40 Fun Facts About Rhode Island Colony

Which Puritan colony banished Roger Williams in 1635, leading him to found Providence the next year?

Massachusetts Bay cast him out for attacking its land charters and its church rule. The settlement he started took in other outcasts and grew into a haven for dissenters.

Which British customs ship did Rhode Islanders burn in 1772, over a year before the Boston Tea Party?

HMS Gaspee ran aground while chasing a local packet boat, and colonists rowed out that night, shot its commander and burned the schooner to the waterline.

Rhode Island was the only one of the thirteen states to send no delegates to which 1787 gathering?

The Constitutional Convention met without Rhode Island, which feared a strong central government and held out until 1790, the last of the thirteen states to ratify.

When Roger Williams's grave was opened in 1860, what had grown into the rough shape of his body?

An apple tree root had followed the line of his spine, split at the hips and bent at the knees. The Rhode Island Historical Society has looked after it ever since.

Roger Williams of Rhode Island taught Dutch to which great English poet of the 1600s?

John Milton, who went on to write Paradise Lost, traded lessons with him: Williams taught Dutch and got refresher lessons in Hebrew and Greek in return.

The first governor under Rhode Island's 1663 charter shared his name with which traitorous great-grandson?

Benedict Arnold the governor was said to be the wealthiest man in the colony. He died in 1678, long before his namesake switched sides to fight for the British.

Rhode Island distillers turned Caribbean molasses into which spirit for the triangular trade?

Rum made Rhode Island's merchants rich: it was shipped to Africa as a trade good, and the ships came home from the West Indies loaded with more molasses.

Newport's Touro building of 1763 is the oldest surviving American example of which house of worship?

A synagogue rose in Newport because the colony's promise of religious liberty had drawn a small Jewish community there by 1658, a century before it was built.

Until voters shortened it in 2020, Rhode Island's official name ended "and Providence" plus which word?

Plantations was an old word for settlements, and the full name dated from colonial times. Voters had chosen to keep it by 78% to 22% just ten years earlier.

Which one-word motto sits above the anchor on Rhode Island's seal, as it has since colonial times?

Hope sits over an anchor that has stood for Rhode Island since its first colonial seal, probably echoing a Bible verse that calls hope an anchor of the soul.

Which woman, tried and banished by Boston's Puritans, helped found Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1638?

Anne Hutchinson had angered the ministers by holding popular religious meetings in her own home. Her supporters settled Portsmouth with encouragement from Roger Williams.

Which English king, newly restored to the throne, granted Rhode Island its Royal Charter in 1663?

Charles II approved a charter that let the colonists elect their own governor and promised that nobody would be punished for differences of opinion in religion.

Two months before the Declaration of Independence, Rhode Island became the first colony to do what?

Rhode Island's assembly voted to renounce allegiance to the Crown on May 4, 1776, by a nearly unanimous vote, well ahead of the Congress meeting in Philadelphia.

Roger Williams founded America's first congregation of which denomination in Providence in 1638?

Baptist only briefly himself, Williams soon moved on, yet the congregation he gathered still meets in Providence as the First Baptist Church in America.

Which Ivy League university began in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island?

Brown was the first American college to write into its rules that students would be admitted and taught equally, whatever their religious affiliation.

Which 1675–76 conflict saw Providence burned, although Rhode Island had tried to stay neutral?

King Philip's War reached Providence in March 1676. Roger Williams, who had known the opposing leaders since they were children, helped train the town's recruits.

Mary Dyer, a Rhode Island settler hanged in Boston in 1660, belonged to which persecuted group?

Quakers were banned from Boston under Puritan law. Dyer, whose home was in tolerant Rhode Island, kept going back to defy the ban and was hanged for it.

In 1652, Rhode Island passed the first law in the American colonies that tried to ban which practice?

Slavery stayed widespread anyway: there is no evidence the 1652 law was ever enforced, and the assembly made the practice legal across the colony in 1703.

Which Narragansett name is still used for the island of Newport, officially called Rhode Island?

Aquidneck is what residents still call it, mostly to avoid confusion with the state, which took its own name from this one island.

The name Rhode Island may come from Dutch explorer Adriaen Block describing an island as which colour?

Red, or reddish, is how he described it in a 1625 account. A rival theory credits an Italian explorer who likened an island near the bay to Rhodes in Greece.

