Molly Cousins' Project - Prospect Terrace Park and the Williams Root

I walk to Prospect Terrace Park on a Saturday afternoon. After spending all week in enclosed spaces, the exposure to sunlight and the persistent Providence wind offers respite from my typical routine. I squint, almost ashamedly, at the bright blueness that my eyes have dishabituated from and bury my face further into my scarf. How quickly the body forgets interactions with the exterior world!

I take the roundabout route, despite my mild discomfort, for no particular reason other than to prolong my walk. It’s nice to wander these quaint streets from time to time and take note of my broader surroundings. As I meander northward, then double back towards my destination, I am struck by the cheeriness of the pastel clapboard against the brilliant sky. Although the style of these buildings seems, to me, timeless, it is also clear from the plaques I see on some of the homes that I’m walking through a neighborhood with significant historical weight.

A left onto Congdon Street and the park appears; somewhat to my surprise, despite my clear (although leisurely) intent to find it. My ambling through the residential part of College Hill has conveniently also given me a sense of the physical context of this park. Given the precipitous nearby hill, the surrounding plots of land must be economized and efficiently used; however, I had expected the park to be larger. Then, I saw the view. Of the four others there – two couples out for a Valentine’s stroll – I was clearly the only one there for the park itself and not its backdrop. The couples gravitated towards the front edge of the park and the massive square arch housing Roger Williams, yet ignored this weighty focal point in favor of the more popular view of downtown Providence.

My single self, feeling somewhat cynical this Valentine’s Day, chuckled that these couples had chosen this park. They were either unaware of or had since forgotten its formal history and the urban memories surrounding it. This curious mix of accepted history and local myth was forefront in my mind, yet certainly I was somewhat biased after recently researching Prospect Terrace. Evidently H.P. Lovecraft, a horror writer from the early 1900’s, frequented this park while living at 10 Barnes St. As a sufferer of intestinal cancer, malnutrition, and psychiatric ailments, the park for Lovecraft surely served a different purpose than it did for these couples today.

Two years after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, an event almost befitting a horror novel took place – a committee composed of descendants of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, decided to unearth his body from its quiet, discreet resting place behind his old house for a more honorable location. They and the Works Progress Administration constructed the arch and statue in Prospect Terrace Park for this express purpose. A statue of Williams was to look out over his city and his body was to rest underneath it in a white tomb.

During the attempt to exhume the 250-year-old body, all that was discovered were bits of “greasy earth” and a curiously-shaped root from a nearby apple tree. The root seemed to have arms, a torso, legs, and even upturned “toes.” Evidently the root had "eaten" Roger Williams, growing through the coffin and using the nutrients of his decomposing body to grow. The committee moved what remains they could find across the street to the tomb. I looked for some form of commemorative plaque around the giant white structure, yet found no official documentation within the park apart from the WPA seal at the northern entrance. In fact, the park had been far more “documented upon” informally by local graffiti artists than the Roger Williams Family Association or the City of Providence. It struck me as a social gathering space and recreational facility as much as (if not more so than) a memorial. I found it to be lacking ties with local history and collective memory that I had expected from my pre-journey research.

The “Williams Root” has recently been taken out of storage and exhibited in the John Brown House on 52 Power Street. Volunteer workers claim that it has become the most popular part of the House tour – some visitors have even traveled significant distances to see the root exclusively. Although scientifically it is well known that apple tree roots seek out carbon in surrounding soil (and it thus follows that this root could have “followed” the path of a human body) this anthropomorphized root maybe is just a root from an apple tree that happened to grow on a bit of land that he once lived on.

I wonder why it is that this bizarre humanoid plant root draws far more attention than Williams’ actual remains. Although Prospect Terrace clearly commemorates something, perhaps the absence of a description for the white statue and tomb confound this sense for the visitor. What results is a disconnect between perceived, expected meaning and actual usage in the mind. Perhaps it is due to the sheer passage of time that the root is a crisper image in the collective memory than Williams’ tomb – the root’s exhibition opened quite recently, although technically these two memories do begin in 1939. Clearly the novelty of the myth adds an intrigue that only the most zealous of historians would likewise feel about the tomb. Perhaps in moving Roger Williams’ remains from their original context, which had established historical as well as a more personal meaning, his memory was also moved, changed, and fractured. The arbitrarily located memorial has no connection to Williams or, from what we can tell, to his personal life other than that it is in “his” city. Although he lived nearby, Williams cannot have had direct interaction with this exact space, as he died 200 years before it became a park in 1867. He cannot have enjoyed the park as Lovecraft or the Valentine’s couples did, for the space was not the same space with the same character in any of these times.

Although I have taken the time to research and gain a greater knowledge of the Park and the history and memory surrounding it, I will most likely forget what it was like when I went to Prospect Park for the second, third, and fourth times. I too will become habituated to the memory that arises in my mind when I am there, and I may even eventually forget that Roger Williams is buried there. Perhaps I too will succumb to the vague feeling that the place is “historical” as the collective memory dictates, like I do when I walk the streets of other New England towns, instead of having a more concrete understanding. Perhaps I will even focus on the skyline of downtown Providence instead of the giant white mausoleum and inherit the blind spot that the Valentine’s couples and others seem to have. Memory, both individual and collective, is mutable. As Prospect Terrace Park demonstrates, so is history.

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology