are shared from a history point of view, not a science point of view. While we may feel tempted to laugh at or poke fun at some of these examples, the reality is that it wasn’t very funny at all in the moment. 

Arnold, James N. Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850: First Series ; Births, Marriages, and Deaths ; a Family Register for the People. XIII and XIV. Vol. XIII and XIV. Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1891.

•  Buried in the Bay: Searching for Drownings at Swan Point Cemetery , by Eric Weiss

It is accepted that we turn to history books to learn about the people of the past, but what can we learn from onsite investigation? We invite you to wander the many historic cemeteries of Providence. You might choose to see how many water-related deaths you can identify, and wonder what that tells us about the lives of those who came before us.

By Eric Weiss

One of the most interesting changes in the style of headstone carving over the last 175 years is the quantity and type of content carved into the stone. One example of this was the trend in the 1800s to include the manner and location of death if it was by drowning.

Was a death by drowning considered more honorable than if by disease or injury, which were not typically carved into headstones? Or was there an implied bravery in facing this sort of death? The only other cause of death commonly found carved into headstones of the era is for soldiers killed in battle. Drowning victims buried in Swan Point Cemetery were often identified with the body of water in which they drowned, or the name of the ship on which they were traveling when it sank, if known. For example, still legible on her grave are the words:

“Tabitha Harris, Wife of Abner Peckham, Drowned from the Metis, off Watch Hill, Aug. 20, 1872.” 

The sinking of the Metis was a well-known disaster of the day, so perhaps that’s why it merited a mention. Also found on headstones pictured here are drowning locations: the Deleware [sic] River and the Isles of Shoals (off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine).

Names feel very official to us now, they are written down and recorded. But in the post-contact history of what is now known as Providence, naming was much more fluid. Sometimes, place names were interchangeable. Addresses as we know them now did not exist, and neighborhoods, whose borders were fuzzy, were literally re-shaped by bulldozers: hills flattened and water filled in. “India Point” refers to the point itself, and “Fox Point”, which started out as a point, will refer to the neighborhood that grew up around it. The editors and authors acknowledge that this can be confusing, and we are doing our best to bring clarity to this changing historic landscape of names.

•  The Evolution of India Point , by Traci Picard
•  The Lost Neighborhoods of Fox Point , by Sam Coren
•  Slavery , by Traci Picard
•  By the Sweat of our Brow , by Sylvia Ann Soares
•  Italian Immigration to Providence on the Fabre Line , By Aimee Bachari, Education Director and Astrid Drew, Archivist from the Steamship Historical Society of RI
•  An Intro to Providence Area Shipwrecks , by Charlotte Taylor
•  The Cost of Power , by Traci Picard

By Traci Picard

On the watery edge of Providence, two bits of land pointed out into the upper Narragansett Bay: Fox Point and India Point. This has long been a place of great convergence, where the Seekonk River met the Great Salt Cove to become what is sometimes called The Providence River. The land was hilly and irregular, the air was salty and windy, and the water was brackish and untamed. High tides periodically flooded the edges of these points, and the fishing was good. 

When Roger Williams crossed the Seekonk River, he was fleeing from Massachusetts Bay Colony, currently called East Providence. Legend tells us he landed his little boat on a particular rock and was met by Indigenous Narragansett  folks with the greeting “What Cheer, Netop.” This moment of colonization turned the river into a border between two colonies, and positioned India Point as the outer edge of Rhode Island.

Early settlers made their homes close to what is now North Main Street. As the 17th century turned into the 18th, the town grew and moved from a very small community focused mainly on survival and farming towards an economy based more on maritime industries. This included boatbuilding, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and commerce with China and India. 

Descendants of the wealthier families who had colonized Providence in the 1600s began to amass great swaths of property, and some set their sails towards development of the waterfront. John Brown was one of these, a major developer of the India Point area. He, alongside his 3 brothers and their associates, built wharves for their ships to dock, to repair and to move goods. His brother Moses built a bridge across the Seekonk and charged a toll to fund his continued building projects elsewhere. John and Nicholas Brown built “distill houses”, where their workers distilled juniper-y gin and turned molasses into rum, in a process deeply connected to slavery in the Carribean. They built “ropewalks”, warehouse-style buildings where rope was made from fiber, twisted by hand for shipboard use. The Browns also built a candle factory, where workers - both free and enslaved - made spermaceti candles from whale’s head fat. The labor of enslaved workers like Sharper Brown and Mintus Martin was an important contribution to the wealth built here.

 By the late 1700s, the neighborhood which we now call Fox Point became quite built up, with stores and warehouses, counting houses for money and boarding houses for sailors. This was the peak time of maritime trade in Providence, an economic “boom time” when privateers mingled with first mates and self-emancipated sailors in oyster cellars, and caroused in raucous houses of ill repute. Providence became a hub of marine insurance and banking, and masses of people and goods flowed into and out of this port, and all over the world. 

As the 1800s dawned, India Point was clearly a major site of labor for many Providence residents. The work of so many is what made this growth and development possible: stevedores to load and unload the ships, sailors to sail them, cooks to keep everyone fed and preachers to save their souls. The hands of laborers built and repaired the boats and wharves using trees felled by lumberjacks, they caulked the ships with pine tar to keep the water out and whitewashed them with lime from oyster shells. Shopkeepers set up along South Main Street to sell everything from Bibles to underpants, and apothecaries opened shops to help relieve pain and “cure” syphilis.

In this time of growth and immigration, all was not well. Wealth disparities deepened and became more entrenched. Opportunity was not distributed equally, and while some built mansions, others struggled and suffered in crowded tenements. Working class and poor people, single women and Black and Indigenous residents were rarely able to access this great wealth, and a charity industry sprang up to advocate for temperance, house orphans and rescue “wayward women”. The Fox Point neighborhood was a major site of such efforts, including the Home for Colored Children, Harriet Ware’s efforts to assimilate the Irish and the Tockwotton House for “bad boys”.

By the late 1800s, the India Point area and the adjacent Fox Point neighborhood had solidified as a site of maritime labor, and waves of immigrants moved through the bayside blocks. In the 1870s, Cape Verdean and Portuguese migrants began to embrace the area as home and built community as the land and culture of Providence was changing and shifting. Cape Verdean sailors in particular built up an industry of packet ships, running back and forth from Northeast ports to the Cape Verde islands for trade, tourism and migration.

The railroad was a major force for change in the second half of the 1800s, taking some of the commercial business away from ships and onto the trains. The railroad companies were hungry for land and ate up big chunks of Providence real estate, contributing to redevelopment and the filling, moving and flattening of land and waterways. As the 1800s turned into the 1900s, this small, densely packed neighborhood would go on to face new challenges, and find new solutions.

By Sam Coren

There is a big parking lot in the Fox Point neighborhood, behind the Coffee Exchange. Just south of that lot, there used to be a hill, forty feet high, called “Foxes Hill” in colonial times and “Corky Hill” in the mid-19th century. Its highest point was roughly where Brook Street meets George M. Cohan Boulevard today.

By the 1860s, a neighborhood had risen on the now-lost hill and surrounding lands. We know that a lot of Irish laborers lived there in a cluster of densely built villages with names like Nannygoat, Yellar Row, Green Yard and Duck Village(ProJo 12/25/1966.) Other kinds of people probably lived there too, for, as Patricia Rubertone reminds us, Fox Point in the 19th century was a place “where people of color, including Native Americans, descendants of enslaved and free African Americans, and Cape Verdean, Southern and Eastern European, and Irish immigrants lived as neighbors, interacted, and intermarried” (Rubertone, 33).

In any case, officials branded Corky Hill as a slum and in 1873 the City, under Mayor Doyle, seized the land beneath for redevelopment. “Enlisting the labor of over a thousand unemployed men,” as Rubertone writes, “the city filled swampy runoff, tore down 146 dwellings and slaughterhouses, and leveled Foxes Hill [aka Corky Hill], and in the process cleared nearly 400 acres for urban expansion” (Rubertone, 32).

Where did all those people go? Maybe on to other parts of Fox Point, or the Irish neighborhood of “Dogtown” in Upper South Providence. 

What did they do with all that earth? They hauled it a half mile or so up the street to the edge of the Seekonk River, where it was dumped and spread to create Gano Street and a new, artificial shoreline. 

For a brief time, the newly flattened lands along the shore of Providence Harbor must have turned to meadow, not unlike the grassy edges that you see along George M Cohan Boulevard today. But it was not long before a new wave of migrants, most of them Portuguese and Cape Verdean, took up residence. 

The waterfront was a bustling site of industry and trade at this time. Cape Verdean sailors in particular worked as longshoremen and built up an industry of packet ships. For many years, they ran back and forth from Northeast ports to the Cape Verde islands for trade, tourism and migration. They attended mass at Our Lady of the Rosary, which was built in 1885 and stands to this day (though some congregants broke away in 1904 to found the Sheldon Street Church at 51 Sheldon Street). 

People came and went over the following decades, but the land of the former Foxes Hill remained home to a vibrant Cape Verdean community. Things changed in the 1950s and 1960s, however, when government and local colleges set their sights on Fox Point once again as a site for redevelopment. The new Interstate 195, in particular, “cut directly through the Cape Verdean neighborhood, destroying existing houses and businesses, despite community-led resistance” (Forgotten Fox Point blog)

 People of Cape Verdean and Portuguese descent still call Fox Point home. So too do Native Americans, African-Americans, and even the descendents of Irish laborers. But the patch of land along the embankments of I-195 was not always so unpeopled, or so flat, nor did it need to be. 

 FURTHER READING / VIEWING 

By Traci Picard

The trans-Atlantic slave trade spanned about 400 years from the 1520s to the 1860s, involved multiple countries and impacted millions of people, the effects of which can still be felt to this day. (This is an extremely important part of history, and we suggest you take advantage of the resources listed below to learn more about the bigger story.) Let’s zoom in on the history of chattel slavery in Rhode Island, and especially how this City’s participation in that larger story played out.

The first thing we need to confirm is that yes, Rhode Island was a slave state. People were enslaved here. There are documented sales of enslaved people, newspaper ads for “runaways” who self-liberated and wills which show us how humans were passed down as property. Our cemeteries contain the remains of enslaved people, and they deserve an acknowledgement. Their stories are real, and they matter to us today. The story of slavery in Rhode Island is not just the story of locally enslaved people, but also how they fit into a much larger system. This system was entirely dependent on waterways to move around people and goods.

Rhode Island slave traders were responsible for nearly 1,000 voyages that brought enslaved people, against their will, from the West Coast of Africa to ports in the Carribean, Southern Colonies/States and New England. Great profits came to people in Rhode Island from both direct and indirect participation in this trade. And even after the slave trade was abolished and enslaved people were freed here in Rhode Island, there was still significant participation in the system of slavery. Rhode Island mills used slave-grown cotton, and sold finished cloth to southern plantations. Molasses, sugar, tobacco, rum, and cacao all flowed into Providence, and so did the money.

Slavery was a system with many parts which supported a lot of industry here in Rhode Island. What are some of the other parts of this system? First, the captains of slave ships traded goods for enslaved persons on the West Coast of Africa. Where did these “goods” come from? People in Rhode Island produced these goods, and others worked moving these goods around the state, and onto the ships. 

Where did these ships come from? Many hands were at work building the boats. Carpenters worked with wood, but where did the wood come from? Someone was supplying that wood; felling trees, and processing it, then moving it to the right location. Others were designing the boats, and we can note that slave ships, designed to maximize human cargo, were drawn and built by people who were “just doing their job”. They also needed to design and build dinghies, oars, anchors and sails.

Navigation was an asset in this system and the knowledge was often learned on the job. But where did the tools they used come from? Compasses, maps, charts and books were all designed and manufactured, and these were part of the system too.

Once the ship was built, the captains needed to supply the voyages. Food, medicines, rum, barrels, clothing, needles and thread to repair sails, rope, caulk, weapons, tools, fuel, candles, trade goods...

