Don’t laugh at Rhode Island

Exchange Place, ca. 1890. City Hall at center; to its right is the First Union Station, where Burnside park currently exists. The area is now called Kennedy Plaza.

“I know not whether anyone, even in New York, is so hardy as to laugh at Rhode Island, where the spirit of Roger Williams still abides in the very dogs….The small commonwealth, with its stronger and fuller flow of life, is more native, more typical, and therefore richer in real instructions, than the large state can ever be.’’

—E.A. Freeman, in Some Impressions of the United States (1883)