PROVIDENCE — The area once known as the Great Salt Cove is now home to the white-marble-domed State House. Nearby — right along Interstate 95 — are the Providence Place Mall, the Vets auditorium, and the WaterFire Basin, which draws visitors from all over when the braziers are lit for the city’s summer arts celebrations.
Buried beneath it all is Snowtown, a once-thriving neighborhood of Indigenous people, poor whites, immigrants, and Black Americans, including escaped slaves, who came to Providence in the early 1800s in search of a better life. But much like Seneca Village in New York City, which was razed in the 1850s to make room for Central Park, or Milwaukee’s Bronzeville, which was demolished in the 1960s to clear a path for Interstate 43, Snowtown fell victim to urban renewal when marshes of the Great Salt Cove were reclaimed for the railroads.
Now, a historical picture of Snowtown is slowly being pieced together by researchers who are reprocessing artifacts that were recovered from two archeological sites in the 1980s in advance of infrastructure improvements and railroad expansion. The researchers, including those from the Public Archaeology Laboratory Inc., which was hired to reprocess the artifacts, formed The Snowtown Project, a community-based initiative.
And they quickly realized they had uncovered more than they expected to find. There were thousands of uncataloged fragments of Snowtown’s history from the 1980s dig.
Among the artifacts were dominoes, Chinese porcelain, slate writing tools, and collectibles passed down from one generation to another: a memorial plate honoring Marquis de Lafayette made by Boston and Sandwich Glass Co., half pennies from 1809, a thimble inscribed “A token of friendship,” a pierced Spanish real stamped with Ferdinand III — a “good luck” silver coin often associated with enslaved Africans, as well as many other things.
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“The objects you find in dumpsters are the objects of everyday life,” said Joelle Rollo-Koster, a professor of medieval history at the University of Rhode Island. “The homes abandoned before the State House was built, someone made the choice to leave those objects where they are. We need to think about how people thought at the time — the poor and the wealthy — and contextualize their lives.”
Using court and town records, city directories, and newspaper archives, the project’s researchers have spent years piecing together the real story of Snowtown and the people who lived there.
Their work could become a centerpiece of a state archive and history center where people can view exhibits and learn about the stories that historically haven’t been told.
“Rhode Islanders are unfamiliar with the existence of Snowtown and who made up that population,” Secretary of State Gregg Amore said.
“One of the proposed sites is directly across Smith Street and adjacent to the train station,” he noted. “So this building would be in Snowtown.”
In the 1800s, nearby Newport still played a major role in the triangle trade, though slavery was banned by Rhode Island’s constitution in 1843. Providence was a growing commercial hub, thanks to its railroad and port access, and people — including those who escaped slavery — flocked to the city seeking better pay, educational opportunities, and freedom. People with little money settled in Snowtown.
Some of its structures were built partly underground, right into the rocks, sand, and mud. In 1982, an archeological dig on the east side of Gaspee Street, between the train station and State House’s parking lot, uncovered the foundations of old buildings used as tenements and businesses, the support poles still intact.
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“There was a carriage works in the neighborhood at some point. There was the foundry,” said Heather Olson, laboratory manager at the Public Archaeology Laboratory in Pawtucket, and a member of the Snowtown Project’s research team. “There was a candle-making and soap manufacturing facility there. There were tanneries nearby, and there was a lot of that kind of industry going on. But intermixed in some of those areas, you had clusters of houses where people were living.”
“There were families,” added Traci Picard, a historian and graduate student in public humanities at Brown University who is also a researcher for the project. “There were so many immigrants and migrants, so many people who forged their own family roots.”
The thriving community lasted for about 90 years before residents were pushed out and the soft mud of the Great Salt Cove was filled in to make way for railroads and development.
Providence’s upper-class citizens saw Snowtown as a rough place to be avoided, but Snowtown’s residents were mainly working-class people aspiring to the classic American dream. Many of them worked as servants. About 40 percent were people of color, and a large percentage were women, mainly widows, who made their living as caregivers, laundresses, cooks, or sex workers, Picard said. Illustrated newspaper stories from September 1885 describe “rickety homes, barren sand, squallor [sic], and poverty.”
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News about Snowtown focused on court appearances, minor crimes, missed rent payments, and petty disputes. But what the area is most remembered for is the riot.
In 1831, visiting sailors brawling on Olney’s Lane in Hardscrabble, a poor neighborhood adjacent to Snowtown, spilled out of the tavern and attacked a nearby home, wrote Joseph W. Sullivan in a 2007 Rhode Island Historical Society publication. Two Black men fired on the white sailors, killing one and wounding three, according to a report in the Rhode Island American and Gazette newspaper. Enraged, a mob of white sailors chased them into Snowtown.
The riot lasted four days and destroyed 18 buildings. The state militia was called in to stop the violence, and ended up shooting and killing four of the white rioters. A Rhode Island Black Heritage Society marker at the north end of Roger Williams National Memorial park, close to Canal and Smith streets, notes the spot.
Snowtown’s reputation gave powerful white politicians and businessmen an excuse to target the area for development. The multicultural neighborhood was in the heart of Providence, and the rapidly growing city was running out of land.
“The railroad had immense power and immense purchasing power, and political power as well,” Picard said. “They negotiated a deal with the city to get access to land.”
In 1838, the city finished constructing a state prison on Snowtown’s western border. By the 1840s, the cove had been partly filled in for the Providence and Worcester railroad line, which created a depot and a public park known as the Cove Promenade. Newspapers reported that it was beautifully landscaped, and the newly formed Public Park Association said it gave the city “lungs.”
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But the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers that flowed into the Promenade carried city sewage and industrial waste, and the mud flats would fill with sewage whenever the tide went out. As the city’s population grew, residents complained about the stench from the Cove. People in power began pushing to modernize the area and get rid of urban blight.
“The basin comprises some of the best and most accessible land in the city and when filled up will open almost a square mile of territory now covered by water for commercial and railway purposes,” the Boston Globe reported on June 15, 1888.
To this day, such urban renewal projects usually negatively affect lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color, Picard noted. It was no different for Snowtown.
The railroad paid about $1 million to buy most of the property that made up Snowtown. Work to fill the cove began on Dec. 30, 1889, with 91 men pushing dump cars and bringing dirt, according to a story in the Providence Daily Journal. The Promenade was filled in around 1892. What was left of Snowtown was slated for demolition by 1894, when the Rhode Island Supreme Court upheld a decision to condemn properties along Gaspee, Smith, and Francis streets for the construction of the State House.
“Over and over and over, people have been displaced. Over and over people have had to find an alternative community,” said Picard. “The forces that raided Snowtown are still with us. It’s a pattern that happened before and after Snowtown. I’m hoping that not only can we see historical Snowtown residents as people, but everyone who came afterward are worthy of our study and research.”
Carlos Muñoz can be reached at carlos.munoz@globe.com. Follow him @ReadCarlos and on Instagram @Carlosbrknews.