Who paid for all of this? Funding of these voyages came mainly from Rhode Island-based  investors who would pay upfront costs, hoping to get a return on their “investment” in human cargo. Rhode Island companies were active in providing marine insurance for the voyages, and an accountant  was paid to keep balance sheets and keep track of “gains” and  “losses”, not as human lives but as a credit or debit in the book. The books were made by someone, too. Logbooks, paper, pens and stamps were all part of the system.

Laws and policies were passed to support all of this, and tax money from these ventures funded the cities and towns as well as the colony, then state, of Rhode Island and eventually the United States. Infrastructure was built by both private investors and these cities and towns, such as wharves, docks, roads and canals, to enable this system to work more efficiently. 

Rhode Islanders didn’t just supply plantations in the Carribean and Southern US with goods, food, medicines and clothing, they also bought the goods that plantations produced. But some went even further; a number of people born in Rhode Island worked for and even owned plantations. Wealthy families would send their sons to plantations or ships to learn the trades, and Southern families would send their sons to college in the North. For example, Providence-born Richard Arnold owned two plantations in Bryan County, Georgia, and Oliver Bowen divided his time between Providence and Augusta, Georgia.

This brings us to where we have put this story on the map: Market Square. The Market House was built in part by enslaved men, like Pero Paget and freed men formerly enslaved, like Jacob Shoemaker. It was funded in part by money related to slavery, and surrounded by businesses with direct and indirect ties to this work. From the Crown Coffee House, where one of the “deals” done was selling an enslaved woman to the homes of Cyprian Sterry, Joseph Brown and Samuel Chace, direct beneficiaries of stolen labor, this former town center is a place where we can acknowledge and meditate on this history.

The waterways of Providence may give us many thrilling stories, but they also give us a burden. Actions have consequences, and all aspects of the trans-Atlantic triangle trade had grave consequences from which we, as a culture, are still trying to recover today. The Atlantic Ocean may represent pleasure, relaxation and joy to some, but at the same time it is a place of mourning. It is a place which holds the remains of people who were captured and enslaved, and this fact speaks to us of great loss. As we are enjoying and appreciating the stories of water, so too must we remember this legacy, honor those who were harmed and act to help right this past wrong.

 Resources for learning more about trans-Atlantic Slavery 

This piece by Providence storytelling treasure Sylvia Ann Soares is a reflection on the oral histories she gathered from her own family and community members. She tells us about the lives of Cape Verdean longshoremen of her acquaintance from the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence, a community since scattered due to redevelopment and modernization of labor. Join Sylvia as she walks us through some history, and her own memories of laborers, seamen and their struggle to survive.

by Sylvia Ann Soares  

From early times, men raced along shores waving, yelling to unload incoming ships. ‘Longshoremen.’ By the early 1800s, Irish, Jewish, Portuguese and a few African American and Cape Verdean people depended on Rhode Island waterways for their livelihoods. By the mid-1800s, sailing up Narragansett Bay and Providence River, came more Cape Verdeans who would greatly contribute to the economy of Rhode Island. 

The Schooners Ernestina and Madalan docked near today’s Point Street Bridge, unloading cargo and passengers amid joyous waterfront reunions and onboard musical celebrations. ‘Bidons,’ barrels of clothing, supplies, and food, along with money and a lock of hair, were shipped to relatives in the drought-ridden, impoverished Cabo Verde. 

In 1886, traveling via Australia, fifty-one-year-old Cape Verdean whaler and  missionary Manuel Ricardo Martin (1837-1905) held spiritual gatherings off South Water Street for Fox Point Cape Verdeans. He was Walking Foreman for Zephaniah Williams, a Shipping Agent for the Providence and Stonington Steamship Line. Williams influenced the Central Congregational Church to hire Martin as Missionary, which supported Martin’s Portuguese Mission, which later became Sheldon Street Church.  

My Oral History of Cape Verdean longshoremen of Local ILA#1329, funded by the RI Council for the Humanities, revealed the multi-faceted lives of these men:

Immigrant Manuel Querino Ledo (1894—1974), son of a Cape Verdean seaman and whaler, returned to Providence from a seaman stint. He took menial jobs, experiencing first-hand what he called “slave labor”– meaning the exploitation of workers in dangerous conditions for pittance wages. Ledo organized strikes for the Providence Hod Carriers and, confronting vehement opposition of stevedore companies, instituted a labor union for Rhode Island dock workers. 

With the Hod Carriers in 1926 Ledo ‘backpacked’ up to 3,000 bricks daily, some up 400 feet, constructing the Industrial Bank Building (‘Superman Building’).But all was not well on the job.  The Providence Evening Bulletin of October 11, 1926 noted that Ledo’s Hod Carrier strike of over 400 workers affected other buildings as well, including “the addition to the Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company” on the Providence River. By 1928, Ledo was President and Business Agent of the Hod Carriers and Laborers Local Union #257. In 1965, it became LIUNA International Laborers’ Union of North America.

Ledo and the waterfront coal trimmers worked hard, they shoveled and levelled mountains of coal dumped by clam scoops onto barges. They swept the ship’s hold for clam scoop access and positioned the transfer barges headed for the west bank of the Providence River.  

Incensed by disparaging labor policies conditions and his experience of racism, Ledo, ‘The Chief,’ became Head Organizer, Founder and first Business Agent of the local International Longshoremen’s Association ILA #1329, chartered in 1933. John F. Lopez, Funeral Director and later NAACP President, was the First President. Ledo continued as a ‘stickman,’ placing beams for easy access of forklifts under lumber piles.

By the 1950s ILA #1329 was the first predominantly Cape Verdean labor union in New England,  working for the stevedore companies of  John J. Orr and Nacirema. Longshoremen labored at Davisville, at Field’s Point and at India Point. They loaded and unloaded goods, piled loose lumber with hooks, lifted 55 gallon oil drums, buckets of pig iron sometimes needing two men lifting, scrap metal, steel, can goods, cement bags over a hundred pounds and more. Cars were driven out of deep toxic ship holds. This author recalls her father Arthur S. Soares coming home for lunch with hair, eyebrows and mustache encrusted with cement. He passed years later from lung cancer.

Arthur S. Soares (1916-1988) son of Cape Verdean immigrants, was the longest running President of ILA #1329, sixteen years within 1954-1974. The first Union official and Cape Verdean/Black person to be President of the Propeller Club of the United States, Port of Narragansett Bay, he served the stipulated year 1973-1974. Soares was the first such man to hold both leading offices in these major unions concurrently, locally and likely in the nation. The 1974 Propeller Club cited his distinctive service and 1987, and named him 1987 Maritime Man of the Year.

International liners brought families to Rhode Island, including Japanese, Italians, Norwegians, and more. Harold Fontes (1932-2012,) ILA #1329 Shop Steward and Deacon of Sheldon Street Church, befriended a German couple. He and his wife took them to the popular former Providence Department Store Ann & Hope. The women remained pen pals exchanging Christmas gifts.

Longshoreman Sidney Lima (1928-2010) the first minority in the Providence Fire Department in 1953, was promoted to Lieutenant in 1971, becoming the Department’s first Cape Verdean/Black officer. In 1977 during a fire raging through Providence College's Aquinas dormitory, he managed to coax panicked girls down a four story ladder. Bodies of girls who had jumped lay all around under sheets. On the way home, Lt. Sidney wept. 

Avelino ‘Chapette’ Rose (1924-), Superintendent of John J. Orr Company later became the First Cape Verdean/Black Processing Sheriff for the State of Rhode Island.

Marshal Bento (1944-), son of a longshoreman anticipated and bemoaned the advent of container ships, which lightened labor but lessened employment.

Davisville and Field’s Point ports thrive today, but India Point Port has transitioned.

 ADDITIONAL READING / RESOURCES 

Many of the current residents of Providence have a history of immigration, whether it was recently or long ago. This city is a place where a great variety of cultures and histories come together. Whether we come from a nearby state, a distant country, or somewhere in between, the common thread is travel - the movement of people across land and water. This story introduces us to a small piece of that great puzzle of movement through the Fabre Line: a shipping company which made many voyages from Europe to Providence in the early 1900s. Collier Point Park allows us to consider a site where so much of this travel intersected. 

By Aimee Bachari, Education Director and Astrid Drew, Archivist from the Steamship Historical Society of RI

By the late 19th century, the peninsula of Italy was brought under one flag, unifying the regions into what we know as Italy today. Decades of internal strife had left widespread poverty. Diseases and natural disasters swept through the new nation, but the nascent government lacked the necessary money and tools to bring aid to its people. Between 1880 and 1920, the economic crisis following Italy’s unification worsened and political and social unrest intensified. At the same time, transatlantic transportation became more affordable. And news of American prosperity came to Italy through returning immigrants and U.S. recruiters. An estimated 4 million Italians immigrated to the United States.

Immigration to Providence, Rhode Island, before 1914 consisted mainly of people of Italian or Portuguese descent, replacing the previous wave of immigrants, the majority of whom were from Ireland, France, Canada, and Switzerland. Many Italians left Europe because of poor economic conditions; Rhode Island was attractive because of the need for inexpensive labor in the textile mills. Many settled in Federal Hill, Silver Lake, the North End, Johnston, North Providence, western Cranston and West Warwick. They worked in the mills or on small farms. 

The demand for immigrant labor was so great that the Fabre Line selected Providence as a port of call in 1911. At the beginning of the 20th century, Providence began projects to improve the harbor at the head of Narragansett Bay to allow for transatlantic shipping. Rail lines connected it to the rest of the country, and in 1909, voters authorized $500,000 to be allocated to purchasing and improving shore property. In addition to these factors, the Line felt Providence was marketable to immigrants, especially to the Italians and Portuguese, because of the city’s already-established ethnic communities. The Fabre Line’s Madonna would sail from Marseilles, France, on June 3, 1911, and visit Italy, call in the Azores and then continue on to Providence and New York. Between 1911 and 1914, the Fabre Line carried 30,000 passengers to Providence, most of them immigrants.

World War I (1914-1918) slowed passenger travel. The federal Literacy Test Act of 1917 also limited immigration. It required immigrants over the age of 16 to be able to read “not less than 30 nor more than 80 words in ordinary use.” Laws and war deeply affected immigration, but so did the general American attitude after the war and the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. As immigration began to surge once again, this time with Slavs, Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Portuguese and Italians, some Americans viewed these new immigrants as threats to American values and culture. Nonetheless, by 1920 the Fabre line resumed business at pre-war levels, especially with its immigrant travel. 

The next decade brought additional setbacks in immigration traffic for the Fabre Line. The Emergency Quota Act became law on May 19, 1921, and took effect July 1. It added two new features to American immigration law: numerical limits on immigration and the use of a quota system for establishing those limits.

The second legislative act aimed at limiting immigration was more stringent. The National Origins Act of May 24, 1924, put a cap on immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe. At the time, Americans felt that these people with different linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds could not be assimilated. This attitude toward immigration continued through the Fabre Line’s operation in Providence and lasted until 1965 when immigration laws were relaxed.

With these increased restrictions, the Fabre Line sought to diversify and include more eligible immigrants. In 1923, it began service eastward in the Mediterranean. The Providence Journal began reporting the nationality of these new immigrants. They included: persecuted Armenians from Turkey, Christian Syrian and Lebanese fleeing Muslim rule, Greeks, Jews from a number of countries, and Ukrainians and Romanians leaving the Black Sea area. 

During the 1920s, Providence was ranked third in immigrant-receiving ports along the Atlantic coast. More immigrants on the Fabre Line disembarked in Providence compared to New York during the 23 years that Providence was a transatlantic port of call. Immigrants came to the United States for many reasons throughout the years: economic hardship, religious persecution, war, or famine. Whatever the reason, steamship companies like the Fabre Line reaped the benefits. Passenger travel, with immigrants making up the largest portion of passenger manifests, kept the Fabre Line afloat economically. Immigration began to slow down significantly and the economic downturn of the 1930s forced the Fabre Line to end its operations in Providence in the summer of 1934.

