Rhode Island Real Estate - Providence County

The Colonial Era

Rhode Island's first permanent settlement (Providence Plantations) was established at Providence in 1636 by English clergyman Roger Williams and a small band of followers who had left the repressive atmosphere of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to seek freedom of worship.  Canonicus and Miantonomi granted Williams a sizable tract of land for his new village.  Other nonconformists followed Williams to the bay region, including Anne and William Hutchinson and William Coddington, all of whom founded Portsmouth in 1638 as a haven for Antinomians, a religious sect whose beliefs resembled those a Quakerism.  A short-lived dispute sent Coddington to the southern tip of Aquidneck Island (also purchased from the Narragansetts), where he established Newport in 1639.  Samuel Gorton, another dissident from Portsmouth, settled the fourth original town, Warwick, in 1642.  During this initial decade, two other outposts were established: Wickford (1637), by Richard Smith, and Pawtuxet (1638), by William Harris and the Arnold family.

The religious freedom that prevailed in early Rhode Island made it a refuge for several persecuted sect.  America's first Baptist church was formed in Providence in 1639; Quakers, who merged with the Antinomians, established a meetinghouse on Aquidneck in 1657 and soon became a powerful force in the colony's political and economic life; a Jewish congregation came to Newport in 1658; and French Huguenots (Calvinists) settled in East Greenwich in 1686.

But by 1670, even the friendly tribes who had greeted Williams and the Pilgrims became estranged from the white colonists, and the storm clouds of war began to darken the New England countryside.

Clashes in culture, the appropriation by whites of Indian land for their exclusive ownership, and a series of hostile incidents between the Wampanoag chief King Philip (Metacom) and the aggressive government of Plymouth Colony resulted in the terrible colonial conflict called King Philip's War.  This futile struggle to rid New England of the white man consumed the lives of several thousand Indians and more than six hundred whites and resulted in enormous property damage.

By mid-eighteenth century the spacious farm, plantations of South County, utilizing the labor of black and Indian slaves, reached the peak of their prosperity.  Here and in the rolling fields of the island towns, colonial farmers raised livestock (especially sheep and a renowned carriage horse aptly named the Narragansett pacer) and cultivated such commodities as apples, onions, flax and dairy products.  The virgin forests yielded lumber for boards, planks, timber, and barrels, and the sea provided whales and an abundance of fish for food and fertilizer.  Most of these items soon became valuable exports for Rhode Island's ever-expanding trade network.

By the end of the colonial era, Rhode Island had developed a brisk commerce with the entire Atlantic community, including England, the Portuguese islands, Africa, South America, the West Indies, and other British mainland colonies.  Though agriculture was by far the dominant occupation, commercial activities flourished in Newport, Providence, and Bristol and in lesser ports like Pawtucket, Wickford, East Greenwich, Warren, and Westerly.  The most lucrative and nefarious aspect of this commerce was the slave trade, in which Rhode Island merchants outdid those of any other mainland colony.  This traffic formed one leg of a triangular route that brought molasses from the West Indies to Rhode Island, whose distilleries transformed it to rum.  This liquor was bartered along the African coast for slaves, who were carried in crowed, pest-ridden vessels to the West Indies, the Southern colonies, or back home for domestic service in the mansions of the merchants or on the plantations of South County.