RIRhode Island Fun Facts

Rhode Island refused to send anyone to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and then held out for three more years. It ratified on 29 May 1790 by 34 votes to 32, a margin of two, and only after Congress began discussing whether to tax Rhode Island goods as foreign imports. The smallest state has always been comfortable being the awkward one.

Facts most people get wrong

• It is not an island, but it is named for one. The name belongs to Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay, which is still legally called Rhode Island. The mainland borrowed it.
• It is not the least populous state. Wyoming and Vermont both have fewer people. Rhode Island is smallest by land area only, about 1,034 square miles.
• The old official name was not about slave plantations. State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations used the word in its 1600s sense of a new settlement. Voters removed the phrase anyway in November 2020, retiring the longest official state name in the country.
• Rhode Island was not a bystander in slavery. Merchants in Newport and Bristol financed and sailed the majority of North American slaving voyages in the 1700s, and the trade continued illegally for decades after the state passed a gradual emancipation act in 1784.
• The Boston Tea Party was not the first attack on the Crown. On 9 June 1772 Rhode Islanders rowed out and burned the British revenue schooner Gaspee after it ran aground chasing a smuggler off Warwick, eighteen months before anyone dumped tea in Boston Harbor.
• Roger Williams did not choose Rhode Island, he was expelled to it. Massachusetts Bay banished him in 1636 for arguing that government had no authority over conscience and that the land belonged to the Narragansett. He founded Providence, and the colony became the first with genuine separation of church and state.

Records and firsts

• First to renounce the king. On 4 May 1776 the General Assembly formally renounced allegiance to George III, two months ahead of the Declaration of Independence.
• Last of the thirteen to ratify the Constitution, on 29 May 1790, by 34 votes to 32.
• The start of American industry, 1793. Slater Mill in Pawtucket was the first water-powered cotton spinning mill in the country, built from machine designs Samuel Slater had memorised in England before emigrating.
• The oldest synagogue building in the United States. Touro Synagogue in Newport was dedicated in 1763 and is still in use.
• Two national championships began in Newport. The first US national tennis championship was played at the Newport Casino in 1881, and the first US Open golf championship at Newport Country Club in 1895.
• The oldest Fourth of July parade in the country. Bristol has held one every year since 1785.

Geography that surprises

• About 48 miles top to bottom and 37 across. You can drive the length of the state in roughly an hour without hurrying.
• Narragansett Bay cuts almost thirty miles inland and holds more than thirty islands, which is how a state this small ends up with something close to 400 miles of shoreline and a straight face when it calls itself the Ocean State.
• Block Island is a separate town. It sits about 13 miles offshore and is officially New Shoreham, the least populated town in Rhode Island.
• The high point was the hardest summit in America to reach. Jerimoth Hill is 812 feet, a short walk from a road, but the approach crossed private land and the owner turned climbers away for decades, making it notorious among people trying to visit all fifty state high points.
• Rhode Island would fit inside Alaska more than 400 times.

Where the name comes from

There are two candidates and neither has won. Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed past in 1524 and compared an island near the mouth of the bay to Rhodes in the Aegean, and later English colonists picked the comparison up as a name. The Dutch trader Adriaen Block, who charted the coast around 1614, called it Roodt Eylandt, red island, for the red clay along the shore, and English ears turned that into Rhode Island.

The royal charter of 1663 fixed the spelling and bolted on the settlements around Providence as Providence Plantations. Plantation then meant a planting of people, a new settlement, nothing more. Voters cut that half of the name in 2020.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #50 of 50
• Admitted: 1790, the 13th and last of the original states
• Capital: Providence
• Largest city: Providence
• Time zone: Eastern

Bordering states

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