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"THREE AND ONE-HALF CENTURIES AT A GLANCE"



The Colonial Era: 1636-1765



The land upon which Roger Williams planted his town of Providence was the tribal domain of the Narragansett Indians. Their generous deeds to the early English colonists entitle them to share with Williams and his associates the honor of founding this important settlement.

For its first century Providence was significant much more for the principles upon which it was established than for its political or economic influence. Roger Williams made Providence (which he named for God's guidance and care) a haven for persecuted religious dissenters. His town became the "lively experiment" in religious liberty and church-state separation. This was and is its major claim to fame.

Despite Providence's position at the head of Narragansett Bay, Newport far outdistanced its sister town during the colonial era. Providence's rocky, hilly, heavily wooded hinterland yielded grudgingly to the plow and the axe, whereas pasturage was more spacious and the land more level and fertile in the colony's southerly regions, and these supplied Newport with valuable articles of commerce.

The destruction of the town during King Philip's War was an added hurdle, albeit temporary, to the growth of early Providence. Still another obstacle was posed by the town's tradition of dissent, which was not conducive to the development of sound and orderly government. Providence's independent-minded and strong-willed pioneers often clashed with one another over land titles, politics, and religion. Roger Williams's bout with William Harris and the Arnold Family over the territory along the Pawtuxet River was only the most acrimonious of many such squabbles.

During its first forty years the town was exclusively a fishing and farming village, laid out along one winding dirt road which meandered along the eastern shore of the Providence River and the old Cove. Called "the Towne Street," this thoroughfare (present-day North and South Main streets between Olney and Wickenden) was the main artery of Providence for the duration of the colonial period and beyond.

In the years following the devastation of King Philip's War some industrial and commercial activity began, and settlers moved outward to the town's remote lands bordering upon Connecticut to the west and Massachusetts to the north. Despite this growth, however, the population of the entire municipality was only 1,446 when the first colony-wide census was taken in 1708.

The economic tempo of the town quickened during the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. By the next census, in 1730, the population had nearly tripled (to 3,916), and so many farmers had moved into the "outlands" of Providence that three large towns were set off from the parent community in 1731 (Scituate, Glocester, and Smithfield). Before the colonial period came to a close, an inner ring of three more farm towns (Cranston, Johnston, and North Providence) were carved from Providence's territory. What remained, less than six square miles, huddled around the river and the Cove and was predominately commercial and increasingly cosmopolitan in character.

By the middle of the 1760s-- the eve of the Revolution--Providence had a flourishing maritime trade, a merchant aristocracy, a few important industries, a body of skilled artisans, a newspaper and printing press, a stagecoach line, and several impressive public buildings. Its long period of civic gestation was over, and its 4,000 inhabitants were ready to play a leading role in the political and economic revolutions that lay just ahead.


Revolutionary Providence: 1765-1790


The Mother Country's passage of the Sugar Act in 1764, levying a duty on sugar and molasses imports so essential to Providence distilleries and to the "triangular trade" in rum and slaves, set in motion a wave of local protest which crested in 1776.

As the colonies edged toward the brink of separation with England because of subsequent measures such as the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts, the town of Providence became a leader of the resistance movement. In the 1760s Providence pamphleteers Stephen Hopkins and Silas Downer expounded a federal theory of the British Empire which would divide sovereignty between the colony and the crown, thus preserving local autonomy including the power to tax.

In June 1772 Providence merchants and sailors burnt the customs sloop Gaspee, and in June 1775 they burnt tea in Market Square. Providence citizens led the way in calling for the Continental Congress, in founding a Continental navy, and, on May 4, 1776, in renouncing allegiance to the king.

This rebellious town, according to a 1774 census, had 4,321 inhabitants, with 655 families residing in approximately 370 dwellings. A 1779 list shows 278 shops and stores, some of which contained living quarters. There were at least 118 businesses engaged in commerce, but this primary economic activity was dominated by three mercantile firms: Nicholas Brown and Company, Joseph and William Russell, and Clark and Nightingale.

Though colonial industry had been restricted by the mercantile system, Providence on the eve of revolt harbored six distilleries, two spermaceti candle works, two tanneries, two gristmills, a slaughterhouse, a potash works, and a paper mill. Some two hundred tradesmen and artisans represented more than thirty-five different services and skills.