Which Wampanoag sachem, an ally of the Pilgrims, sheltered Roger Williams through the winter of 1636?

Massasoit hosted Williams for three months until spring, then sold him land for a first settlement before Williams moved on to found Providence.

Samuel Gorton renamed his Rhode Island settlement of Shawomet in gratitude to which English nobleman?

The Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, ordered the colony's Puritan neighbours to stop molesting Gorton's people, and the grateful settlers took his title as their town's name.

Which uprising over voting rights finally pushed Rhode Island to replace its 1663 colonial charter?

The Dorr Rebellion failed and its leader went to prison, but it ended a rule, kept since the royal charter, that only men who owned land could vote.

Which Rhode Island signer of the Declaration of Independence steadied his shaking right hand with his left?

Stephen Hopkins had palsy in his hands and remarked that his hand trembled but his heart did not. He had already spent nine years as the colony's governor.

Which Rhode Island-born general, who walked with a limp, took over the American army in the South in late 1780?

Nathanael Greene was passed over as a militia officer because of that limp, yet his campaign through the Carolinas wore down British control of the region.

Newport's round stone tower, once claimed to be Viking-built, was most likely put up in the 1600s as what?

A windmill is the likeliest origin: the colonial governor who owned the land mentioned his stone-built wind mill in a will of 1677.

In 1723, colonial Newport hanged 26 men at Gravelly Point on a single day for which crime?

Piracy trials came to Newport after a British warship captured 36 men at sea; colonial leaders were rounding up pirates in the 1720s under pressure from the British government.

In 1775, Rhode Island's assembly made the first formal call for Congress to create which fighting force?

A navy mattered to Rhode Island's merchants, whose shipping was being policed by British warships. One delegate in Congress called the plan the maddest idea in the world.

Newport's Redwood building, completed in 1750, was the first in America to be purpose-built as what?

A library was the aim of Abraham Redwood and 45 fellow colonists, who founded it in 1747. Its original room still holds most of the books first bought for it in London.

Which royal governor ruled Rhode Island after it was absorbed into the Dominion of New England?

Edmund Andros was so unpopular that Boston's leaders had him arrested in 1689. The Dominion collapsed and Rhode Island resumed its old charter government.

Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was born in which English city?

London lost his birth records when his parish church burned in the Great Fire of 1666, so even his birth year, probably 1603, is a historian's best guess.

Which mocking nickname did Puritan critics give Roger Williams's colony for welcoming people banished from elsewhere?

Rogue's Island was the milder insult: the Boston minister Cotton Mather went further and called the colony the sewer of New England.

Which Founding Father's older brother James set up Rhode Island's first printing press in Newport?

Benjamin Franklin had once been apprenticed to James, who left Boston after his newspaper was suppressed in 1727 and started again in Newport.

Roger Williams of Rhode Island published the first book-length study in English of what in 1643?

A Native American language, mainly Narragansett, fills A Key into the Language of America, which Williams wrote partly to stop his Puritan neighbours claiming Rhode Island's territory.

Which painter, born in colonial Rhode Island, made the presidential portrait used on the one-dollar bill?

Gilbert Stuart never finished that portrait: he kept the original for himself and used it to paint scores of copies for paying patrons.

Roger Williams sailed to England and in 1644 secured Rhode Island's first charter from which body?

Parliament granted the charter in 1644, and that August it ordered the public hangman to burn every copy of Williams's new book on freedom of conscience.

Which Irish philosopher lived near Newport around 1730 while waiting to found a college in Bermuda?

George Berkeley waited in Rhode Island for promised funds that never came, so he gave up and sailed home. The California university city of Berkeley is named after him.

Which Narragansett sachem gave Roger Williams the land on which Providence was founded in 1636?

Canonicus had led his people since before the Pilgrims landed and was wary of settlers, yet he made the banished minister welcome and befriended him.

Which Newport physician spent more than a decade in England securing Rhode Island's 1663 Royal Charter?

John Clarke stayed on in England as the colony's agent and wrote into the charter a promise of religious freedom never before seen in such a document.

In December 1675, colonial militia overran a huge Narragansett fort in southern Rhode Island in which battle?

The Great Swamp Fight struck a people who had stayed officially neutral, partly through their ties to Roger Williams, but had sheltered the enemy's women and children.