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RIRhode Island Geography
The state is named after an island most of it is not on
Aquidneck Island, the 38-square-mile block of land in Narragansett Bay holding Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth, has carried the legal name Rhode Island since 1644. The mainland has no such name. When the island settlements and the Providence settlements merged into one colony the compound title stuck, and the official name stayed the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations until voters cut the second half in a referendum in November 2020. Until then it was the longest official state name in the country, attached to the smallest state.
The whole place measures roughly 48 miles north to south and 37 miles east to west: 1,214 square miles including water, 1,045 square miles of dry land. Alaska is more than five hundred times larger. Rhode Island still has five counties on paper, but they have had no government of any kind since 1846 and survive only as court districts and census units.
A bay that takes up a tenth of the state
Narragansett Bay covers around 147 square miles, more than a tenth of everything inside the state line. It is a drowned river valley. Glaciers deepened the channels, sea level rose after the ice withdrew, and salt water flooded the low ground, leaving three long passages running inland around more than thirty islands. Conanicut, Prudence, Hope, Patience, Dutch and Hog are the larger ones. The tidal shoreline that results runs to about 384 miles, against only 40 miles of open ocean coast, which is where the Ocean State nickname comes from.
One consequence is that Rhode Island is not continuous by road. The East Bay towns of Bristol, Warren, Barrington and Tiverton sit on the far side of the water, and getting there from Providence means crossing a bridge or driving through Massachusetts. Three long spans hold the state together: the Mount Hope Bridge from 1929, the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge from 1969, which runs 11,248 feet across the East Passage, and the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge from 1992.
812 feet, and once the hardest summit in America to visit
Jerimoth Hill in the town of Foster, a wooded rise 812 feet above sea level near the Connecticut line, is the highest ground in Rhode Island. Only a handful of state high points are lower. For decades it was notorious among people who collect state summits, not for the climb, which takes a couple of minutes from the road, but because the only approach crossed private land whose owner posted the property and called the police on visitors. Access opened in 2005 after the land changed hands and the Highpointers Club cut a short trail, and the state Department of Environmental Management took ownership in 2014. It is open at any hour now.
The rest of the state splits in two. Roughly two thirds of it, everything east and south, is Coastal Lowland: flat, sandy, mostly under 200 feet. The northwestern third, including Foster and Glocester, belongs to the New England Upland, rockier and several hundred feet higher, which is where Jerimoth Hill sits.
Everything here was left behind by ice
Nothing in the Rhode Island landscape was shaped recently by anything except glaciers. The Laurentide ice sheet reached its southern limit at this latitude and stalled, dumping the rubble it had dragged south. That terminal moraine is now Block Island, sitting about 13 miles offshore in the Atlantic, where the Mohegan Bluffs rise roughly 150 feet of loose glacial sediment straight out of the surf. Along the southern mainland the same process left low barrier beaches with shallow salt ponds trapped behind them. Ninigret, Quonochontaug, Winnapaug, Point Judith Pond and Trustom are nurseries for shellfish and stopping points for migrating birds.
Block Island picked up a second distinction in December 2016, when five turbines off its southeastern shore began feeding the grid as the first offshore wind farm in the United States.
A river that fell fast enough to start an industry
The Blackstone River drops about 438 feet on its way from Worcester in Massachusetts down to tidewater at Providence, and it packs that fall into 46 miles. The gradient is the reason the American factory system began in Rhode Island rather than somewhere with more room: Samuel Slater put water-powered spinning machinery at Pawtucket Falls in 1793 and mills filled the valley behind him. The Pawcatuck River marks part of the Connecticut border, and the Pawtuxet drains the middle of the state into the bay.
The shape of the bay also concentrates storms. A hurricane driving up a narrowing funnel piles water at the closed end, and in September 1938 the surge put downtown Providence under several feet of sea water with almost no warning. The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier, finished in the 1960s, now seals the river mouth when a storm is coming. Rhode Island's temperature records are 104 degrees at Providence on 2 August 1975 and 28 below zero at Greene on 5 February 1996.
Common questions
What is the highest point in Rhode Island?
Jerimoth Hill in Foster, 812 feet above sea level, near the Connecticut border. Until 2005 it was the hardest state high point in the country to visit because the only access crossed hostile private land. The state took ownership in 2014 and it is open all hours.
How big is Rhode Island?
1,214 square miles including water and 1,045 square miles of land, about 48 miles north to south and 37 miles east to west. It is the smallest state, and Alaska is more than five hundred times larger.
Why is Rhode Island called the Ocean State?
Because of Narragansett Bay. The bay covers about 147 square miles, more than a tenth of the state, and the tidal shoreline runs to roughly 384 miles even though the open ocean coast is only about 40 miles long. No part of the state is far from salt water.
Is Rhode Island actually an island?
Part of it. Aquidneck Island, which holds Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth, has been legally named Rhode Island since 1644, and the colony took its name from the island. Most of the state is on the mainland.
How was Rhode Island's landscape formed?
By the Laurentide ice sheet. Narragansett Bay is a glacially deepened river valley flooded by rising sea level, Block Island is a terminal moraine, and the south shore salt ponds sit behind glacial barrier beaches.
Smallest state, same size square on the grid
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