Check out our  social studies lesson  on this topic.

More on the Steamship Historical Society:  www.sshsa.org  

Historians tell us that Providence was chock-full of ships. Big ships, little ships, wooden ships, steamships...maritime culture looms large in our stories, pictured in paintings, engravings and early photos of Providence. But where did all these ships go? Some were dismantled for their wood, and some were sunk on purpose in the Narragansett Bay. Others crashed, leaked and/or burned. Several were used as infill along the shore, and a few went on to live a second life in another town. Bits of these ships remain below the surface of our waterways, and sometimes emerge, ghostly reminders of this city’s salty past. Bold Point Park and the adjacent Green Jacket Shoals area is one of the locations where we can explore these remains.

by Charlotte Taylor

Even before Roger Williams arrived in Providence, it was almost certainly a hub of water traffic, with the Narragansett and Wampanoag people traveling its rivers and the bay in dugout canoes. After the city was founded, vessels from up and down the coast, from the Caribbean and across the Atlantic (including hundreds of vessels that were part of the slave trade), visited its harbor, though Newport was a busier hub of commercial activity. When the British occupied Newport during the Revolutionary War, however, Providence became Rhode Island’s primary port. In 1775, the Continental Congress ratified Rhode Island’s earlier resolution to assemble a Navy, authorizing the state to construct 26 ships of war, many of which sailed down the Providence River and upper Narragansett Bay.

After the Revolutionary War, Providence supplanted Newport as the state’s primary city, and its river was lined with commercial wharfs. Over the next two hundred years, occasional hurricanes devastated the city’s shipping, starting with the Great Gale of 1815.  

Welcome Green recorded the disaster in his history of Providence--

“Without a pause she smashed through the bridge, swinging her bowsprit into, and wrecking the upper story of the Washington Insurance building, as an angry elephant with his tusks destroys an enemy without stopping in mid career, and sped onwards till she reached the firm land at the head of the cove where she ended her career forever. Through the gap which she made poured other craft and wreck stuff till the shores of Smith’s Hill and the Moshassuck River were strewed with the wrecks of three ships, nine brigs, seven schooners, and fifteen sloops, besides houses, lumber, casks, and every imaginable sort of material that the angry flood had raised from the shores below and flung to the end of its reach. The succeeding vessels passing through the breach in the bridge had, by striking against its sides, widened it till no bridge was left. Nearly every vessel in the harbor had gone that way, and one sloop was carried into the limits of North Providence. All the vessels in the harbor, save two, had been driven from their moorings. As the waters abated—almost as rapidly as they rose—a large sloop was seen reposing in Eddy Street, between Weybosset and Westminster streets, against a three-story brick house, her mast showing proudly above it.”

The hurricane of 1938 was also unkind to the ships moored in Providence, tossing them helter-skelter. For instance, the storm surge left the Estelle perched on a dock on the east bank of the Providence river, and the steamship Monhegan was swamped at the Dyer Street wharf.

One of the most dramatic disasters was when the barge Harrison, of the Texas Oil Company, spontaneously combusted with 135,000 gallons of oil still aboard. The company’s wharf was destroyed, and a quarter mile of the upper bay was covered in burning oil, scorching other vessels before they could be pulled to safety.

To see shipwrecks in the Providence area, visit Bold Point Park in East Providence. There you can see the remains of derelict vessels abandoned at Green Jacket Shoal, a shallow area to the north of a large floating dry dock, where ships were repaired in the late 19th/early 20th century (many pilings from the dry dock still survive). At least 2 sidewheeler cruise ships, 17 scow barges, 4 sailing ships, 3 harbor steamers, 2 steam/diesel boats, and 1 schooner barge were abandoned there, and remnants of these vessels can still be seen above the water.  You’ll also be able to see the remains of a large modern barge used during the construction of the highway bridge.

 Read More on the Great Gale and the Green Jacket Shoal 

By Traci Picard

 Hydropower Video Intro 

 Marine and hydrokinetic energy Video Intro 

 Steam Engines Video Intro 

 Coal 101  Video

 Impact of coal-mining 

•  Filled in and Paved Over: Excavating the Layers of Field Point , by Traci Picard
•  The transformation of Fields Point and the new Save the Bay headquarters , by Katy Dorchies, editor, on behalf of Save the Bay
•  A Brief History of Wastewater Pollution in Providence , by Topher Hamblett and Katy Dorchies, editor, on behalf of Save The Bay
•  The Tallest Building You’ve Never Seen: The Providence Combined Sewage Overflow Tunnel,  by Sam Coren

By Traci Picard

“Throughout history, Narragansett Bay has been central to the region’s transportation, military, textile, fishing and tourism needs, becoming a dumping ground for industrial waste and sewage along the way.” -Todd McLeish, Saving Narragansett Bay

Early Colonial Field’s Point: 1700s-1800s

Field’s Point is located on the border of Providence and Cranston, right along Narragansett Bay in what’s now the Washington Park neighborhood. It is a great example of the many, sometimes drastic, changes in topography and use that have occurred all over Providence since colonization. It was the edge of a wild and wonderful Bay, where sea creatures lived in clean salty water. It was habitat, wetlands, floodplain, a place for people and animals to hunt and gather. Originally part of an irregular coastline with a little island called “Starvegoat” by colonists, it’s been filled in, flattened and paved over so much that this history can be difficult to imagine.

Early in the settling of Providence, the point was named after Thomas Field, a colonist who built a sturdy little wooden house there in the late 1600s. It became a place used for farming, a lookout point, and a grazing spot for domesticated animals. As Providence began to emerge as a port with significant maritime trade, Field’s Point was used as a marine hospital.  

Many waves of transmissible diseases like Smallpox and Yellow Fever affected Providence during the mid-1700s to mid-1800s. They began to arrive at the Port of Providence along with people and goods arriving from all over the world. Providence’s citizens wanted the porcelain cups and fine silks, the workers and the books, the molasses and the quinine gathered from foreign countries...but not the infectious diseases which sometimes arrived alongside these goods. A major source of transmission was people aboard the ships arriving from ports in the Carribean, South America, West Africa, India, China and the American South. These people were sailors and sea-people as well as migrants, enslaved persons and other workers.

Over time, a variety of strategies were put into place to help prevent these outbreaks, with varying degrees of success. One such strategy was instructing ships coming up the Bay to stop at Field’s Point, as it was the edge of the city and therefore much less populated. Quarantine stations were set up for ships with signs of outbreak and at times of known outbreaks, every ship was quarantined. They were to remain for a set amount of time and watch for signs of illness, taking that time to air out and occasionally “smoke” (to light plant material or substances like sulphur on fire and apply the smoke to goods, in order to disinfect) their cargo and speak with a representative from Providence. At times, the ship would arrive with passengers already suffering from a serious illness, and they would be cared for, or buried, near Field’s Point.

Quarantines may have helped determine if anyone aboard was ill, but they were hardly foolproof. Airing out, sunning and smoking goods worked great for the germs killed by exposure to UV light, time or mildly antimicrobial wafting of smoke, but this describes only a certain percentage of diseases. Additional inspections of goods and people sound great in theory, but only if the Captain was both honest and observant, and the inspector had the skills to truly read the signs of illness and determine the risk..

Leisure and Industrialization: 1800s-1950s

Soon after this move, in 1942, Field’s Point was designated to host an emergency shipyard of the Walsh-Kaiser Company. They further filled in the area with massive amounts of sand and fill and paved over it, in order to build their workplace. Because of World War II, the country was in great need of ships to wage war with. The Shipyard built warships and employed a lot of Providence workers, but as soon as the war ended, the Walsh-Kaiser Company departed the area.

Around this time, the City of Providence chose this location as a landfill. They began dumping debris on the shore, eventually filling in the waterway between the mainland and Starvegoat/Sunshine Island. All kinds of household waste and construction debris was deposited here for years, making a kind of garbage bridge that remains to this day. The water quality inevitably worsened until shellfishing was banned due to high levels of contaminants. Generations of people treating our Bay as a dumping ground caught up to us, and the people of Providence are still trying to recover from this mindset today.

Modern Restoration of Field’s Point: 1970-Present

 Save the Bay , an organization dedicated to restoring the health and beauty of the Narragansett Bay, eventually acquired land at Field’s Point and has been instrumental in helping Providence move towards cleaner water through advocacy, education, policy-making, habitat restoration and monitoring. 

In the interim, Johnson and Wales University built their second campus in the adjoining area, and the other side of the point is now occupied by highly paved and fenced land supporting the fossil fuel industry, metal recycling and vehicle storage. Despite the challenges, Save the Bay has created an access point for the people of Providence, with a fishing pier, a kayak launch, walking trails, a tiny beach and excellent birdwatching. Visitors can see a wide variety of bay critters like mussels, clams, oysters, periwinkles, Osprey, hawks, ducks, swans, seagulls, eels, a wide variety of fish, horseshoe crabs, jellyfish and sea plants like rockweed, bladderwrack and eelgrass.This little piece of land has seen so much over the years. It exemplifies the idea of land as a utility, to be shaped according to the perceived needs of the time. 

Field’s point  was used to advance the real and perceived needs of a growing urban center, with a less than ideal thought process around how that would affect the environment and the future. The uses have changed, but even more so the actual land itself has ebbed and flowed, suffered harm and (to some degree) recovered. Field’s Point is beautiful, and not because it is pristine or picturesque. It is beautiful because it is still here. It is beautiful because it is a little piece of resilience and wildness in a sea of pavement and commerce. It is beautiful because you can get there by bus or by bike. It is beautiful because it welcomes the visitor with wind and sun and drizzly clouds and salty breeze. It is beautiful because the plants that grow here are badass weeds, and it is beautiful because it is ours. The only constant here is change...and Seagulls. Seagulls are forever.

Andresen, Robert L. Providence Shipyard: Walsh-Kaiser Company, Inc., Shipbuilding Division, Providence, R.I., 1943-1945. Providence: Lithographed by Bank Lithograph Co., 1945. 

Cady, John Hutchins. The Civic and Architectural Development of Providence: 1636-1950. Providence, RI: The book shop, 1957. 

By Katy Dorchies of Save the Bay

In the 17th century, Providence’s Fields Point was carefully-tended farmland, owned and operated by its namesake, Thomas Field. As centuries passed, and human activity in the area increased, the site ultimately became better known for the municipal dump it housed than for the rustic scenes of the time of its naming. 

Until 1871—when Betsy Williams died and left the City of Providence the land that would become Roger Williams Park—the 37-acre Fields Point Farm was considered to be the city’s premier park. In the early 1900s, Fields Point remained popular for a famous dinner hall—Colonel Atwell’s Clam House—and as an ideal day trip destination, complete with two beaches and the Washington Park Yacht Club. 

During this era, a small island could be spotted off the southern coast of the point. Originally dubbed Starved Goat Island [the editors note that because spelling was not standardized until well into the mid- to late-19th century, different spellings of this Island’s name exist], it became home to a state children’s hospital in the early 20th century and was renamed Sunshine Island. When the Hurricane of ‘38 passed over Sunshine Island, it destroyed the facility and the island fell out of use—however, its mainland cousin did not. 

The City of Providence began using Fields Point as a landfill in the 1950s. Due to the sheer quantities of deposited waste alone, the gap between the mainland and the island gradually filled in. Before long, the site was abandoned, designated a brownfield—until the local environmental nonprofit Save The Bay identified it as the perfect destination for its future Explore the Bay Center. 

“From the very beginning, our goal was to create a space for the community,” explained Maureen Fogarty, director of operations for Save The Bay since 1995. “We envisioned a site that would serve as a hub, not just for Save The Bay, but for our students, for community groups, and for anyone looking to connect with the upper Bay.” 

