A History of the Providence River: With the Moshassuck, Woonasquatucket & Seekonk Tributaries

present.

Introduction

Every river has its beginning. Whether from a mountain lake replenished each spring by melting snow from white-topped peaks that send waterfalls and raging torrents along an ancient water-carved path or from the humbler origins of lowly marshlands that send a trickle and then a stream to join a larger tributary on its journey. Every river has its beginning, but all end at the sea.

In Rhode Island, these tributaries find Narragansett Bay, which reaches its headwaters in the heart of Providence and laps at every crevice of the shoreline of these ancient lands and islands. The bay was a great river eight thousand years ago, and hunters in canoe-like boats came up on land to hunt for caribou. They built piecemeal camps along the great river and sometimes explored its smaller tributaries but always moved on.

About five thousand years ago, Narragansett Bay had—with the warmer climate–enlarged to the contours we know today, and more people settled around the inland streams and rivers and along the coast of Rhode Island. The Narragansett Indians have lived along these shores longer than any other people, and it is from excavations of their encampments and burial grounds, as well as the tribe’s oral and written history, that we know what we know of their lives along the rivers and the bay.

As described by Dr. Ella Wilcox Sekatau, the Narragansett ethno-historian and medicine woman, in her essay Providence’s Original Inhabitants, The people who have become known as the Narragansett Indians were a great nation governed under the auspices of royal Sachems from the Pautuxett, Nehantic (east and west), Sekonett, Pocasett and Narragansett groups.

The remains of Native American settlements have been found throughout Rhode Island, including along the banks above the Seekonk River and at the edge of the saltwater cove that lay in what is still the center of the city. Dr. Sekatau writes:

The civilization of the people was governed by the thirteen (13) twenty eight (28) day moon cycles, four seasons, the eight winds and eight directions, the tides and their strong faith in spiritual practices and beliefs. Seven months were devoted and spent preparing survival materials for the six months of late fall, winter and early spring from the plentiful and abundant natural resources on land and from the sweet and salt waters. Hunting and fishing, trapping in and around fresh water springs, brooks, ponds, rivers and the many saltwater marshes coves, bays, inlets and open seas along the coast and numerous islands were all resources for a millennia of human uses.¹

Thus, the Narragansett and neighboring tribes shared these riverbanks and shores for thousands of years before Verrazano crept his ship La Dauphine through the eastern passage between the Aquidneck and Conanicut Islands and became perhaps the first European to discover the bay.² Standing at the gunwale as the ship headed north past the five small islands…full of tall spreading trees, he must have wondered, noticing from the pleasant hills on either side and the many streams of clear water flowing from the high land into the sea, what great tributary met the bay at its headwaters.

From the north, the Blackstone River meanders toward Pawtucket Falls (named so by Native Americans for the union of two rivers), a freshwater falls that tumbles into the saltwater tide. A well-known fishing location to the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians for more than a millennium, they named the tidal river Seacunck,³ which means home of the black goose and is linked to the tradition of the river as a stopping place for migrating wild geese.

The river continues its course past the woodlands of Pawtucket, the blanket of sand dunes on the western bank and the marsh coves on the eastern side to curl the narrow channel between Bold Point and India Point, where it enters the Providence River.

From the west of Providence, in the bog-laden marshlands the Native Americans called Moshassuck, a stream, which the white settlers would later name after the marsh, begins winding eastward. This tributary joins the Woonasquatucket, whose own origin lies in the great Stillwater⁴ reservoir and feeds the Georgiaville, Greystone and Allendale Millponds before curving north and then east to enter the Great Salt Cove in Providence. The rivers and tide came to a formidable strait at Market Square, the name that white settlers gave to this area between Weybossett and College Hill that was well known for its flourishing trade.

Detail from Charles Blaskowitz’s 1777 map showing Upper Narragansett Bay. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Pawtucket Falls today. Courtesy of the author.

Paddling the Seekonk River today. Courtesy of the author.