Fortunately, Providence escaped enemy occupation, a fate that arrested Newport's growth. But as English ships and troops hovered nearby, the town remained constantly on alert. A 1776 survey shows 726 Providence men capable of bearing arms. These able-bodied citizens built fortifications and warning system lest British ships venture up Narragansett Bay. In 1775 they erected a beacon pole on College Hill near the present corner of Meeting and Prospect streets. According to one historical account, persons in Newport, in New London, Norwich, and Pomfret, Connecticut, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spotted the light from a trial firing on the night of August 17, 1775. Entrenchment's and breastworks were later constructed on Foxes Hill (a rise of ground on Fox Point, later leveled), at Fields, Sassafras, and Kettle points, and on College Hill.

In December 1776 a three-year occupation of Newport began, forcing many of that town's inhabitants to take refuge in Providence--a reversal of the pattern in 1676 during King Philip's War, and a reversal of the relative importance of Rhode Island's two principal towns.

During the war American troops were quartered in Providence en route to various campaigns, though perhaps a thousand were permanently stationed here as a protective force. French troops moved in and out of Providence from July 1780 to May 1782, and it was from this point, in June 1781, that Rochambeau's army began its fateful march southward to Yorktown.

While Providence residents were fighting in many of the important land and naval battles of the war, inflation and shortages of food and fuel were causing hardship for those who remained at home. Business enterprise, however, was not destroyed. During the three-year blockade of Narragansett Bay, Providence entrepreneurs imported their wares through the ports of New London and New Bedford, and some historians claim that local merchants actually prospered during the war years.

On the debit side, education was disrupted, especially at Brown, where University Hall became a barracks and a troop hospital, and certain religious sects (according to Baptist minister James Manning) experienced a decline, especially the Baptists and the Anglicans.

Despite the dislocations of war, the people of Providence found time for some festivities, including Fourth of July celebrations, private parties, and parades when military dignitaries like Washington or Rochambeau passed through. The greatest celebration was reserved for victory: on April 23, 1783, the entire town turned out to hear "the Proclamation of Congress for a Cessation of Arms." The firing of cannon, the tolling of bells, church services, a fireworks display, a procession, and a state dinner marked the occasion.

With war ended, Providence resumed its pattern of growth. Its citizens and entrepreneurs weathered a postwar depression (1784-86) and then scaled new economic heights. When American ships were barred from the British West Indies in 1784, local merchants replaced this important colonial trading partner with ports in Latin America and the Orient.


From Town to City: 1790-1832


During the early years of the republic, Providence moved into the front rank of the nation's municipalities, first as a bustling port and then as an industrial and financial center. Providence merchants, especially the Browns, experiments in manufacturing. Samuel Slater was their first important protege.

Peter J. Coleman, in a detailed and informative history, traces this remarkable economic transformation of the town and the state. The transition begun by Slater in 1790, was on its way to completion by the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. This period (1790-1830) Coleman accurately calls "the era of experimentation." by the time it drew to a close, economic statistics indicate, the "experiment" was a stunning success. manufacturing had replaced maritime activity as the dynamic element in the economy, and industry had become the principal outlet for venture capital and the primary source of wealth.

Providence's four major areas of manufacturing endeavor--base metals and machinery, cotton textiles, woolen textiles, and jewelry and silverware--were established by 1830, and for the next century they dominated the city's economy. They made Providence the industrial leader of the nation's most industrialized state. Providence owed this primacy to its superior financial resources and banking facilities, its position as the hub of southeastern New England's transportation network, and--especially--to its skilled work force and enterprising business leaders.

But all was not rosy in the early years of the nineteenth century. A major fire on South Main Street in January 1801 destroyed thirty-seven buildings, and the Great Gale of September 1815 left the entire waterfront in shambles. The War of 1812 brought hardship to commerce and apprehension to the residents of a port vulnerable to enemy attack, and a postwar depression (the Panic of 1819) interrupted economic recovery.

Most serious, however, were the town's internal growing pains. In 1820 the population of Providence reached 11,745. By 1830 the number of inhabitants had jumped to 16,832, of whom 1,213 (or 7.2 percent) were black.

During the 1820s, as Providence became more densely populated, as its older houses became less habitable, and as its factories darkened the landscape, tensions increased between the white working class and the black community. The fact that Negroes were stripped of the right to vote in 1822 and were segregated by the Providence School Law of 1828 intensified their resentment.