The designs for the site included a new headquarters for the organization, as well as public grounds and a pier to promote access to Narragansett Bay.

“We sought to build a community site, and find a home for Save The Bay, but we also wanted to stick to our roots,” said Fogarty. “By selecting Fields Point, we created an opportunity to demonstrate what was truly possible when it came to site reclamation.”

After acquiring a lease on the property from Johnson and Wales University, Save The Bay broke ground on the project in November 2002. But restoring a brownfield is no small feat. 

First, Save The Bay enlisted engineers to reshape the shoreline with a rocky seawall to prevent erosion, creating a brand new salt marsh in the process. Then, in keeping with brownfield restoration best practices, the entire site was capped with a geosynthetic fabric to keep the underlying layer of toxic material from tainting future efforts. A layer of clean soil and new vegetation was placed on top. 

Croxton Collaborative Architects, P.C. designed the building to be a shining example of the latest in environmentally-friendly design. The structure supports solar panels and a “green roof,” the latter of which incorporates native grasses to provide insulation and absorb rainfall, managing stormwater. 

Four years, and many additional fundraising efforts later, the building formally opened in 2005, and Save The Bay has anchored itself at Fields Point ever since. In 2019, the opening of a public pier completed the project. 

Today, the site—located at 100 Save The Bay Drive, behind Johnson & Wales University’s Harborside Campus—offers residents from Providence and beyond a public access site to Narragansett Bay. The grounds are open to the public from dawn-dusk, year-round, and the public pier is open April-November. 

By Topher Hamblett and Katy Dorchies, editor, on behalf of Save the Bay

By the early 1900s, the Cities of Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Newport and Fall River had constructed “state of the art” wastewater facilities to move sewage and runoff away from city streets and directly into the Providence River, Mount Hope Bay and Newport Harbor. While this innovative solution assumed, or hoped, the pollution would simply wash out to sea, the reality was that it choked the Upper Bay and urban rivers with raw sewage. 

In 1972, the federal Clean Water Act sought to eliminate the discharge of untreated municipal and industrial wastewater to make all American waterways safe for swimming and fishing, and supported the distribution of billions of dollars in grants across the country—but progress was slow. 

Providence’s Fields Point plant found itself in the crosshairs of the United State Environmental Protection Agency in 1979, when it was cited as one of the worst wastewater treatment facilities in the United States. The agency ordered the City to fix its aging facility, which was in such disrepair that globs of waste, or “greaseballs,” regularly washed up on the shores of the Providence River and Upper Bay. 

When Providence refused to comply with the EPA order, the local environmental nonprofit Save The Bay sued the City for violating the Clean Water Act and supported legislation that transferred control of the plant from the City to a newly-created, quasi-public agency: the Narragansett Bay Commission (NBC). (In the ensuing decades, NBC turned the chronic pollution source—and national embarrassment—into an award-winning wastewater treatment facility, and took on the challenge of tackling the raw sewage overflow problem that had plagued the upper Bay for nearly a century.)

Save The Bay continued to call for improvements to wastewater infrastructure, saying in a 1979 newsletter that, without significant public investments in these facilities, “it would take Rhode Island 32 years to bring its sewer systems to acceptable operational capacity,” and that, “With 62 million gallons of partially treated sewage entering the bay each day, we simply don’t have this kind of time. It looks like citizen activism at the state and local levels will have to be the leader.” 

Rhode Island voters embraced the challenge, first voting in favor of a $15 million ballot question for statewide wastewater treatment facility improvements in 1979, and then approving another $87.7 million for upgrades to the Fields Point treatment plant the following year.

Despite public enthusiasm for improvements at Fields Point, another major polluter was still at large: the Blackstone Valley District Commission, a regional wastewater plant dumping more than 500 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Seekonk River each year. Like the Fields Point plant, the BVDC used a combined sewer overflow system (CSO) that merged sewage pipes with stormwater pipes. During rainstorms, these pipes would overflow, belching a foul mix of raw sewage and polluted runoff into the river. Tides and currents carried the pollution into the Providence River and Upper Bay, causing the frequent closure of thousands of acres of shellfishing grounds.

In the 1980s, 90 pipes were discharging approximately 2.5 billion gallons of untreated waste into the Bay, and a mere half-inch of rain was enough to trigger sewage overflows. As a result, certain shellfishing areas were closed 200 days per year, costing fishermen across Rhode Island an estimated $1.5 million.

In 1990, Save The Bay and the Rhode Island Shellfishermen’s Association united to demand an end to the BVDC’s overflows. A 1990 Save The Bay newsletter explains that, during a rally on the Seekonk River, “More than 200 angry shellfishermen braved rain and rough seas to bring their banner-laden vessels from up to 16 miles away to the rallying point at the Narragansett Boat Club,” where the two organizations announced the filing of a lawsuit against the BVDC, Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and the cities of Pawtucket and Central Falls for violations of the Clean Water Act. 

When the DEM gave the BVDC another 18 months to study potential solutions, Save The Bay vowed to “continue to fight for deadlines to stop raw sewage discharges into the Seekonk River, despite the DEM’s issuance of a lax permit for the state’s worst sewage treatment facility.”

In the days before a public hearing on the BVDC’s permit, Save The Bay staff hung a net over a Pawtucket discharge pipe, capturing the contents of a sewage overflow event. On the day of the hearing, staff placed the net—containing garbage, condoms, tampon applicators, and toilet paper— on the steps of the Rhode Island Department of Health, dubbing it “A Day’s Catch on the Seekonk River.” Citizens packed the hearing and demanded action. In 1991, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed legislation merging the BVDC with the Narragansett Bay Commission. 

In 2001, NBC broke ground on a massive, three phase project to reduce raw sewage overflows; in 2018, commencement plans for the third and final phase of the project were announced. The NBC estimates that, since 2008, over 9 billion gallons of sewage and polluted runoff have been captured and treated. Thousands of acres of upper Bay shellfish beds have already reopened.

by Sam Coren

Imagine a beautiful summer day at the beach: children splash and swim as their parents sun on shore; a line forms for fresh-caught oysters, people fish from surrounding boats and piers. 

Now imagine that this beach is on the shore of India Point, Collier Point, or even Fields Point, right here in the city of Providence. 

It may seem really far-fetched. The Providence River has a bad reputation, and riverside communities on the South Side are still burdened with harmful shoreline industries like scrap metal yards and petrochemical plants. Believe it or not, though, the river is cleaner than it has been in about a hundred years, and getting cleaner. 

How has this come to be?

For most of the twentieth century, the inland rivers conveyed a heavy toxic burden: “sewage solids, metals, oil, grease and bacteria,” lawn chemicals, and industrial wastes (NBC). Wastewater treatment plants tried to capture most of this stuff, but after heavy rains, a lot of it drained out into the Providence River and Narragansett Bay. Why? The Narragansett Bay Commission explains: 

“...when our sewers were built 150 years ago, they were designed not only to take dirty water from homes and businesses, but also water that fell on streets when it rained. These are called combined sewers, because they hold a combination of rainwater and used water from buildings...” (NBC).

The “stormwater overflow” from these old sewers is toxic for most of the creatures who live in the rivers and Narragansett Bay. By the early 2000s eelgrass beds in the Bay had dwindled from 100,000 benthic (meaning “underwater”) acres to only 100.  High levels of nitrogen, much of it runoff from suburban lawns, produced frequent algae blooms which deprived fish of the oxygen they needed to live. High bacteria levels from sewage led to constant summer beach closures. 

But there is now another, hidden river beneath the streets of Providence’s inner harbor--300 feet beneath, to be exact, where no sound or sight from the aboveground city penetrates. This river flows through a vast rockbed called the Rhode Island Formation, a 300-million-year-old realm of gray sandstone, siltstone, shale and coal--mineral traces of a time when carbon swamps and shallow seas covered much of the earth.

The hidden river itself is not nearly that old. In fact, it is the youngest of the local waterways, and a completely artificial one at that, carved not by glaciers or quakes but by workers at the helm of a giant boring tool. 

You won’t find fish in this river, better known as the Combined Sewage Overflow Tunnel, or CSO for short. But it is not without life. On some days, in fact, it is teeming with little critters called coliform bacteria. These critters live in poop, and it is poop, along with runoff from dirty streets, that the CSO was built to carry and to keep away from the waterways above.

Managed by the Narragansett Bay Commission, the CSO helps Rhode Island meet Clean Water Act guidelines. During storm events, it captures sewage overflow and runoff from the many paved surfaces of the aboveground city. These flows are then gradually “returned to the system for treatment after the storm” (NBC). This is important because it is stormwater and sewage that contaminate the bay after big rains, killing marine life and forcing beaches to close.

The main spine of the CSO runs for three miles; it begins beneath the Moshassuck River on the North End, then follows the Providence River all the way to a headhouse on Allens Avenue.  A second, narrower tunnel branches off the main spine near the State House, to link up with a stormwater “interceptor” on the Woonasquatucket River. A third branch crosses the Providence River to Fox Point, where it connects to yet another interceptor on the Seekonk River. 

Work on a new tunnel begins this year: another “deep rock tunnel” beneath Pawtucket and Central Falls, 2.2 miles long and 30 feet wide, that will terminate at the Bucklin Point Wastewater Treatment Facility on the Seekonk River in East Providence. 

(You may wonder: when those tunnels were built, where did they put all the excavated bedrock? Lots of it went to the Central Landfill in Johnston. But some of it now forms the embankments of the relocated I-195, which perform double duty as levees on either side of the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier.)

The Bay has begun to heal from more than a century of toxic outflow, and that is thanks in large part to the CSO! Since the 1990s, bacteria levels have declined by 50%. Nutrients levels have also declined sharply as the overflow tunnels have captured poop and lawn fertilizers. Eelgrass is returning, with help from URI biologists, and the RI Department of Environmental Management has begun opening new shellfishing beds in the Providence River. 

People can dig for quahogs on the Providence River again, for the first time in at least seventy years. Which is pretty amazing, and a reason to hope for the continued resurgence of the Bay.

See you at the beach!? 

FURTHER READING AND WATCHING

“Combined Sewer Overflow - Narragansett Bay Commission.” Accessed March 25, 2020.  https://www.narrabay.com/programs-and-initiatives/combined-sewer-overflow/ .

Kuffner, Alex. "Final piece of $1.5B Bay-saving tunnel network gets EPA funding Will complete huge stormwater-management system." Providence Journal (RI), September 21, 2019: A1. NewsBank: Access World News. 

Narragansett Bay Comission. Narragansett Bay Commission: Water Works! Accessed July 14, 2021.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN25vVYeLII&t=4s .

Phua, Chelsea. "Starting from seed - URI tries a new way to restore the Bay's eelgrass." Providence Journal (RI), August 19, 2004: C-08. NewsBank: America's News. 

•  Cloudy with a Chance of Fish , by Traci Picard
•  Follow that Herring: The Journey of Herrings up the Woonasquatucket River Fish Ladders , by the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council
•  There Goes a Glacier , by Iris Picard
•  Manton Avenue Bathhouse , by Sarah Zurier
•  Where the Skunk Cabbage Grows: Swamps of Providence , By Traci Picard
•  An alternative way of mapping the Woonasquatucket River , by Casey Merkle

By Traci Picard

It was a hot May afternoon in 1900, unseasonably hot, and the workers were taking off their jackets as they walked home, or to the market, or to the pub. This was a time before people got pinged by weather alerts on an iphone, but a few pointed at the sky and said “Hmmmmm....” to anyone who would listen. Clouds or no clouds, though, they all had places to go and things to do, and didn’t stop to wonder too much.

But then. A sudden wind.

“Help! My hat has blown off into the Woonasquatucket!”

“Ach! My scarf has flown into a Sycamore tree!”

The wind grew stronger, and stronger, the temperature dropped by about 20 degrees and hail began to fall. It was loud, it was chaotic, and some were afraid. The people of Olneyville took cover, and not a moment too soon. 

