The main artery of eary Providence, Rhode Island lay on the east side of the river. Once Towne Street, it is now called North and South Main Streets.
Roger Williams founded the town of Providence after he experienced legal trouble in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He had protested their right to seize and claim Indian lands; the Massachusetts General Court responded by ordering his return to England in 1635. A selection from Roger Williams's A Key Into the Languages of America (1643), from The Bloody Tenet of Persecution (1644), and his 1654-55 "Letter to the Town of Providence" (distinguished by the unusual closing, "I remain studious of your common peace and liberty") appear in Early American Writings, ed. Carla Mulford et al. (New York: Oxford UP, 2002) 257-65. Nina Baym's Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 2003) also features a selection of these canonical Williams texts on pages 226-37. Here is a Google Earth placemark file for ye olde center of Providence: Download 1636ProvidenceRI.kmz (1.1K).
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