Most blacks lived in an area called Hard-Scrabble (present-day Moshassuck Square) or minor race riot occurred in Hard-Scrabble in October 1824. Although it resulted in no deaths and only moderate damage, it shocked the citizenry and kindled debate not only on the issues of race but also on those of law and order and governmental reform. The old town meeting system, said some, was no longer adequate for the administration and security of a community harboring nearly 17,000 socially and racially antagonistic residents.

In subsequent years the drive for a city form of government gained momentum because of the town's steady growth. In January 1830 the General Assembly granted Providence a city charter, subject to ratification by a three- fifths vote. When balloting was held the next month, 383 supported the proposed charter and 345 opposed it--a result short of the legislature's 60 percent approval requirement.

Here things stood until September 1831, when another race racer riot erupted, much more serious than that of 1824, beginning with a clash between some rowdy white sailors and blacks living in Olney's Lane. This four-day episode, in which five men died, was the final catalyst for municipal change. A town meeting on October 5, 1831, promptly decided "that it is expedient to adopt a city form of government." The General Assembly agreed. In November the charter was issued and ratified by the town's electorate, 459 to 188. Another stage in the history of Providence had passed.

According to urban historians Howard Chudacoff and Theodore Hirt, race was not the only variable in the disorders of 1824 and 1831. These incidents "fit within a larger context of urban growth and change. Increase in vice and disorganized violence; social breakdown of the old village sense of community; decline of the influence of the church; a rise in intemperance, plus an increasing awareness by middle and upper classes of need for reform"--all signified that the economic and social ferment of the early nineteenth century was undercutting old patterns of political and social authority.

In response, Providence upgraded and expanded its municipal services and streamlined its government. The city charter of 1832 by no means insured peace and harmony (as the Dorr Rebellion would prove), but it was an innovation which heralded a new era in Providence's growth and development.


Providence in Rebellion: 1832-1845


Providence inaugurated its city government with much fanfare and little difficulty. Samuel Bridgham, the first mayor, working with a two-chamber council that held most of the power, expanded city services and levied a tax of $3.17 on each $1,000 of assessed valuation to defray their cost. The total expense of city government during its first full year of operation (1833) was $43,205.

In 1835 the railroad came to Providence, wending its way southward from Boston. Two years later another corporation completed a line from Providence to Stonington. These facilities augmented the turnpikes and the canal that had been constructed in the previous decade.

The new city's most significant institutional development during this period was the expansion and improvement of the public school system. John Howland, Francis Wayland, Samuel Bridgham, and Thomas Wilson Dorr (de facto president of the school committee from 1838 to 1842) made the greatest contributions. When educational specialist Henry Barnard was brought to Rhode Island in 1843 to implement statewide reforms, he observed that "the city of Providence has already gained to itself an extended reputation and made itself a bright example to many other cities."

Public works projects like the Blackstone Canal and the railroads joined with the growth of the factory system to make jobs plentiful in Providence during this busy period. Such employment opportunities attracted not only native-born families from the farms but also workers of foreign birth. In 1820 there were only thirty-nine unnaturalized citizens in Providence; by 1835 there were 1,005 "foreigners not naturalized," nearly all of whom were Irish Catholics. In January 1843 Reverend John Corry informed local historian William Staples that the Providence Catholic community had grown from 150 in 1830 to more than 2,000 in the succeeding twelve years.

This new Celtic element in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant environment gradually became even more disturbing to the native white majority than the black community had been during the turbulent twenties. In fact, the Irish "problem" developed into a major political issue during the Dorr Rebellion and remained a divisive force for a half-century thereafter.

Though all these factors were important, the major development in the decade following the incorporation of the city was the movement for constitutional reform, for the state still clung to the royal charter of 1663 as its basic law. An 1832 list of Providence freemen enumerated 1,216 eligible voters. In view of the approximately 3,823 white adult males residing in the town at the time of 1830 census, a rough projection indicates that 68 percent were disenfranchised by the prevailing real estate requirement for voting at the time of the 1832 presidential campaign.

The minority of Providence men who could vote were themselves victimized on the state level by a malapportioned General Assembly. In 1830 Providence had one representative in the House for every 4,209 residents. At the opposite end of the scale was Jamestown, with one seat for every 207 inhabitants. Small wonder that the demand for constitutional reform of these inequities was stronger in Providence that elsewhere in the state.