Cries began to ring out across the Square, and beyond:

“Poissons!” 

“Pesce!”

“Fisk!”

“Pescado!”

“Ryka!”

“Fish! Get a bucket!”

A brief and very intense storm visited Olneyville, and brought with it a rain of fish. Were fish really raining? No, because rain comes from clouds. But they were indeed picked up from the water, and dropped back down in the vicinity of Harris ave and Joslin St. No one counted exactly how many fish were disrupted from their happy little swims, but everyone seems to agree: it was a lot. Some allege the Pout alone numbered in the hundreds, but the Perch numbers seem harder to pin down.

There are stories of people collecting these fish, mostly to eat, in buckets and newspapers and whatever else was handy. People were quite excited about this event, and they brought the fish into bars and pubs around Olneyville, telling everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to witness this event all about it. We can neither confirm nor deny whether they embellished a bit, but we do know that some people were a tad alarmed. 

Superstitious residents even refused to eat these fish, although that might have had more to do with their knowledge of what humans were dumping into the Woonasquatucket river than their fear that these aquatic beings were sent by evil forces.

The storm was brief, but it frightened people, and it did do some damage, bringing what the Providence Evening Bulletin called “a long list of minor disasters”.  Trees were blown over, streetcars were delayed and horses and carriages were overturned. And an overturned horse is not a happy horse.

Now, as we walk through Olneyville, we can call to mind this Tuesday in 1900. We can hear the cries, feel the wind on our face, and smell the garlic and onions sizzling in oil, the fish hitting the hot pan. We can look into the river and see fish swimming, happy that they are in their right place, and remember the biggest lesson of the 1900 Olneyville Fish Tornado: be prepared.

By the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council

By Iris Picard

If you’ve ever visited Block Island, walked along the beaches of Matunuck, or found a boulder looking mysteriously out of place in a Rhode Island park--you’ve seen the evidence of the last great Ice Age. Like its New England neighbors, Rhode Island gets pretty cold in the winter. Climate change makes weather events more intense, and we’ve seen snow flurries well into April and skidded across black ice on dark back roads. Despite Rhode Island’s annual freezes,  there are no glacial sheets covering our little state, so how are rocks and landforms in Rhode Island linked to glaciers?

The answer is that 50,000 years ago, Rhode Island was covered in ice. The most recent Ice Age actually peaked around 18,000 years ago, but there’s a wide range of history where ice all over North America was freezing and melting and moving around. During this time, huge sheets of glacial ice crawled slowly southwards. The force of their movement pushed dirt and rocks out of the way, similar to how a snow plow pushes snow and debris. Once the glaciers reached the coast, most of that debris and dirt was deposited into the Atlantic Ocean, and eventually there was enough of it to reach above the water and form Block Island. This is the same way other coastal islands like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket came to be as well.

Once all that sediment had been deposited, the glaciers eventually moved back. They didn’t literally flow back north, but around that 18,000 year point, the ice in Rhode Island began to melt and recede. When this happened, any other rocks and dirt that had been stuck in the giant sheets of ice were abruptly dropped. This created what is referred to as a terminal moraine, a big pile of rocks and sand that makes up most of the landscape of Charlestown, Westerly, and Narragansett. The sediment dropped by glaciers specifically is called glacial till, and it covers most of Rhode Island, on top of the other rocks that were already present before the glaciers moved in.

The way glacial till got to the northern parts of Rhode Island, especially the lower-elevation coastal areas like Providence, is through glacial outwash. Even after dropping the majority of the sediment it carried, the melting glacier released water that carried the smallest sediment in streams down to the coast to add to the rocky beaches.The bigger pieces were dropped more abruptly, becoming glacial erratics that are scattered across Rhode Island in the trail of the receding glacier. It can be hard to tell glacial erratics from normal boulders, but they usually stand out in their surroundings. Cobble Rock in North Smithfield, Dr. John Champlin Glacier Park in Westerly, and Lincoln Woods State Park in Lincoln are all places where you can see glacial erratics in their natural habitat. Keep an eye out for other features of glacial landscapes, like round, shallow kettle ponds and rocky glacial till, all across southern Rhode Island!

By Sarah Zurier

By the turn of the 20th century, personal cleanliness had emerged as a cultural and public health issue across American cities. In Providence, the vast majority of poor and working class residents lived in crowded tenement housing without indoor plumbing. They shared common wells, and hauled water inside by hand. What was the solution? State of the art, publicly-funded bathhouses erected in poor and immigrant neighborhoods.

In 1911, the City of Providence opened its first municipal bathhouse in Franklin Park on Atwells Avenue. Two years later, City Aldermen voted to build two new bathhouses: one on Manton Avenue in the Olneyville neighborhood and one on Quaid Street in the North End. They appropriated $47,041 for construction, though costs reached $64,000 by the time the two bathhouses were completed in 1914. 

The one-story Manton Avenue bathhouse was clad in tapestry brick, and its gable roof was supported by bracketed eaves and covered in slate shingles. The interior plan was divided down the middle, with separate showers and dressing rooms for men and women.  

On October 13, 1914, the Evening News reported “record numbers” of residents using the two new bathhouses: 730 baths given in a single day at the two new facilities on Manton Avenue and Quaid Street. “At this rate it looks as though more baths will have to be erected soon in order to meet the constant and ever increasing demand.” 

The reporter noted that “At each house there are 40 dressing rooms and 24 baths, divided equally for males and females….Four attendants are employed at each house, two males and two females. Both houses are under the direction and management of the Commissioner of Public Buildings. Persons attending these baths, bringing their own towel and soap, are allowed to bathe free, while those desiring the use of these articles furnished by the attendants, are charged for their use the nominal sum of five cents.”

Over the course of 1915, there were 56,136 baths given at the Manton Avenue Bathhouse. By 1916, Providence offered twenty municipal bathhouses: on America Street, Atwells Avenue, Benefit Street, Branch Avenue, Chalkstone Avenue, Courtland Street, Davis Park, East Street, Hopkins Park, Ives Street, Jenkins Street, Point Street, Putnam Street, Quaid Street, Roosevelt Street, Temple Street, Veazie Street, Vineyard Street, Webster Avenue, and Willard Avenue.

The Providence Preservation Society attributes the closing of Providence public bathhouses to a 1953 zoning law that required hot running water in all residential buildings. The bathhouses that had survived closed one by one. Today only three of Providence’s bathhouse buildings remain: 

• the Manton Avenue Bathhouse
• the 201 Pocasset Avenue Bathhouse built ca. 1926, now used as a church
• the Wickenden Street Bathhouse built ca. 1926, now an elementary school library

Next time you are on Manton Avenue, look closely at the bathhouse. You’ll find a lot of architectural clues that reveal its history. Splish-splash!

SOURCES

City of Providence, Seventieth Annual Report of the City Auditor (City of Providence, 1916): 137. City of Providence, Seventy-Sixth Annual Report of the City Auditor (City of Providence, 1922): 165.

Record Numbers Use the New Bath Houses,” The Evening News October 13, 1914.

“Municipal Baths Are Popular,” Providence Magazine, September 1916: 594. 

“Fox Point Bath House,” Providence Preservation Society,  https://guide.ppsri.org/property/fox-point-bath-house  (accessed 6/19/2021). 

By Traci Picard

Merriam-Webster defines swamp as a noun:

1 : a wetland often partially or intermittently covered with water

especially : one dominated by woody vegetation

2 : a tract of swamp

3 : a difficult or troublesome situation or subject

Swamps sometimes get a bad name in popular culture. They are often viewed as a problem to be dealt with, a place things go to get lost. When people say they’re “swamped” with work, they are not rejoicing at the pace or workflow of the moment. “Swampy” things are a stand-in for scary things, for ill health, for problematic politics, for a place which fails to live up to our sunny, sanitary standard of how land should perform.

Maybe we are wrong about this, though. Swamps of Providence were doing an ecological  job. They provided habitat for plants and animals, a place for water to live so it couldn’t go too far awry and flood our homes. Swamps have long given us stories and lore, reminding us that land does not have to be developed to be of value. 

This ship has sailed now. Providence was a place with many bodies of water. We know rivers, yes, The Cove and Narragansett Bay of course, but what about smaller bodies of water? Ponds are lovely, and easy to admire. But swamps? Where did they go? Providence’s many swamps have been drained, filled in, removed. There are very few places where we can go to understand the former topography of Providence, but Neutaconkanut Hill is one of these places. It is a place where we can still see water acting on the land; certainly not an untouched old growth forest, Neutaconkanut and its land and water have been manipulated by people over the years. But it’s still uneven and irregular, hilly and swampy, with little streams running throughout and boulders sitting right where they landed, long before any of us were born. There are creeks which flow relatively unimpeded, and two separate swampy areas.

When walking here, we can squint and suspend disbelief and pretend, because this may be the closest we can get to feeling those older Providence swamp vibes. In honor of these past swamps, now gone, we can enjoy those still with us, and protect them, and share the space with urban wildlife, frequent visitors to the area.

The early Colonial Records of Providence features many discussions about swamps. You can read them yourself, which I recommend. For an introduction to former swamps, here’s a list of Providence swamps named in the early 1700s:

Absolute Swamp

Ash Swamp

Cat Swamp

Cedar Swamp

Cold Spring Swamp

Deep Swamp

Great Swamp

Great Pine Swamp

Joshua Swamp

Little Swamp

Long Swamp

Maple Swamp

Nipsachuck Cedar Swamp

Pine Swamp

Popple Swamp -”Popple: (of water) to flow in a tumbling or rippling way; a rolling or rippling of water.”

Spruce Swamp

Wallers Swamp

Winsor Swamp

Casey Merkle shares an alternative way of mapping the Woonasquatucket River, using algae collected from four sites along the River, likely polluted with dioxin – a chemical compound that was a byproduct of industrial practices during the 1940s and 1970s.

MATERIALS

• ALGAE: Thalassionema, Melosira, Ceratium Lineatum
• ZOOPLANKTON: Daphnia, Copepod
• PAPER
• THREAD
• PIMENTS: Iron Oxide, Chromium Oxide

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF DIOXIN

This piece alludes to an alternative way of mapping the Woonasquatucket River. The backdrop is the foundational layer for this map, representing the wetness of the water seeping into the surrounding land. This map uses paper made from algae collected at four distinct sites along the Woonasquatucket River. The light blue thread shows the route of the Woonasquatucket River in 2021. In dark blue is the river’s path in 1939. 

Along this stretch of the Woonasquatucket is the Centerdale Manor. This site is located at 2072 and 2074 North Providence. It was polluted with dioxin, a chemical compound that was a byproduct of industrial practices during the 1940s and 1970s. Dioxin is a dangerous chemical known to cause cancer, hormone interference, chloracne, and other health effects. The EPA strongly advises against any recreational use of the Woonasquatucket due to high levels of dioxin. Centerdale Manor is the source area for clean up of this EPA superfund site.

To stay up to date with the progress of this EPA superfund site, visit the  Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council’s website .

• Stay tuned for an introduction to Mashapaug Pond by one of its greatest stewards and storytellers, Holly Ewald!
•  Roger Williams Park and Questions it Inspires , by Traci Picard

by Traci Picard

When Roger Williams Park was created, nature was classified, sorted and separated. We see echoes of this design today; there are neat roads which wind through mown lawns, paths and bridges, rules and signage. The animals have their place, the plants theirs, and the artifacts another. Rose bushes are clipped, shrubs are trimmed and leaves raked up.

In the 1870s, when this park was designed, Victorian era approaches to nature influenced parks. Wild water was managed and contained, filled in and moved. Wetlands and buffer zones were minimized and technological interventions were implemented to keep it all under control. The space, much the same today as it was a century ago, is lovely to look at, and reflects a societal desire to keep calm and carry on.

