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Rhode Island » Providence » Main Street, South and North » Roger Williams National Memorial Park

Roger Williams National Memorial Park

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Early 1980s, National Park Service. North Main, Smith, and Canal sts. and Park Row

This park incorporates the site of the spring that supposedly attracted Providence's first European settlers. The conjectural spring itself is sited a little beyond the Old State House Parade, commemorated by a marble wellhead in a pretty garden, surrounded by marble parapeting, and reached from the higher grade at Main Street by an elaborate marble stair (1933, Norman M. Isham). This precinct speaks more of Colonial Revival pieties than of Roger Williams's original waterhole. The well no longer offers water, but the architectural pilgrim may find that this arcadian aggrandizement of the past slakes the thirst in a different way.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Brick Schoolhouse
Old State House (Providence Colony House, later Rhode Island State House)
What Cheer Garage
Shakespeare's Head
George R. Drowne House

Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "Roger Williams National Memorial Park", [Providence, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-PR62.

Print Source

Buildings of Rhode Island, William H. Jordy, with Ronald J. Onorato and William McKenzie Woodward. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 70-71.

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