Colonial

In the Barneyville Historic District of Swansea, Massachusetts, near Old Providence Road and the Palmer River, there is a granite monument erected in 1912 with a bronze plaque that reads …
Read More

Stephen Hopkins (1707–85), statesman, pamphleteer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born on March 7, 1707, in Providence easterly of a former Indian village called Mashapaug. This site …
Read More

In the mid eighteenth century in Newport, there were three men from the same family, contemporaries with almost the same name, all sons of governors.

Two, father and son, were …
Read More

A recent publication in Williamsburg, Virginia, about a colonial school for enslaved and free children of color spurred this research. Williamsburg historians used their database of student names, as well …
Read More

I was going through the colonial records of South Kingstown at the South Kingstown Town Hall last year when I stumbled across a census document with decent detail that wound …
Read More

[The following is the main text from my article “The South Kingstown Planters: Country Gentry in Colonial Rhode Island,” Rhode Island History, Volume 45, Number 3 (August 1986), pages 81-93. …
Read More

Eighteenth-century American society allowed women to take on some roles outside of homemaker. Women were plaintiffs in court cases, administrators of wills, held powers of attorney, and were property owners. …
Read More

Samuel Casey of Little Rest (now Kingston) was one of the most skilled silversmiths in colonial times in all of the colonies.  His craftsmanship of silver tankards and teapots made …
Read More

We viewed the sea from a high rock…below us of three or four miles extent, a pleasant green meadow, thro’ the middle of which run a pritty winding river. Hamilton …
Read More

Long-simmering tensions in southeastern New England over land and the mistreatment of Indigenous people finally exploded into all-out conflict in June 1675. King Philip’s War, as it became known, began …
Read More