I am particularly struck by the historic idea of this park as an “escape” for city residents. Parks are good, and green space is positive for our city. But what are we escaping from? Now we can question what necessitated this escape. Removing the vast majority of the plants and animals from the city was a choice, one that humans made. Clearcutting, infilling, flattening and destroying habitat were all choices. Distributing space, trees and yards inequitably was a choice, perhaps justified by setting aside a park “for the people”.

We are now seeing the consequences of these actions. A vast swath of Providence is covered by pavement or other impervious surfaces, leading to serious problems when water has nowhere good to go. Summer heat in a warming climate is distributed predictably to a city that was sorted the same way Linnaeus sorted his specimens: low income over here, wealthy over there. Black neighborhood, white neighborhood. Low density, high density. Healthy air over here, polluted air over there.

Great work is being done now to repair these past designs. People and institutions are making connections between what’s upstream and what’s downstream. The  Natural History Museum  has brought in an exhibition about urban nature, helping to tell the story that animals who live among us are as valuable as the “exotic” specimens who we visit in a zoo. The Zoo itself has moved from housing animals in empty cages and cement pits, just for viewing, to also doing conservation work and engagement, creating healthier settings for their charges. The Botanical Center has made space for people to learn and to grow food, and the ponds are full of wild birds. The Stormwater Innovation Center is also working in the park to mitigate some of our past mistakes, educate the community and  experiment with solutions .

Roger Williams Park was intended to be a space of pleasure for residents, and it has fulfilled that mission. It is a place of refuge, and also a place of questions.

Who designs public space, and whose values are reflected in that design?

Where does water belong?

How have past scientific ideas contributed to the ways we view and interact with plants and animals, both in mediated (zoo) and unmediated (vacant lot) spaces? 

What can we learn from the design decisions of the past, to approach the land and water more holistically than we have before?

By Sam Coren

Once upon a time (1871-1920s), the city of Providence pumped its drinking water from a 14-acre reservoir in Cranston, close to where Garden City stands today. Called the Sockanosset Reservoir, It was fed by the Pawtuxet River and surrounded by 113 acres of forested land, which buffered that water from industrial and household pollution. 

If you’ve ever been to the Garden City area, you might have noticed that the downtown Providence skyline is perfectly visible from the crest of Hillside Drive. That’s because the part of Cranston where the reservoir used to be is on higher ground. 120 years ago, this difference in elevation, from Cranston to Providence, meant that engineers could rely on gravity to do the work of pumping water to the urban core. For hilly places where gravity was not enough, “high-powered pumping stations” filled two holding reservoirs. One was on Fruit Hill, while the other occupied the site of today’s Hope High School (Diveglia).

Why was the Sockanosset abandoned? In part because of pollution: upstream factories and dwellings befouled the water before it even reached the reservoir, and the problem got worse over time. City officials also feared eventual shortages as the population of Providence and its suburbs continued to rise in the early 1900s, and people’s use of water intensified. As one journalist wrote in 1926: 

...the population of the city has grown from 68,904 to more than 267,000. The consumption of water per capita has also increased, indicating either that the city is getting thirstier, or that the use of the bathtub is wider spread. Providence now uses about 87 gallons of water a day for each one of its population. In 1910 this figure was 64 gallons, and in 1892 it was scarcely above 60 gallons (ProJo, 9/12/26).

With imagined scarcity and very real pollution in mind, the city abandoned the Sockanosset in the 1920s. Houses, shopping centers and roads took the place of its forested watershed, while the holding reservoir on Hope gave way to the public high school that stands today. 

In place of the old system, the Providence Water Supply Board, on behalf of the city of Providence, dammed the North Branch of the Pawtuxet River to create the Scituate Reservoir. To do so, the PWSB razed over 1,100 buildings and evicted 1,600 residents from the villages of Elmdale, Glen Rock, Ashland, Richmond, Kent, South Scituate, Ponagansett, Harrisdale, Rockland and Saundersville (Brussat). PWSB workers then seeded an extensive pine forest to buffer the lands surrounding the 5.3 square-mile reservoir from future development. 

In the following decades, as towns like Warwick were added to the reservoir’s service area, new suburbs boomed along the metropolis’s growing edge, while the North Branch watershed maintained its role as a woodlands buffer zone. 

Providence still owns the Scituate Reservoir, which now serves 60% of the state, and the reservoir, though far away, is the lifeblood of the metropolis. Without it, we would have no drinking water, no way to shower, and no way to flush our toilets. It is not just the water, though: just as important are the many acres of forested land that protect the reservoir from lawn chemicals, road runoff and other contaminants.  

Look at a map of Providence County, and notice how the Scituate Reservoir compares in size to the capital city. The reservoir is huge!  And the reservoir watershed--the forested lands that drain into those protected waters--is much bigger still, now comprising 92.8 square miles. Providence the city, in comparison, is only 20.6 square miles in size. 

Granted, the reservoir supports other cities too, including Warwick, Cranston, East Providence, North Providence, and Smithfield. But the fact remains that it takes a whole lot of undisturbed woods and water to support a thirsty metropolis. 

But then, do we ever stop to ask why our water must be pumped in from sixteen miles away? Because city water is not clean enough to drink, you might say. But why? Must “development” always mean contamination? 

Will we ever be able to drink again from the freshwater rivers that surround us--the Woonasquatucket, Moshassuck, West Rivers and Mashapaug Pond--as people did for thousands of years? Can we imagine a city with net-zero water pollution, within city bounds? 

We should not rule out the possibility. 

Until that day, and after, a toast to the Scituate and the Pawtuxet River for giving us life!

 “Did You Know? | Providence Water.”  Accessed July 14, 2021.

“‘What Am I Offered?’ Says Providence to the World.” Providence Journal (Providence, Rhode Island), September 12, 1926: 71. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.

Brussat, David. "COMMENTARY - Scituate's deep reservoir of history." Providence Journal (RI), August 11, 2005: B-05. NewsBank: Access World News – Historical and Current. 

DiVeglia, Angela.  “Hope Reservoir.”  Rhode Tour. Accessed July 14, 2021.

•  The Inner Harbor and the Convergence of Three Rivers , by Sam Coren
•  “A Mass of Liquid Filth”: The Road to Municipal Drinking Water , by Traci Picard
•  Where’s the Bathroom? Water in Colonial Providence , by Scott Alexander
•  Laundry Day in Colonial Providence , by Scott Alexander
•  Manna Bernon: Proprietor of the First Oyster House in Providence , by Traci Picard
•  The Great Salt River, Past and Future , by Sam Coren
•  Rivers of Concrete: The Highways of Providence , by Sam Coren
•  The Gathering Storm: The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier , by Sam Coren

By Sam Coren

Two rivers converge in downtown Providence: the 9-mile Moshassuck River, whose course originates at a pond in the Lime Rock Preserve of rural Lincoln to the north, and the the 16-mile Woonasquatucket, which begins in swampland around Primrose Pond in the town of North Smithfield.  As they draw closer to the capital city, nineteenth-century mill buildings, some now converted to apartments, begin to rise along their banks, along with tenement housing, auto-repair shops and pocket parks. Closer to downtown, the Moshassuck becomes a stone-walled canal, and the Woonasquatucket becomes an urban cove called Waterplace Park before resuming course along the downtown’s cobblestone river walk. The two rivers finally meet to form the Providence River, which runs between College Hill and the historic central business district before passing beneath the city’s Hurricane Barrier and ultimately feeding into Narragansett Bay.  

The rivers, which had served as a source of food for thousands of years, were badly polluted by the late 1800s. From 1874 to 1900, they carried sewage from the city’s burgeoning neighborhoods out to the Bay. As a consequence, “sewage silted up at the outfalls, many of them in docks around the inner-city harbors, and collected as ‘mud’ flats” in the Cove Basin not far from City Hall” (Castelluci).  At the time, City Superintendent of Public Health Dr. Edwin Snow described the Moshassuck as “a mass of liquid filth” (Warner, ii-16). As William Warner wrote, “the resulting smells, hardly imaginable today, explain the growing impulse (equally hard to imagine) to cover the river wherever possible” (Warner, 107). In any event, the rail-driven economy of the rising industrial city had little need for the downtown waterways, and by the early twentieth century, the inner harbor of the Providence River was almost entirely paved over.

The downtown port was rendered obsolete as a working waterfront by the 1930s, facing competition from the much larger Port of Providence rising south along the Providence River’s outer harbor. And the inner harbor’s nineteenth-century warehouses fell into disrepair as water traffic dwindled. 

The New England Hurricane of 1938 decimated the river’s wharves, and “the last night boat to New York stopped service” around the same time (Warner, 107).  Following the gale, the city decked over the downtown confluence of the Providence, Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket rivers to build a new central post office and federal building annex. Then, in 1946, the City Plan Commission (CPC) proposed running a North-South freeway directly over the Providence River’s course, proclaiming that “the foul open sewer, which runs through the heart of the city, will finally be subjugated” (Warner, li-22).

The CPC’s 1946 plan to inter the River’s sorry remains never came to pass, most of all because a regional power station stood in the way of the proposed freeway route. But a decade later, the City did build a highway bridge and ramps along the river’s outer banks, and the ramps permanently blocked access to the water on both sides. In the years to follow, the Providence River and its tributaries withdrew further from public notice, so much so that city planners failed to even mention them in a sweeping 1961 vision of downtown renewal.

Mid-century officials and downtown stakeholders regarded the Providence River as a nuisance. That the downtown district was built along the narrowed banks of the Providence on former marshland made it prone to infrequent but severe flooding. In the wake of one such flood in 1954, the Army Corps of Engineers proffered a long-term solution in the form of the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier, a monumental structure clamped to the bottleneck-shaped meeting point of the Providence River’s inner and outer harbors. This promised to “protect the major part of the high valued area,” an ailing but still viable central business district that included multiple government offices and a regional power plant (ProJo 5/25/55, 1).      

Three decades later, the Providence River--unburied, re-routed, beautified and apparently tamed--became the centerpiece of the City’s late-twentieth century “renaissance.” Beyond the Hurricane Barrier, however,  heavy industry continued to dominate the Southside waterfront. Here, in a flood zone, petroleum storage tanks, scrap metal yards, and cement mixers were the iconic mainstays of the Ocean State’s most toxic corridor. One of the biggest landholders, the regional electric and gas utility company National Grid, is now adding a liquefied natural gas facility to its riverside operations, despite sustained opposition from residents. The most recent proposal for this district, which many residents also oppose, calls for expansion of Liquid Propane Gas facilities in the Port of Providence. 

As this brief historical sketch suggests, the industrial City’s relationship to its namesake river has not remained static over the past century. Once a dead zone in every sense, the inner harbor has become habitable again for many kinds of fish, birds, and plants; accessible and valued as a public gathering place; and, for better or worse, a “prime real estate” zone. However, the heavily contaminated “working waterfront” that is the outer harbor severs the Southside neighborhoods from the coastline, while providing little in the way of community benefits. In this way, the waterfront bears witness to the social contradictions of the City at large, which ranked third among U.S. cities with the greatest wealth divides in 2018 (CBS News). 

On a summer eve, the riverside parks of downtown attract hundreds, sometimes thousands of people from around the region. They are drawn to the life of the river, which is inseparable from the city that surrounds it, and could be so much more abundant yet. 

 Sources and Further Reading 

By Traci Picard

Most people today accept the germ theory as the cause of most communicable diseases, but there was a long and bumpy road to arrive at this point. Throughout history, there have been a variety of theories to explain illness. From demons to damp air, miasma to sexy thoughts, humans have struggled to understand why we get sick. It’s easy to look at this idea from our modern vantage point and poke fun, but in most cases people were doing the best they could with the information they had. 

Providence, like many other cities, went through wave after wave of disease, and managed these outbreaks to greater and lesser degrees with early public health methods.  At the time, most people got their water from hand-dug wells, either those on their own property or the public wells shared by each neighborhood. Cisterns or rain barrels collected water, but these were not always well-sealed. Privately owned proto-water systems began to appear, but they were quite expensive and not exactly reliable. 