J. Earl Clawson notes the profusion of Native American trails leading to this juncture:

Besides the Narragansett trail or Pequot path and the Wampanoag trail, out Meeting Street and over the Red Bridge⁵ route, there were the Pawtucket trail along North Main Street, the Watchemocket and Montaup trails over Washington Bridge and into the southeast; the Louisquisset trail, doubtless another along Putnam Pike, both used by the Nipmucks, and paths feeding in from the west-Cranston, Scituate, Foster….

The Narragansett and neighboring Indians traded corn and other foodstuffs. Tools, utensils, pottery and precious stones were also exchanged. With the advent of European trade, demand for sandstone pipes and bowls increased, and the Narragansett became proficient in their manufacture as well as that of wampum, the currency used by Native American and European traders the length of the eastern seaboard.

CHAPTER 1

The Founding of Providence

One European who became familiar with the Native Americans of southern New England was a Puritan minister named Roger Williams, who had run afoul of Massachusetts authorities in Boston and Salem before being exiled from the colony. After spending much of the winter of 1635 with the Wampanoag Indians, Williams and a few followers settled along the eastern bank of the Seekonk River in the spring of 1636, building a few crude huts and preparing fields for planting. Within a short time, however, they were informed by Salem authorities that they were still living within the boundaries of the town and would have to leave. Williams and a handful of men set out across the Seekonk to a wide cove downriver on the western bank, where they were greeted by a band of Narragansett who shouted from a rocky outcrop on the hill, What cheer, Netop? a phrase that was to become iconic in Rhode Island lore. The legend associated with this greeting has been celebrated in printed word, sketches and paintings—even on dinnerware—and more recently on popular T-shirts sold in Providence shops.

Williams was familiar with the environs of the settlement he would create, guiding his boat around the Neck and up the tributary that would be named the Providence River, where he settled near a freshwater spring that emptied into a great salt cove.

Williams agreed to a deed with the chief sachem of the Narragansett, Canonicus, and his nephew, Miantanomo, for the lands and meadows upon the two fresh rivers called Mooshasick and Wanaquatucket…the bounds of these lands from the river and fields of Pawtuckqut and the great hill of Neotaconconitt on the north-west, and the town of Mashapauge on the west…I having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the Sachems and natives round us; and having in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, called the place, Providence.⁶

Scene of Roger Williams’s landing. Courtesy of the Warwick Historical Society.

Once established, others who had followed from Salem, including William Harris, Thomas Angell, the extended family of William Arnold and Williams’s own family, eventually joined the minister in Providence. During that first year of its existence, the new settlement held an estimated thirty-two inhabitants.⁷

Isolated from the established communities in southern New England, the settlers of Providence prided themselves on their ability to provide for themselves. Most of the families cleared fields for planting crops and raised livestock, which were herded across a narrow ford that the Indians had used for many years to the newly named Weybosset meadowlands, where many of the town’s fields and communal pastures lay.

Historian Glenn Lafantasie notes that hogs were plentiful in the early Providence settlement and were particularly self-sufficient: they roamed the woods, foraging for themselves, and rooted for clams and shellfish on the shore at low tide.⁸ This practice of letting such livestock range free was not without trouble, as attested by early court cases in Providence. In other parts of the colony, it was troublesome to many of the Native Americans who raised crops in the open and relied on the bay for their own food sources. The settlers, it seemed, had other concerns. In Providence, the assembly passed a decree allowing for a reward for any man who shot a wolf lurking about the settlement.

The seal of Providence as depicted on the Van Wickle Gates of Brown University. Courtesy of the author.

Once they secured the safety of their domestic animals, families produced the fiber and flax for bedding and basic clothes, tanned leather for shoes and harnesses and boiled fat and lye for soap. Building materials were in abundant supply. Trees provided the wood for the beams, boards and shingles used for housing, as well as the pitch to waterproof boats and outbuildings. Stones were used for foundations and chimneys and clay for making bricks and stuffing chinks. Limestone for mortar was produced by the burning and slaking of oyster shells from the river.

