Roger Williams’ house was opposite the spring, forty-eight feet to the east of the present Main Street and four feet north of Howland Street. Next, to the north of his residence, was the house and lot of Joshua Verein. North of this was Richard Scott’s. The first house south of Williams’ was that of John Throckmorton and, beyond, that of William Harris. At first the struggle for existence was hard, more so because of the loss of the crops planted at Seekonk. Governor Winslow, of Plymouth, conscious of the wrong Plymouth Colony had done to Williams, visited the little settlement that first summer and left a gift of gold with Mrs. Williams. In the spring and summer of the following year, new houses were built along the street. The new settlers brought money with them, and Williams enlisted outside capital to help develop the colony.
The Original Providence “Compact”
Drawn up by the men of Providence, August 20, 1638, and now contained in the City Hall. One of the most valuable documents in existence, under which Williams and his companions promised to subject themselves in active and passive obedience, but “Only in Civil Things.”
“You must look to the Magna Charta, for another such epoch-making decree, for these, with the Declaration and the Emancipation Proclamation, are the four great dynamic forces of American Freedom.”—R. B. Burchard.
Courtesy of “Providence Magazine,” October, 1915
The number of town lots increased. The land lay between the present Main Street and Hope Street. Each lot was of equal width and ran eastward. Eventually there were one hundred and two of these lots extending from Mile End Brook, which enters the river a little north of Fox Point, to Harrington’s Lane, now the dividing line between Providence and North Providence. Meeting and Power Streets were the dividing streets in those early days. In addition to the home lot, each proprietor had an “out six-acre lot” assigned to him. Williams’ “out lot” was at “What Cheer Rock.”
The Threatened Indian Trouble
Williams, although suffering from Puritan persecution, had an opportunity that first year of doing good to his persecutors. He became the savior of all the New England Colonies. The Pequot Indians planned the annihilation of the English. Williams, hearing of this, did his utmost to break up an Indian league, and kept the Narragansetts from joining the Pequots and Mohicans. He describes this experience in the following statement:
The Lord helped me immediately to put my life into my hands, and scarce acquainting my wife, to ship alone, in a poor canoe, and to cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of life, to the sachem’s house. Three days and nights my business forced me to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequod ambassadors, whose hands and arms, methought, reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on the Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also. God wondrously preserved me, and helped me to break the Pequod’s negotiation and design; and to make and finish, by many travels and charges, the English league with the Narragansetts and Mohegans against the Pequods.