At the start of the 1800s, great strides were being made across the world to understand how diseases were spread. Links were made between sanitation, drinking water and illnesses like Cholera. Attempts were made to manage waste, but change was slow, and many resisted the new ideas. “Illness couldn’t possibly be caused by water! Could it? No, it’s….stuffy air. Poor people. Too much garlic.”

In Providence, Dr. Edwin Snow was named first Superintendent of Health for the state of Rhode Island in 1856, sparked by a terrible outbreak of Cholera in the two years before.  He worked tirelessly, inspecting houses and businesses, wells and basements. He made report after report detailing the need for improvements in the system of infrastructure, and traveled across this country to speak about the issue. He brought both local and national attention to issues with household swill and cesspools, and widely encouraged everyone who would listen to adopt preventive methods like quarantines and vaccines. Although he struggled to adopt the new ideas of germ theory, his sanitary actions helped many to avoid illness.

It was Snow who pushed the City of Providence towards building a sewer system. While we may now look back on this time and understand that they merely transferred the problem from the tenement yards to the rivers, it was a significant step towards the water treatment which we have now. Prior to Snow, the city mainly waited for “nuisance” complaints to roll in. And there were many, from overflowing privies to hogs running amok. But his approach was to get ahead of these problems, to do preventive care, so this was a pivotal moment for Providence. As Martin V. Melosi tells us in The Sanitary City, “The fear of fires and epidemics was a great motivator for change.”

After Snow retired in 1884, Dr. Charles Chapin took on the role. He was instrumental in bringing Providence’s sanitary infrastructure into a new era, building on the work of Snow and others to take on the challenges of a growing city. Increased urban density and new waves of immigration brought increased urgency to the field of public health. Public water systems were a huge part of how the city of Providence reduces outbreaks of illness. Diverting sewerage, or “rejectamenta and effluent” (Melosi), and keeping it away from drinking water was a massive step towards preventing Cholera, and this project happened in fits and starts over about 100 years. 

While there are still issues with drinking water, such as access for everyone and the ongoing challenge of lead pipes, we are now blessed with clean running water in most homes. Bubblers, water fountains, public bathrooms  and fire hydrants are all part of a system built up in response to this history, and we are the beneficiaries of the hard work and advocacy of those who came before. So let’s pour a drink of tap water and toast to the persistence and the labor of all who came before, and those who continue to make this system possible today.

 by Scott Alexander

The first English settlements in New England were located along the coastline for ease of commerce and travel. Often a clear spring or brook would be chosen as the center of a community. Such was the case with the founding of Providence by Roger Williams. After landing on the west bank of the Seekonk River near Fox Point and consulting with a band of Narragansett Indians, he rounded the point and continued up the Providence River north towards the junction of the Woonasquatucket and the Moshassuck rivers. Here at the base of a 200 foot hill near a spring, the new town began to take shape. (1) (Warren, p. 61.)

This spring was described as “... gushing forth from the hillside in a copious stream…” Roger Williams built his house across the street at what’s now North Main and Bowen, and religious and civil meetings took place around this gathering place. It was an anchor for the community.  Over time the spring was hidden under buildings until the 1930’s, when the area was uncovered.  A symbolic well now marks the site of the spring at the Hahn Memorial located at the center of the Roger Williams National Park. (2) (“The Wellspring of Providence”)

These water sources were natural meeting spots where the early settlers would congregate to share news and talk with neighbors as they brought buckets, pails and other containers to fill and transport water back to their homes. The effort required to bring several gallons a fair distance made anything other than essential uses difficult. This was a pretty effective disincentive on bathing and washing. It also contributed to the general lack of proper sanitation. (3) (Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, p.6)

Today, we’re accustomed to going into our bathrooms and having access to water just by turning a handle on the tub, shower or sink, but this wasn’t always the case.  I was amazed to discover that Providence had not one but TWO private systems of underground waterworks to deliver water to paying customers two years before the American Revolution. In March of 1772, John Field agreed to rent out half of his spring to at least 39 individual houses located around Eddy Point on the west side of the Providence River.(4) (http://www.waterworkshistory.us/RI/Providence/FieldsFountainSociety1772.pdf.). Another chartered corporation known as the Rawson Fountain Society came into existence in October of the same year supplying water from Fountain Street, on towards Westminster Street and to the waterfront by the Crawford Bridge.

 This was such a noteworthy event that it was mentioned in the Boston based newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy, on September 10, 1772:  

“We hear from Providence, Rhode Island, that an Aqueduct is now completed there, from Mr. Field’s Fountain to that part of the town called the Point, which was carried through hills and valleys, in a subterranean manner, the difference of ¾ of a mile. The water was conducted with such rapidity as to deliver 100 gallons in a minute, thereby supplying the inhabitants of the Point (who were before destitute) by small conductors leading there from with fresh water in their cellars, kitchens and chambers only by the turn of a brass key. This affair is the first of its nature ever attempted and affected in English America.” (5) (“Providence, Rhode Island”)

The “conductors” mentioned in the article were wooden tree trunks bored through the center and connected together, a precursor to modern piping. Some of these hollowed out logs have been unearthed during excavations over the years when more modern materials were being installed for delivering water to the city’s residents. The cost of joining such a venture was prohibitive to most individuals, about ten dollars a year in 1800 currency, when a day’s pay for a  laborer was one dollar. Only a wealthy few benefitted from the endeavor. (6) (Simister, p. 134)

  If you tour an early colonial house, you’ll notice that there are no bathrooms. The large open room might be divided with a curtain line dividing the kitchen space from the sleeping areas for the adults. Children, servants, apprentices, indentured and enslaved persons would be relegated to sleep up in the lofts or attics of the houses. In general, there was not a lot of privacy to be found.

If you needed to “go to the bathroom”, there were outhouses or privies located near the homes. As the towns became more densely settled, these facilities were located in the cellars. The waste was contained in tanks or pits until the “nightmen” came along to collect what was known as “night-soil”. When it was not convenient to go outside, chamber pots were used indoors. This meant that the contents would have to be disposed of and the pots cleaned for future use. (7) (Kempe, p. 10)

Regular bathing of the entire body was not a common practice; early settlers hardly ever undressed completely, much less bathed the entire body at once. Most people would do a quick washing of their face, neck, hands and armpits, a “sponge bath” with a damp cloth. Instead of a sink hooked up to a drain, one would use a basin and fill it with water. The bather would use whatever they could find to hold and pour the water, most likely made of wood or clay. The wealthy might have some fine china water pitchers and matching basins to display. They would need some type of cloth to serve as a face cloth and another to towel off and dry. When they were done, they would toss the dirty water outside.

 An actual sit -down bath was a luxury that was more of a dream than a reality. Few tackled such a mighty effort more than a couple of times a year. Misunderstandings also contributed to a limit for such endeavors, for it was believed that too much bathing would destroy your natural oils and leave you more susceptible to diseases. If one began to “reek”, there was perfume to douse on oneself or on a handkerchief to avoid offending or being offended. Clearly colonial America was, to the modern nose, a “grungy” place.

During the warmer weather, bathing in natural bodies of fresh water like rivers, ponds and lakes was more common. The challenge for bathing in New England came during the long winters. The great-grandson of John Adams remarked that “When the temperature of a bedroom ranges below the freezing point, there is no inducement to waste any unnecessary time in washing.”(8) (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) John Innes Clark, a resident living in a grand mansion on Benefit Street in Providence noted in December of 1797 that, “… the thermometer in our dining room even with a good fire being about 48 degrees.”(9) (Nylander, p. 75)

 Clean undergarments, shirts for men and shifts for women were exchanged as often as practical to maintain a sense of cleanliness. This also meant that it was necessary to have as many on hand as possible to exchange when needed and added to the laundry piles of the wealthy. The poor just kept on wearing whatever they had which was made of a poorer quality and fewer in number. (10) (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

By Scott Alexander

For most families, laundry was a weekly chore, always  done on the same day. Laundry day was a lengthy, exhausting production. It was so universally disliked as a chore, that it was often given to the younger daughters, hired help or enslaved people.. The day itself tended to be designated at the beginning of the week in order to tackle the hardest chores early. It may also have been because the ladies had been able to “rest” on the Sabbath (Sunday).(11) (Nylander, p. 130 )

It was truly a day-long process involving much water carrying, fire building, rinsing, scrubbing, and “beating” of the clothes. Beating here is quite literal,for one would have to hit the heavily soiled clothing by using sticks, rocks and washboards to remove the stubborn stains and dirt. Ideally, the chore could be accomplished outside with clothes being moved through a long series of soaks, rinses, and scrubbings before being laid on bushes or pinned to a line to dry and bleach in the sun. Clothespins were not used before the 1700s. This meant that a lot of space was needed to do the actual cleaning and hang the clothing to dry.  Many towns had communal areas set aside for everyone to gather and accomplish this unliked task. After all, misery loves company! And this was historically a place for women of lower social status to exchange information and support each other. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t always cooperate and some washings might be scaled back so the wash could be hung within the house, usually in the kitchens and keeping rooms around a large fire. This was especially true in the winter because the wash might freeze to an outside line or in an unheated room.(12) (Paul Revere House)

How often were items washed? Just because you wore an item did not mean that it would be washed after taking it off. Several items were used over and over again, such as gowns, vests and coats. Body linens, like shifts for women and shirts for men, worn underneath were intended to protect outer garments from body odor and personal soil.  Aprons and frocks protected the outer garments from external sources of soil and dirt.

The following is a detailed account and a logical sequence of the different stages for laundry:

“Assort the clothes, and put the white ones to soak, the night before, in warm water [which you first hauled in from your preferred source]. … In assorting the clothes, the flannels are to be put in one lot, the colored clothes in another, the coarser whites in a third and the fine clothes in a fourth lot. Wash the fine clothes first, in suds; and throw them, when wrung, into another tub of suds. Then wash them in the second suds, turning them wrong side out. Then put them in a boiling bag, and let them boil, in strong soapsuds, for a half an hour and moving them about with a wash stick to keep them from yellow in spots. Take them out of the boiling water into a tub, and rub the dirtiest spots. Then rinse them, throwing them, when wrung, into a tub of blueing water. Then wash the coarser white articles in the same manner. Then wash the colored clothes… Lastly wash the flannels.”(13) (Nylander, p. 135)

Housewives or their servants  were also in charge of making their own soap, which was usually made in large batches during the spring. They would collect the ashes from the larger fires during the winter months and mix them with animal fat (tallow) and water to make a hard soap known as lye soap.(14) (Ibid., p. 135-6).

Water infrastructure in Providence has changed a lot over the past 300 years. Some things have gotten easier, others harder, but one thing is for sure: “the good old days” required a lot of work just to survive!

 Further Reading and Bibliography on Water and Laundry in Colonial Providence > 

By Traci Picard

History is filled with mysteries. There is much we can’t know, and many who lived their whole lives without being recorded in depth, or at all. Sources conflict, and misinformation is repeated. The story of the first oyster house in Providence is an incomplete story, but one worth telling. This is what we know:  

In the early 1700s, Emmanuel Bernon and his family were enslaved by French Huguenot and settler Gabriel Bernon in Colonial Providence. This family included a woman named Eve, who was probably Emmanuel’s mother, and a cousin who was, confusingly, also named Emmanuel Bernon. Emmanuel was manumitted (legally freed from slavery) in 1736 and he changed his name to Manna Bernoon. Soon after, Manna opened the first known Oyster and Ale House in Providence on Towne Street, which is now called South Main Street. The exact address is not known, mainly because exact addresses were not yet invented, but we do know that it was close to the waterfront. Bernoon was a culinary pioneer who kicked off a style of eating place which thrived in Providence for the next 200-plus years, changing with the times but always rooted in a love of the briny little bivalve.

