Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He named the area in award of “God’s merciful Providence” which he believed was blamed for revealing such a waterfront for him and his followers. The city developed as a busy port as it is situated at the mouth of the Providence River in Providence County, at the head of Narragansett Bay.

Providence was one of the first cities in the country to industrialize and became noted for its textile manufacturing and subsequent machine tool, jewelry, and silverware industries. Today, the city of Providence is house to eight hospitals and eight institutions of well ahead learning which have shifted the city’s economy into help industries, though it still retains some manufacturing activity.

At the 2020 census, Providence had a population of 190,934, making it the third-most-populous city in New England after Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts.

Providence was contracted in June 1636 by Puritan theologian Roger Williams and grew into one of the indigenous Thirteen Colonies. As a minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Williams had advocated for the disaffection of church and acknowledge and condemned colonists’ confiscation of house from Native Americans. For these “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions,” he was convicted of sedition and heresy and banished from the colony. Williams and others normal a concurrence in Rumford, Rhode Island. The group forward-looking moved beside the Seekonk River, around the dwindling now known as Fox Point and up the Providence River to the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers. The harmony was named after “God’s merciful Providence.”