Providence is beautifully situated on the hills at the head of Narragansett Bay, and its centre is a fine new Union Railway Station, completed in 1897. Near by is the massive City Hall, one of the chief public buildings in Rhode Island, a granite structure costing $1,500,000. In high relief upon its front is a medallion bust of the founder of the little State, Roger Williams, wearing the typical sugar-loaf hat. A feature of this impressive building is the magnificent stair-hall, lighted from above; and from the surmounting tower there is a wide view over the city and suburbs, and far down the bay towards the ocean. In front is the public square, with a stately Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument of blue Westerly granite, bearing the names of nearly seventeen hundred men of Rhode Island who fell in the Civil War, and guarded by well-executed bronze statues representing the different arms of the service. Facing it is a statue in heroic bronze of the Rhode Island General Burnside, who died in 1881. These works are artistic, but the priceless art gem in Providence is the exquisite little picture of "The Hours," painted on a sheet of ivory six by seven inches, in London, by the great portrait and miniature painter, Edward Greene Malbone, of Newport—the three Grecian nymphs, Eunomia, Dice and Irene, representing the Past, Present and Future. The President of the Royal Academy said of it, "I have seen a picture, painted by a young man of the name of Malbone, which no man in England could excel." This is his masterpiece, one of the most admired paintings in America, and is kept carefully in the Athenæum (to which it was presented by a public subscription in 1853), a solid little granite house built on the hillside, not far from the Baptist church.
Farther up this hill are the campus and rows of buildings of Brown University, the great Rhode Island Baptist College with seven hundred students, founded in 1764, and bearing the name of one of the leading families of the wealthy manufacturing house of Brown & Ives. The campus is shaded with fine old elms, and some of the newer buildings are handsome and elaborate structures. Around this university, and all through the extensive suburbs, are the splendid homes of the capitalists and mill-owners of the State, who have made this hill, rising between the Providence and Seeconk Rivers, the most attractive residential section. Benefit Street, on the hill, is lined with the palaces of these textile millionaires. Providence is, in fact, a city of many hills, and its houses are mostly of wood. Extensive sections can be traversed without seeing a single brick or stone building. There is a large railway traffic, but only a small trade by sea, beyond bringing coal and cotton, though the city formerly enjoyed an extensive China trade. Like all the Rhode Island towns it has many mills and much wealth, and there are thirty or forty banks to take care of its money. Besides textiles, its mills make locomotives and Corliss steam-engines, silverware and jewelry, cigars, rifles and stoves, gimlet-pointed wood-screws, tortoise-shell work and cocoanut dippers, cottonseed and peanut oils, and many other things, not overlooking the famous "Pain-killer," for the ills of humanity, which is consumed by the hundred thousand gallons in all parts of the world. The "Pain-killer" factory was always one of the lions of the town, although now the new Rhode Island State House, finished in 1898, also commands great public admiration. This is a huge dome-surmounted building in Renaissance, constructed of Georgia marble and pink granite. But Providence, above everything else, reveres the memory of Roger Williams, who died in 1683, and is interred in the old North Burying Ground. On Abbott Street is carefully preserved, as a precious relic, a small old house with quaint peaked roof, built in the seventeenth century, and reverenced as the place where he held some of his religious meetings. His bronze statue ornaments the Roger Williams Park to which Broad Street leads, a beautiful tract of about one hundred acres, surrounding the quaint gambrel-roofed house in which lived his great-great-granddaughter, Betsy Williams, for many years, who gave this domain to the city in 1871, as her tribute to his memory. Here are refreshments served at "What Cheer Cottage." But the most treasured memorial of the founder is his original landing-place of "What Cheer Rock," where the Indians greeted him alongside the Seeconk River,—a pile of slaty rocks, enclosed by a railing, near the foot of Williams Street, down by the waterside.
PROVIDENCE TO WORCESTER.
We ascend the Seeconk River to Pawtucket, about five miles distant, a busy manufacturing town of thirty thousand people, noted as the place where Samuel Slater introduced the cotton manufacture into the United States in 1790, the original Slater mill still standing. The Pawtucket Falls of fifty feet give the valuable water-power which has made the place, and here are some of the greatest thread factories in the world. The town extends up into the villages of Central and Valley Falls, and the enormous power furnished by the river is drawn upon at different levels from several dams. All sorts of cotton textiles, muslins and calicoes are made, and the slopes running up from the valley, with the plateaus above, are covered with the operatives' houses. This town has the most attractive situation on the Blackstone River, which here changes its name to the Pawtucket, and finally to the Seeconk. Samuel Slater, who started it, was a native of Belper, in Derbyshire, England, having worked there for both Strutt and Arkwright, the fathers of the textile industries. Learning that American bounties had been offered for the introduction of Arkwright's patents in cotton-spinning, he crossed the ocean, landing at Newport in 1789. Here he heard that Moses Brown had attempted cotton-spinning by machinery in Rhode Island. He wrote Brown, telling what he could do, and received a reply in which Brown said his attempt had been unsuccessful, and added: "If thou canst do this thing, I invite thee to come to Rhode Island and have the credit and the profit of introducing cotton manufacture into America." Slater went to Pawtucket, and on December 21, 1790, he started three carding-machines and spinning-frames of seventy-two spindles. He afterwards became very prominent, building large mills at Pawtucket and elsewhere, and the impetus thus given the place made it the leading American manufacturing centre for a half-century. The Indian name of the falls was retained by the city.