Settlers also met the needs of the households by building beds, tables, chairs and chests. Wood scraps were also used to make buckets and utensils. In this fashion, the early settlers of Providence could provide for most of their needs.⁹ Whatever else was required was obtained in trade with the local Native Americans. Roger Williams had established a rapport and trade with the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians some years before his settlement, and these good relations doubtless eased the procurement of goods and helped to expand the settlers’ own trade.

The arrival of John Gallop in the summer of 1636 certainly improved on these early trading expeditions. Gallop was a fisherman, pilot and experienced Indian trader. He was the man who had found the murdered John Oldham off Block Island in August 1635 and evidently had forged a friendship with Williams in the aftermath of this incident. John Throgmotten, who kept a shallop in Salem, was also among the first to visit the settlement, and he soon kept a regular run, transporting pork and Narragansett Bay corn to Boston and Salem.¹⁰

A few settlers brought other skills with them. Thomas Olney was a shoemaker who came to Providence from Salem in 1638. John Smith was a miller who would eventually operate the town’s first gristmill, located on the Moshassuk River. Other early settlers contributed to the physical development of the settlement. Chad Brown and William Carpenter are but two examples.

Chad Brown likely arrived in Providence in 1639 with his family from Boston, having recently emigrated on the ship Martin with his wife, Elizabeth, and their son, John. Brown had come to assume leadership of the First Baptist Church, which in its founding years met in meadows, groves and in people’s homes when the cold weather came. Along with his duties as spiritual leader (or perhaps because of them), Brown was given the task of surveying the land and laying out the lots of New Providence. His descendant, John Nicholas Brown, later wrote of the young minister’s dilemma:

Roger Williams on arrival…found a spring of fresh water beside a small river. The hill rose steeply behind. It was quite logical for Chad Brown…to run the line down along the course of the river, the Moshassuck. The little town was on a single street, the Towne Street then called, now called Main Street, and the lots ran eastward up the hill into the wilderness.¹¹

William Carpenter and John Smith were likely responsible for the oversight of many of the constructed homes after the lots were established. In the late nineteenth century, architectural historian Norman Isham spied Carpenter’s handiwork in one of only a few houses remaining after the destruction of the city during King Philip’s War.

The Arthur Fenner house, nestled at the base of Neutaconkanut Hill across Great Salt Pond, had survived King Philip’s War, but the years had brought it to ruin by the time of Isham’s examination. Still, he found in the rubble the smaller fireplace in the chimney that…belonged to the original house. Isham described the fireplace:

It is narrow and deep and low and has, over the opening, an oak beam 16½ inches wide by 23 inches deep, beveled on the fire side, and on it’s lower corner, on the room side, adorned with the most elaborate mouldings [sic] in the colony. They were no doubt the handiwork of William Carpenter, worked out literally by hand; and the beam, thus ornamented, was built into the small chimney.¹²

Of the fifty-four lots drawn out from the end of the cove to another narrows near what later became Randall Square, Brown was awarded land for a house on Towne Street. William Carpenter received a lot on the corner of Towne Street and the highway between his lot and that of Robert Coles. This would later become Meeting Street, as William Wickenden’s and Nicholas Power’s lots were divided by another highway that would later take the name of the latter settler.

Mid-nineteenth-century photograph of the Fenner house before its ruin. Taken from Samuel Arnold’s History of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

In addition to the house lots, there were warehouse lots allotted along the river, and additional lots of six acres were awarded to the first settlers of the colony. Roger Williams’s lot was also located on Towne Street, across from the freshwater spring he had discovered. His six-acre lot adjoined the hillside along the Seekonk River where he had first set foot on his new colony.

Williams was a man of wanderlust. Even as Providence was beginning, he was looking beyond the river to the bay. As early as 1637, he had established a trading post at Cumscossuc, near present-day Wickford, as a vital link for trade with the colony he envisioned as a refuge for those prosecuted for their dissent. Within a few short years, he had assisted settlers in establishing new townships in Porstmouth, Newport and Warwick. Some settlers negotiated with neighboring tribes on their own, though many of these deeds were