In 1833 the Providence Workingmen's Association, led by carpenter Seth Luther and barber William I. Tillinghast, began the drive for "free suffrage" and reapportionment. Soon they were joined by local patricians such as Thomas Dorr and Joseph K. Angell. This incongruous alliance resulted in the formation of the Constitutional party, a moderate, short-lived, and unsuccessful pressure group.

After the election of 1840, however, zeal for reform intensified. A militant Rhode Island Suffrage Association ignored the existing reactionary government and called a People's Convention, which met in the fall of 1841. Under the guidance of Dorr, a very progressive basic law was drafted and overwhelmingly ratified in a December referendum. In April 1842 Dorr was elected the "People's Governor."

Because the charter regime refused to yield, a confrontation occurred that May at the state arsenal in Providence. When Dorr's forceful effort failed, he fled the state, returning only briefly in late June to Chepachet in a futile attempt to revive the "People's Legislature."

In the aftermath of this bloodless struggle, the victorious forces of law and order drafted and ratified a conservative state constitution designed in part as a bulwark against working-class and immigrant influence. Among its undesirable features small rural towns to check urban-oriented legislation; the absence of a secret ballot, which permitted employers to intimidate their workers and a suffrage article which required naturalized citizens (i.e., Irish Catholics) to own real estate if they wished to vote or hold office, while allowing landless natives to gain the right to vote by merely performing one day's militia duty or paying a one-dollar registry tax. This new basic law (the present state constitution in its original form) was cumbersome and difficult to amend and contained no mechanism for the calling of future conventions.

By 1843 the forces of reaction had triumphed, the turmoil had subsided, Dorr was in jail, and Providence had emerged from yet another crisis more confident and optimistic than ever.


The Age of Modernization: 1845-1860


In the years between the Dorr Rebellion and the Civil War, Providence adjusted to its new status as a city. Several major public works projects were instituted to meet the demands of rapid demographic and economic growth. The most important of these was railroad construction. In 1847 the first train ran over the Providence and Worcester line. This railroad (which is still a major factor in the city's economy) built a massive terminal in 1848, the Union Passenger Depot, to service its operations. This structure, some trackage, and adjacent railroad yards were erected on land reclaimed from the Cove by the P & W, which had undertaken construction in 1846 of an elliptical cove basin, surrounded by an eighty-foot promenade, to prepare its route into the central city.

In the 1850s other railroads sought Providence as a terminus. The Hartford, Providence, and Fishkill line was completed in 1854, connecting the city with the Hudson River. In the following year the Providence, Warren, and Bristol line provided access to the East Bay region. This road was extended to Fall River in 1860.

Internal routes of transportation were also improved. In 1847 the Providence Gas Company was incorporated. Its first project was the lighting of streets. mains were laid first in the principal Downtown thoroughfares, and gradually gas superseded whale oil for highway illumination. In the mid-1850s the city council funded a major road improvement program, which resulted in the widening of existing streets, their extension, and the building of cross streets and bridges. In several highways, tracks were laid so that horses ( called "string teams") could pull freight cars from the docks to the main line of the railroad and back.

Waterborne transport also received a boost when the United States Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the Providence River in 1853 prior to dredging a channel south of Fox Point to a depth of 10 and a width of 100 feet. This improvement allowed the port of Providence to accommodate most of the new and larger vessels used in the coastal trade.

Apart from transportation and public works, another development that loomed large in this era was the establishment of institutions for the care or treatment of the unfortunate. For the mentally ill, the innovative Butler Hospital was opened in a pastoral setting overlooking the Seekonk River in 1847. For wayward children, the Providence Reform School was organized in 1850, housed in spacious Tockwotton Mansion near India Point.

Orphaned and neglected children also became an important social concern. To supplement the work of the Children's Friend Society (established in 1835), the Association for the Benefit of Colored Children (organized in 1838) constructed a facility, called "The Shelter," on Olive Street in 1849. Two years later the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy established St. Aloysius Home in their convent on Claverick Street. By 1862 this orphanage--the oldest continuous social welfare agency in the diocese--occupied a spacious, modern building on Prairie Avenue. Providence Catholics also established a local branch of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a lay organization dedicated to aiding the destitute. The cathedral unit (founded in 1853) was the first of many parish chapters.

To care for the elderly, the Providence Home for Aged Women was organized in 1856. Its present building at Front and East Streets, overlooking the harbor, was opened in 1864. (Elderly men waited ten years longer for their facility.) Finally, when all else failed, there was the Swan Point Cemetery, platted with burial lots and avenues by engineers Atwater and Schubarth, and opened for business in 1847.