The Blackstone River was named after the recluse Anglican clergyman, Rev. William Blackstone, who, as heretofore stated, first settled Boston about 1625. When he found, after a brief experience, that he could not get on with the Puritan colonists, who came in there too numerously, he sold out and "retired into the wilderness." He wandered for over forty miles into the forests, and during more than forty years made his home on the banks of this stream among the Indians, not far above Pawtucket Falls. He lived there in his hermit home at Study Hill among his books, the river rushing by, and the Providence and Worcester Branch of the New Haven Consolidated Railroad now cuts its route deeply through his hill, running among the dams, and in some cases over them, on its way up the busy valley of this very crooked river. Its waters, which do such good service for so many mills, become more and more polluted as they descend, so that its lower course is a malodorous and dark-colored stream. The river is about forty-five miles long, rising in the hills adjacent to Worcester and flowing in winding reaches towards the southeast, descending over five hundred feet to Providence. The mills, however, have grown vastly beyond its capacity as a water-power, so that auxiliary steam is now largely used. Numerous ponds and other feeders accumulate a vast amount of water for the Blackstone in Southern Massachusetts, and its lower course for nearly thirty miles is a succession of dams, canals and mills, making one of the greatest factory districts in existence. Over a half-million people work and live in this busy valley, the operatives being chiefly French Canadians, Swedes, and the various British races, the French preponderating in some of the towns. The Yankees long ago left, seeking better pay elsewhere, being replaced by a more contented people satisfied to work in mills. Most of the huge factories lining the river are owned by wealthy corporations having their head offices in Boston or Providence, and it is said that, the buildings being without signs or names, many of the operatives actually do not know who they work for. These mills are four and five stories high, often a thousand feet long, with hundreds of windows and ponderous stairway-towers.
Ascending the river, the factory settlements of Lonsdale, Ashton, Albion and Manville are passed, and we come to Woonsocket Hill, one of the highest in Rhode Island. Here the river goes around various bends admirably arranged for conducting its waters through the mills, and the town of Woonsocket is built where twenty thousand people make cotton and woollen cloths, the noted "Harris cassimere" having been long the chief manufacture at the Social Mills. To the northward, Woonsocket spreads into the towns of Blackstone and Waterford, also industrial hives; and finally, having followed the river up to its sources, the route leads to Worcester, the second city of Massachusetts, forty-five miles west of Boston, styled the "heart of the Commonwealth," with a population of over one hundred thousand people. Its chief newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy, is noted as having actually started as a spy upon the royalists in the exciting times preceding the Revolutionary War, and is still a prosperous publication. It was at a Worcester banquet in 1776 that the "Sons of Freedom" drank the noted toast: "May the freedom and independence of America endure till the sun grows dim with age and this earth returns to chaos; perpetual itching without the benefit of scratching to the enemies of America!" Worcester is a great manufacturing city, but has almost lost its New England population from the steady Yankee migration westward, they being replaced in its numerous mills by French Canadians, Swedes and Irish, the latter predominating. It has a noble Soldiers' Monument, a splendid railway station, and the fine buildings of the Massachusetts Lunatic Asylum standing on the highest hill in the suburbs. Its new white marble City Hall, completed in 1898, is an imposing edifice. The huge Washburn & Moen Wire Works are on Salisbury Pond, in the outskirts. Among the interesting old dwellings is the Bancroft House, where the historian, George Bancroft, was born, in 1800, dying in 1891. The great attraction of Worcester is Lake Quinsigamond, on the eastern verge, a long, deep, narrow loch, stretching among the hills four miles away, with little gems of islands and villa-bordered shores. Scattered over the distant rim of enclosing hills are several typical Yankee villages, with their church-spires set against the horizon. Worcester had a chequered colonial career, the Indians repeatedly driving out the early settlers, until they built a fortress-like church on the Common, where each man attended on the Sabbath, carrying his musket. These resolute colonists were Puritans, bent on enforcing their own ideas, for when a few Scotch Presbyterians came in 1720, and built a church of that creed, it was declared a "cradle of heresy" and demolished. A considerable number of the French Acadians, exiled from Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, came to Worcester, and their descendants are now among its prominent people.
New England, as is well known, was forced to adopt manufacturing, because the inhabitants could not extract a living from the soil. It is difficult to say where is the most sterile region, but in Massachusetts it seems to be generally agreed that the town of Ware, on the Ware River, northwest of Worcester, is hard to beat in this respect. It is a picturesquely located mill-village, with a soil that is stony and sterile. The original grant of the land was made to soldiers as a reward for bravery in King Philip's War. They thankfully accepted the gift and went there, but after examination left, and sold all their domain at the rate of about two cents an acre. President Dwight, of Yale College, rode through the town, but never wanted to see it again, saying regretfully, in describing the land: "It is like self-righteousness; the more a man has of it, the poorer he is." Someone wrote a poem describing the creation of the place, of which this a specimen stanza:
"Dame Nature once, while making land,
Had refuse left of stone and sand.
She viewed it well, then threw it down