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.