These social agencies (Swan Point excluded) were humanitarian responses to the increasingly impersonal nature of an emerging urban-industrial society. They were commendable attempts by civic-minded reformers to deal with the victims of rapid change, growth, and modernization that characterized mid-nineteenth-century Providence.

The only notable departure from contemporary humanitarian sentiment was the incidence of nativism in the 1850s. Prejudice towards Irish Catholic immigrants, fanned by the Providence Journal, used as its vehicle the American, or "Know-Nothing," party, a secret organization that swept city and state elections in the mid-fifties. Its candidate, James Y. Smith, captured the mayoralty in 1855. some of the party's more zealous adherents even planned a raid on St. Xavier's Convent, home of the "female Jesuits" (the Sisters of Mercy.)

Fortunately, this virulent and militant strain of nativism subsided as quickly as it had reared its evil head. By 1860 bigotry again became subtle rather than overt as Providence and the nation braced to face yet another challenge--the specter of disunion.


Providence and Civil War: 1860-1868


Providence, like every city in America, felt the impact of the Civil War, but this was a war that many in Providence sought to avoid. Yankee businessmen, especially those producing cotton textiles, had economic ties with the South which war would(and did) disrupt. As some critics remarked, there seemed to be an unholy alliance between the "lords of the loom" and the lords of the lash," as the slave holders were called. In addition, many foreign-born Irishmen, resentful that they needed land to vote while blacks were subjected to no such discrimination, had little sympathy for freeing those who could become their rivals for jobs on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Consequently, when the Republican party nominated Seth Padelford for governor in 1860--a man whose antislavery views were extreme--a split occurred in party ranks. Supporters of other Republican aspirants and Republican moderates of the Lincoln variety joined with Democrats (who were softer on slavery) to nominate and elect a fusion candidate on the "Conservative" ticket. Their choice, twenty-nine-year-old William Sprague, was heir to a vast cotton textile empire and a martial man who had attained the rank of colonel in the Providence Marine Corps of Artillery. Sprague outpolled Padelford 12,278 to 10,740, carrying Providence 3,578 to 2,761--victory celebrated as a rebuke to abolitionism by the citizens of faraway Savannah, Georgia, who fired a 100-gun salute in Sprague's honor.

But if Providence and Sprague were soft on slavery, they were strong on Union. After the Confederate attack of April 12, 1861, on Fort Sumter, the local citizenry rallied behind their once-conciliatory governor and rushed to the defense of Washington. President Lincoln issued his call for volunteers on April 15. Just three days later, the "Flying Artillery" left Providence for the front, and on April 20 Colonel Ambrose Burnside and Sprague himself led 530 men of the First Regiment, Rhode Island Detached Militia, from Exchange Place to their fateful encounter with the rebels at Bull Run. More than half of Burnside's regiment hailed from Providence.

During the war there were eight calls for troops, with Rhode Island exceeding its requisition in all but one. Though the state's total quota was only 18,898, it furnished 23,236 fighting men, of whom 1,685 died of wounds or disease and 16 earned the Medal of Honor. Providence, with 29 percent of Rhode Island's population in 1860, supplied nearly half its fighting men.

The city's contribution to the Union victory went beyond mere military manpower. Some historians have claimed that the productive element in the outcome of the Civil War. Here again Providence was prominent. Its woolen mills, especially Atlantic and Wanskuck, supplied federal troops with thousands of uniforms, overcoats, and blankets, fashioned on sewing machines made by Brown and Sharpe, while metals factories such as Providence Tool, Nicholson and Brownell, and the Burnside Rifle Company provided guns, sabers, and musket parts. Builders Iron Foundry (established in 1822 and still operating in West Warwick) manufactured large numbers of cannon; the Providence Steam Engine Company of South Main Street (established 1821) built the engines for two Union sloops of war, the Algonquin and the Contoocook; and Congdon and Carpenter (established 1792) supplied the military with such hardware as iron bars, bands, hoops, and horseshoes from its factory at 3 Steeple Street (now the city's oldest surviving industrial building).

On the home front, the Civil War decade was a time of continued growth and modernization for Providence. The city's most important and dynamic mayor, Thomas A. Doyle, began a nineteen-year reign in 1864. He promptly reorganized the police department into an efficient, modern force and converted the Market House into a municipal office building.

