Cranston, once known as Pawtuxet, is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The credited population of the city in the 2020 United States Census was 82,934, making it the second largest in the state. The middle of population of Rhode Island is located in Cranston. Cranston is a allocation of the Providence metropolitan area.

Cranston was named one of the “100 Best Places to Live” in the United States by Money magazine in 2006. Cranston ranked 36th on the list of “America’s 50 Best Cities to Live” in a 2014 survey ended by 24/7 Wall St.

The Town of Cranston was created in 1754 from a portion of Providence north of the Pawtuxet River. After losing much of its territory to adjacent to towns and the city of Providence, Cranston itself became a city upon March 10, 1910.

Much of the house was purchased by Roger Williams from the Narragansett Indians in 1638 as portion of the Pawtuxet Purchase, and the first settler in the area was William Arnold, who was followed hastily by William Harris, William Carpenter, and Zachariah Rhodes. Stephen Arnold, a brother-in-law of Rhodes and William Arnold, built a gristmill upon the Pawtuxet falls and laid out the Arnold Road (modern-day Broad Street) connecting it to the Pequot Trail leading to Connecticut. Arnold’s son Benedict Arnold became the first Governor of Rhode Island below the charter of 1663. Residents were unable to agree on a publish for a additional town for decades, and the Town of Cranston was eventually created by the General Assembly in 1754 from a ration of Providence north of the Pawtuxet River. Historians debate whether the town was named after Governor Samuel Cranston, the longest-serving Rhode Island governor, or his grandson Thomas Cranston, who was serving as Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives at the get older that the town was created.^{[citation needed]} In the at the forefront 1770s, town meetings were held at the taverns of Caleb Arnold and Nehemiah Knight, where residents voted in accord of a complete opposing the British Parliament’s Coercive Acts; the town heavily supported the Patriot cause during the Revolutionary War. The town purposeless much of its territory to next to towns and the city of Providence more than the nineteenth century, and Cranston became a city upon March 10, 1910.