Manna Bernoon lived with his wife Mary on Stamper’s Street, which was about a 20-minute walk from his Oyster House, near what’s now the University Heights Apartments. Mary worked as a laundress. We don’t know Manna Bernoon’s birth year, but it appears that he died in 1761, and his will and inventory [see image] give us some idea of the tools he used to run his business.  It is not known whether Mary Bernoon worked at the Oyster and Ale House, or whether she took over the oyster business after being widowed.

We can look to the inventory of Manna Bernoon, taken after his death, to learn something of his life. Historians like to use wills and inventories to help fill in the gaps of people’s lives, especially when those people left little or no written records. Here is Bernoon’s inventory,  transcribed as written in 1762. Note that nonstandard spelling was normal at the time.

His wearing apparel

3 Puter [pewter] plates, 2 basons, and 7 puter plates

6 puter porringers and 15 spoons

1 tankard, 1 teapot, i teapot and 2 salt sellers

2 iron tramels, a pr. of handirons and part of a chair

1 iron pot, 1 iron kittle and 1 iron skillit

23 drinking glasses, 10 earthen plates

4 earthen juggs, 28 glass bottles and sundry other earthenware

2 earthen bowles, 3 old hoes, a space and a narrow ax

1 pr. of fire tongs, a pr. of worsted combs, a box [of] iron and 3 heaters

1 desk, 3 chests and a box

2 tables, 2 spining wheals and 6 chairs

Salt pork and 4 empty barrels

Indian corn, sheeps wool, flax and tow

1 pair of bellows and some necessarys

1 bead, 2 bed steads, and all the beading belonging to them

By Sam Coren

Picture yourself on the Pedestrian Bridge above the Providence River. Sunflowers bloom in a field on the River’s eastern bank. Birch trees, willows, and sycamores grow along the water’s edge, along with marsh grasses, clover, and, when the lawnmowers are quiet, beds of wildflowers. 

On the western banks, rows of still-young trees line the edges of wide, tidy lawns. The lawns do not not support much wildlife, but they are a feasting ground for Canada geese, who have evolved from migratory to year-round residents as turf grasses, their favorite food, have spread at the hands of homeowners and parks departments across the continent. 

Kayakers ply the gentle waters. Ducks, mergansers, and swans drift by as pigeons scavenge on the shores. Fishers occasionally cast a line. People come and go. The groan of motorbikes in the near distance rises to a roar, and then recedes. 

This is a pretty vibrant place most days, where many kinds of creatures gather. It is also a very new place, where, not long ago, what is now solid ground was marsh and tidewater; where instead of pavement and domesticated grass, an even greater variety of birds, fish and plants abounded, and where Indigenous people gathered from around the region for trade, news and ceremony.  

Rhode Island is the ancestral homeland of the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Niantic, Pequot, Nipmuc, and Pokanoket peoples. Providence is built on Indigenous land, as many enduring place names and street names here attest. There is the Seekonk River, the Woonasquatucket River, Weybosset Street, and the Pawtuxet River and Village, to name several.  

According to John Hutchins Cady, what is now commonly known as the East Side was known as Moshassuck in the Narragansett language. Moshassuck was a densely forested series of hills before English settlers turned it to house lots and English-style farms (Cady, 4, 14). 

Out along the Bay, the landscape of pre-colonial “Providence” was more like a park than a forest, with little in the way of undergrowth, and lots of space between trees. It was a carefully managed ecosystem, rich in game and good for farming, which the Narragansett people had achieved through a regimen of controlled burning. As William Cronon writes, “fires of this kind could be used to drive game for hunting, to clear fields for planting, and, on at least one occasion, to fend off European invaders” (Cronon, 50). 

What is now the “inner harbor” of the Providence River was a much bigger body of water in pre-colonial times: a Great Salt River surrounded by marshland. Present-day Kennedy Plaza was underwater, “and the shore of the river, below [Weybosset Point], followed the curve of [what became] Weybosset Street in distances ranging from 80 to 160 feet south of that highway.” There was a creek, too, somewhere between Dorrance Street and Weybosset Avenue,“ as one historian details, and “marsh covered a part of lower Westminster Street and the area northward to the cove” (Cady, 71).

There were no bridges joining east to west. There was, however, a very narrow point along the Great Salt River--right around where Westminster and Weybosset Streets meet the river today. The English, probably following the Narragansetts, called this Weybosset Point, and it was here that people crossed from the marshlands to the foot of the hill.

The eastern bank of the river carved a straighter path along the foot of Moshassuck , more or less as it does the East Side today. But where we now see stone retaining walls and river walks, the water gave way to land in the form of a “gravelly beach” (Cady, 4). Salmon and other migratory fish filled the waters, while quahogs oysters, and clams lined the riverbed.

It might be hard to imagine digging for oysters in the waterways of downtown Providence, where the Great Salt River used to be. Linger and look closely, though, and you may glimpse some of the creatures that these waters still support: crabs, turtles, eels, bass, herons, and so many others. 

For the first time in many decades, it is now possible to harvest quahogs from the Providence River south of Gaspee Point in Warwick and Bullock Point in East Providence--if there has been no rain for 7 days prior. 

Sadly, the northern part of the Providence River, where it meets the city’s shoreline, is still off limits when it comes to shellfish. But as one fisher told the Providence Journal, "we're hoping that we can keep heading north" (Kuffner, A12). 

The shellfish beds are witness to the fact that the River is cleaner now than it has been for generations. Life is gradually returning, thanks to decades of work to protect and heal the waterways. There is lots more to be done, but even now, in the midst of office buildings and busy roads, a variety of creatures make a niche.

Not long ago, people turned to the water for food, drink, bathing, swimming, travel, and because it’s beautiful. The water has given a lot to us. And though some of those gifts have been squandered and lost, the water is still here and full of life.

 Further Reading and Engagement > 

To learn more about Indigenous relationships to land in Providence and the Narragansett Bay region, a great place to start is the Tomaquag Museum. Visit them online at  https://www.tomaquagmuseum.org  or in person at 

390 A Summit Rd, Exeter, RI

We also encourage you to explore the work of Wampanoag artist  Deborah Moorehead Spears , especially her paintings of the Providence River. 

By Sam Coren

Providence has become a city of highways. All of them were built in a frenzy of ten short years, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. They carved through neighborhoods, ran over rivers, displaced residents, and divided the city along new lines. 

In the mid-1940s, city officials started planning for the North-South Freeway: a big new road that was supposed to turn Providence into “the new super city of the automobile age” (Downtown 1970, vii). It was built in stages, the very first of which was called the “Providence River Bridge.” Opened in June of 1958, the bridge, as reported by the Providence Journal, “was only a start, the first completed segment” of what was to become “an eventual statewide expressway network” (Kelly, 121). The riverbanks were cleaved by on-ramps on both sides, blocking public access to the water.

In the early 1960s, the North-South Freeway became part of Interstate 95, the mega-road that joins Providence to Maine and Miami and all the coastlands in between. When workers completed I-195 in 1968, the river bridge became the link between the two expressways.

You are standing where that bridge used to be. It was designed to carry a load of 75,000 vehicles per day. But by the 2000s it was one of the most heavily trafficked roads in New England, with 160,000 vehicles passing over daily. A soundstorm of traffic spread over the river at all times (as it still does at the mouth of the inner harbor, where the relocated I-195 now passes).

The Providence River Bridge was demolished in 2009, after about fifty years of use. Ten years later, in 2019, the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge took its place. All that remains of the old structure today are the pylons beneath your feet, jutting out into the river. You might see some gulls down there, catching sun, or just the splatter of their past reunions. 

Expressways were all the rage among planners and politicians in the fifties and sixties, but they caused a lot of hardship for the many thousands of city residents who stood in their path. They also contributed to the degradation of waterways and forests throughout the state. 

One of the last of these planned expressways, called I-84, was supposed to connect Providence to Hartford by way of Scituate. If built, it would have run over the Scituate Reservoir. But as opponents pointed out, the risk of contaminated drinking water was too great, and the state begrudgingly killed the project before any shovels broke ground. As the Stop I-895 fight signaled, Rhode Islanders had begun to rethink the wisdom of building ever more roads.

In Providence at the time, the downtown rivers (the Providence, Woonasquatucket, and Moshassuck) were hidden beneath 1,147 feet of bridge decking and asphalt. They converged in darkness beneath a post office and a parking lot just east of Kennedy Plaza. The legacy of industrial pollution was still fresh in people’s minds, and the waterways were considered more of a nuisance than a gift. It was understandably hard for people to imagine what the Providence and other rivers could be. 

Some city officials would have preferred to keep the downtown rivers out of sight, but a proposal by architect William Warner called for just the opposite. In 1983, Warner unveiled an NEA-funded waterfront master plan called the Providence Waterfront Study. Warner’s idea was to uncover the downtown rivers for the first time in a hundred years. He outlined a vision of continuous public access along miles of these urban waterways, from the foot of Smith Hill to the rubble-strewn banks of the Providence River between Memorial Square and the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier. He further recommended that the city transform neglected lands along several bodies of water—from the Seekonk River to India Point to the outer Providence River—into parks and open spaces.  

Against odds, the plan eventually won the support of both the city and the state. It has been rolling out in stages ever since. The first completed section, called Waterplace Park, was completed in 1994. The centerpiece of the project was a cove-like water body (reminiscent of the city’s nineteenth-century Cove Basin). Just a few blocks south, workers also relocated  the confluence of the three rivers (the Providence, Woonasquatucket, and Moshassuck) from beneath a post office building to a visually prominent site between Canal Street and Memorial Boulevard. Remarkably, much of this work was paid for with the millions that would have gone to the defunct I-84.

Warner’s plan was also the first to call for the relocation of I-195. That project, still in progress, creates “five miles of new city streets, and 4,100 feet of new pedestrian river walks” as well as the new pedestrian bridge where the expressway and its waterfront on-ramps used to be (FHWA). 

There is still a long way to go in reconciling the entire city to its rivers, and reconnecting neighborhoods divided by roads. As that work continues, the downtown river parks remain open and free to all. 

 Further Reading > 

By Sam Coren

The highest of the highest tides to reach the city--the king tides--offer a kind of dress rehearsal for this more watery future, because “the water level reached by an extreme high tide today will be the same water level of more frequent moderate tides in the future (UCSD).” 

Is it time to buy a lot more gondolas? Sure, though it may be a while before the streets become canals. A recent study by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions suggests that the existing Barrier will protect the city center for another fifty years. That is good news, but of course, there is more to Providence than its downtown, and other parts of the City need support in preparing for sea level rise now. 

At the Barrier, the narrow inner harbor of the Providence River meets the open tidal waters of the “outer harbor” – also known as the Upper Bay – and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. As a giant dam, it serves as an interface between the city and the sea, and a monument to the idea that the one can only exist by (literally) keeping the other at bay. 

A lot is staked on the idea that water, along with the rest of nature, must be tamed. But the sea is never not moving and changing. It is powerful, unpredictable, and free. At the same time, it can also be generous – bringing food and fertility to coastal landscapes as it has for thousands of years. Are there ways, then, to protect the life of the city, while embracing the life of the sea?

“City Hurricane Committee Urges Fox Point Dam Now.” Providence Journal (Providence, Rhode Island), May 25, 1955: 7. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.

California Sea Grant.  “King Tides: A Cosmic Phenomenon,”  January 11, 2021.

Detz, Jo.  “Providence’s Toxic Avenue Leads to Neighborhood Problems.”  ecoRI News. Accessed July 14, 2021.

Kuffner, Alex. "RISING THREAT Can Providence's hurricane barrier withstand accelerating pace of sea-level rise?." Providence Journal (RI), March 31, 2019: A1. NewsBank: Access World News – Historical and Current. 

NOAA.  “Hurricanes in History.”  Accessed July 14, 2021.

URI Graduate School of Oceanography.  “Hurricanes: Science and Society: 1954- Hurricane Carol.”  Accessed July 14, 2021.