City health and sanitation programs, under the capable direction of Dr. Edwin M. Snow, were models for other municipalities to emulate. Elsewhere in the field of medicine, the urgings of Dr. Usher Parsons combined with the philanthropy of Thomas Poynton Ives to establish Rhode Island Hospital, giving Providence a first-class medical facility at last.

In education, business and commercial schools such Scholfield's and Bryant and Stratton flourished as they provided a growing white-collar work force with the office skills needed to administer the affairs of the city's burgeoning industries. And in the public schools a momentous event, inspired by the outcome of the war, occurred in 1866: racial segregation was abolished both in the city and throughout the state.

It was during the Civil War decade that urban mass transit came to Providence. Its vehicle was the horsecar, a mode of travel over the streets of the city that combined the old (actual horsepower) and the new (iron rails). The horsecar lines, extending from the Union Depot in Market Square over the surface of every major thoroughfare, were essential factors in the growth and settlement of the city's "streetcar suburbs"--the outlying neighborhoods of Providence that were reclaimed from the surrounding towns of Cranston, North Providence, and Johnston beginning in 1868. Closer to the city's core, splendid mansions, built by the city's business magnates, sprang up on the East Side and in the West End along Elmwood Avenue, Westminster Street, and Broadway.

With the war a partial stimulus, industrial Providence began to scale its greatest heights, pulled from above by its wealthy Yankee entrepreneurs and investors, pushed from below by a growing immigrant work force that now began to include migrants from Germany, Sweden, England, and French Canada. Together the titans and the toilers labored to make Providence an industrial giant among the cities of the nation. As the cataclysmic sixties rushed to their conclusion, the city rushed onward towards its Golden Age


Providence's Golden Age: 1868-1899


The last three decades of nineteenth-century America have been labeled the Gilded Age, an epithet coined by novelists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to describe and decry the low state of manners and morals which allegedly characterized the era. Beneath the gilt of boom and prosperity was a base of crass materialism and moral decay, or so these critics claimed. Whatever validity that intellectually elitist assessment may have had for the nation at large, however, for Providence the age was not Gilded but truly Golden.

If industrialization, urbanization, and cultural pluralism were the waves of the future, then Providence rode the crest of those waves into the twentieth century. From 1868 to 1899, in a series of eight annexations from the surrounding towns of Cranston, Johnston, and North Providence, the city tripled its physical size. These additions, together with an influx of immigrants, raised the number of inhabitants from 54,595 in 1865 to 175,597 by 1900 and placed Providence twentieth among the cities of the country in population despite its still diminutive area.

While the native-born trickled into the city from surrounding rural towns in search of jobs and excitement, the influx of immigrants was more like a flood. The Irish migration continued to be sizable, but it formed a smaller percentage of the whole as the nineteenth century marched on. Those of German stock, who began to arrive in the 1850s, numbered 3,493 by 1895; French Canadians, recruited to augment a work force depleted by the Civil War, totaled 3,451. The 1895 census also disclosed that Providence contained 2,793 persons of Swedish parentage, 1,312 of Portuguese stock, and 4,655 whose parents were born in Italy, as well as small numbers of Jews, Poles, and Cape Verdeans.

One surprising ethnic group, consistently overlooked because their use of the English language and their Protestant religion produced rapid assimilation, were the British Americans. These immigrants, who were often skilled workers, had an enormous impact upon late-census of 1895 counted 11,124 Providence residents with both parents born in England, 2,550 of Welsh or Scottish stock, and another 2,963 from British Canada. Only their socio-religious and political rivals, the Catholic Irish, were more numerous. In all, over 60 percent of Providence's total population were of foreign stock by century's end.

The magnet that attracted these diverse peoples to Providence was jobs. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution, for the city and the country alike. By 1900 economically diverse industrial centers, and its board of trade boasted (perhaps without exaggeration) that the city contained the world's largest tool factory (Brown and Sharpe), file factory (Nicholson File), engine factory (Corliss Steam Engine Company), screw factory (American Screw), and silverware factory (Gorham). These were exuberantly proclaimed as Providence's Five Industrial Wonders of the World. In addition, the city ranked first nationally in the manufacture of jewelry and in the production of woolen and worsted goods, and it contained the home offices of the famed Knight brothers' cotton textile empire. Small wonder that the federal census of 1900 listed 44,978 Providence inhabitants as industrial wage earners.

