Posted on 10/26/2010 5:30:20 PM PDT by rdl6989
Hi Dilbert - you’re right. Roger Williams (my direct 13X grandfather) founded Providence & it’s plantations in 1636 on the mainland after being banished from Mass, he laid out 50 or 52 plots along today’s Main Street and I think they were twelve acres each. His plot was right across from a spring - where the Roger Wliams National Memorial is today.
Another group founded Aquidneck Island and a sort of battle went on to get a royal charter for a couple of decades, which finally was granted in 1688 as “RI and...Plantations”. Another ancestor was among that 1st group on Aquidneck as an indentured servant (stole corn in Boston). His son married Roger Williams daughter.
There were slave plantations in RI though so that part of history is true, and RI was a major slave trading state.
~Rhode Island - first in war, last in peace ~
Explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano likened what is now Aquidneck Island (in the Narragansett Bay) to the Island of Rhodes in the Med...
“Plantations? LOL!”
There actually were slave plantations in RI, I know because my family were both slaveowners & slavetraders in North Kingstown aka “Smith Castle” where the Great Swamp Fight of 1675 was staged from.
In a few decades they can change the name to “Road iLand” in deference to people who got a public education.
actually the name comes from the merger of two colonial settlements: Providence Plantations and Rhode Island (Aquidneck Island)
Well..actually it is. Rhode Island is Aquidneck Island which is really an island. The Providence Plantations are the surrounding lands that are not an island. I don’t know what the other islands are supposed to be.
What ho,Jr.Netop?
To be pronounced correctly it should be Vhode Ilan.
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