Page images
PDF
EPUB

screws, india-rubber, worsted,—all these complicated industries have built up an extending and encroaching city, until now three hundred thousand people dwell within a radius of ten miles from our City Hall.

Old Providence, the home of Williams and the Quakers, is fading away. The "Towne Streete," its meandering curves gradually straightening, will hardly be recognized a century hence. The Mowry house, the homes of Stephen and Esek Hopkins, are small, when compared with the mansions of John Brown, Thomas P. Ives, Sullivan Dorr and Edward Carrington; while the solid comfort prevailing in the eighteenth century, as embodied in these houses, is surpassed, though it may not be bettered, by the more pretentious domestic architecture of our day. The Independent worshipers in the First Baptist and First Congregational churches would feel strange under the domes of the beautiful Central Congregational. The Anglicans of the first St. John's would be bewildered by the pointed. arches of St. Stephen's. The few Catholic immigrants, bringing the Host across the seas with tender care, and resting at St. Peter and St. Paul's, would be amazed by the swarm of

[graphic]

THE CAPITOL.

well-to-do citizens clustering beneath the massive towers of the Cathedral.

The industrial and economic evolution is fully as great as the aesthetic and architectural. The crazy little organism of Almy, Brown and Slater is replaced by the long, whirling shafts, the spindled acres of the Goddards' Ann and Hope Mill at Lonsdale. The homely security of the market house (present Board of Trade), the Providence Bank and the "Arcade" is overshadowed by the City Hall, the Rhode Island Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company. University Hall burgeons into the fair arches of Sayles Hall. No medieval builder worked more reverently than Alpheus C. Morse, as he devotedly wrought at his task, getting the best lines into stone and lime.

Not always does the work of the modern builders tend toward beauty. The masterly brick arcades of Thomas A. Teft kept the city's approaches for a half-century. Swept away by the more convenient passenger station of the New York and New Haven Railway, they will leave behind many regrets. The magnificent marble State House will lift the observer away from and above all the buildings below.

The growth of Providence runs even with the State's, except in the excrescent luxury of Newport in its summer bloom. We cannot

stand still like Holland; we must look outward or decay. The American destiny is reaching out, notwithstanding the caution of the prudent, perhaps of the judicious. The mystic Orient, no longer mysterious, beckons from the West instead of the East. It led the Browns, Iveses, Carringtons, Maurans, and their captains, the Holdens, Ormsbees, Paiges and Comstocks, to opulence. Their descendants, with more abundant capital, ready skill and better organization, ought not to lag in the world's march. Men must be forthcoming.

There has been always a cosmopolitan flavor in the little State, isolated between the restless intellectual energy of Massachusetts and the steady Puritan development of Connecticut. Boston had more trade than Providence and Newport; she was not so truly commercial. The larger Franklin went over to Pennsylvania, but the next man, Stephen Hopkins, stayed in Rhode Island. The seed which Berkeley planted sprouted in Channing, and that influence went throughout New England. The little State has never been without ideas.

[graphic][subsumed][merged small]
« PreviousContinue »