Roger Williams NM Landscape: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Roger Williams National Memorial
Auwaerter J and Cowperthwaite K. 2025. Roger Williams NM Landscape: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Roger Williams National Memorial. Cultural Landscapes Inventory Report. 650048. National Park Service. NPS Northeast Regional Office, Boston, Massachusetts / CRIS-CL Database
Located at the foot of College Hill in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, Roger Williams National Memorial is a small urban park established by Congress to commemorate the founder of Providence and his significant contributions to the principles of freedom in the United States. Roger Williams landed at the future site of the national memorial in 1636, attracted by the presence of a fresh-water spring. Here, he laid out the Providence settlement and established its government that ensured freedom of religion through the separation of church and state. Williams built his house across the street from the spring, and lived there on and off until his death in 1683. During the subsequent four centuries, the spring—later recognized as a symbolic wellspring of both Rhode Island and the concept of religious freedom in the United States—became hidden by urban development. As interest in the city’s past grew, the spring was revealed in the early twentieth century and finally enshrined within Roger Williams National Memorial, designated in 1965 and substantially completed in 1982. Although mostly a contemporary resource, the 4.5-acre park, with its winding paths, open lawns, and groves of trees, includes an early twentieth-century municipal memorial to Roger Williams and the founding of Providence, as well as an eighteenth-century house that is the only remnant of the residential, commercial, civic, and industrial buildings that existed on the site before it was cleared in the 1970s through the city’s urban renewal program.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Auwaerter, John; Cowperthwaite, Karen
- Date of Issue
- 2025
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- NER , ROWI
- Keywords
- Albert Veri, American Exploration and Settlement, Antram-Gray House, Architecture, Axial Plan, Civil Law, College Hill Historic District, Colonial Revival, Commemorative Site, Hahn Memorial, Landscape architecture, National Memorial, Norman Isham, Politics-Government, Providence, Religion, religious freedom, Rhode Island, Roger Williams, Spring, The Early Peopling of North America, The Revival of Classicism, Urban Park