As business grew bigger, workers began to organize to protect their rights and welfare. The decade of the 1880s marked the birth of the modern organized labor movement in Providence. The Knights of Labor, the largest industrial union of the era, came to the city in 1882, and a district assembly of the Knights was established in 1885. The skilled workers--led by the carpenters, the bricklayers and masons, and the tailors--formed the Providence-based Rhode Island Central Labor Union in March 1884.

To accommodate this phenomenal physical, demographic, and economic growth, the city government expanded its services and facilities, primarily through the initiative of Mayor Thomas Doyle. New and more spacious schools were built on both the elementary and secondary levels; the police and fire departments were enlarged and the direction of Superintendent Edwin Snow and his worthy successor, Dr. Charles V. Chapin; administrative departments were reorganized; an ornate and elaborate City Hall was erected; the Cove Basin was filled; Foxes Hill on Fox Point was leveled and the surrounding area cleared of dilapidated housing in a major urban renewal were built; a sewage system and treatment plant were put into operation; more streets and highways were laid, most notably two broad, tree-lined thoroughfares--Elmwood Avenue (1891-92) and Blackstone Boulevard (1892-1904); dredging and other harbor improvements were undertaken; older bridges were rebuilt and two ones constructed--the Red Bridge (1870-73; replaced, 1895) and the Point Street Bridge (1872).

The private sector also furnished new services to a city in the throes of modernization. The horsecars of the Union Street Railway Company facilitated the settlement of the outlying neighborhoods. The Providence Telephone Company (incorporated in 1879) brought a new mode of communication to the city's residents, and the Rhode Island Electric Lighting company (incorporated in 1882) furnished a new form of power. By 1894, through the efforts of banker and utilities magnate Marsden Perry, the street railway system was completely electrified.

Other privately financed projects with a public purpose included the construction of a cable tramway line over College Hill (1890); the building of union Station (1896-98) by the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad; the erection of the luxurious Narragansett Hotel (1878) by a syndicate Providence Opera House (1871); and the construction of the Infantry Building on South Main Street, containing a large civic auditorium (1879-80).

To relieve the tensions generated by such hectic growth and the frustrations caused by long hours of labor in drab and dingy factories, recreation and sports came to the rescue. Roger Williams Park, donated to the city by the will of Betsey Williams in 1871, became a lively, well-developed " playground of the people" by century's end; summer amusement centers within the city limits, such as Park Gardens and San Souci Gardens, flourished briefly; and for eight glorious seasons Providence was one of eight cities in America to host a professional major league baseball team. That illustrious nine, the Providence Grays, playing its games at Messer Park near Olneyville, won two National League championships and was three times runner-up during its brief but exciting existence.

Providence also had name entertainers, such as the American Band of David Wallis Reeves; an internationally known singing troupe called the Troubadours, starring Sissieretta Jones, better known as " Black Patti"; and an Irish-American family of aspiring vaudevillians called The Four Cohans.

Nor was culture dormant, as the Gilded Age stereotype of Twain and Warner would lead us to believe. In 1877 a group of Providence women founded a nationally renowned industrial design institute--the Rhode Island School of Design--as its centennial project. Two decades later many of these same women broke the sex barrier at Brown and in1897 established Pembroke College as a department of that prestigious university. In addition, the defunct state normal school was reopened in Providence in 1871, and it was furnished with an impressive modern building at Francis and Gaspee streets in 1898.

Politics were as prominent and as turbulent as ever. Thomas Doyle was the era's most productive mayor; Democrat Edwin D. McGuinness, the city's first Irish Catholic chief executive, was the most reform-minded and consumer- oriented. "Mr. Inside," Nelson W. Aldrich, a former Providence city councilman, became the dominant member of the United States Senate and won the awesome title of "General Manager of the United States." Against this powerful Brayton-Aldrich machine were arrayed not only reform Democrats such as McGuinness and Charles E. Gorman but also 'mugwump' or good-government Republicans such as the Providence Journal's cultured editor Alfred M. Williams.

Providence finished the nineteenth century with a rush. Having experienced its Golden Age, the city looked to the future with undiminished vigor and optimism. Its captains of industry and their legions of immigrant workers had made it an industrial giant and a culturally diverse mosaic of momentum would be Providence's great challenge of the new century.


Providence History Continued...

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Site last updated: May 2002