Rhode Island Route Description

The hike will start at King Philips Chair on the Haffenreffer Museum Property of Brown University (special thanks to Rod Pacheco for opening the gate for us at 7:00 AM).  The round trip to the chair is approximately 0.4 mile. 

King Philip is believed to have held council from his chair, a depression in a ledge outcropping on the slopes of Mount Hope, at the southern edge of the wide spread summer encampment.  From this general area the many native Indian camps moved northward and inland along the east banks of Narragansett Bay and the Blackstone River to winter settlements which spread from Pawtucket to Worcester.

Leaving the chair we will walk down Tower Street and turn left on Metacom Avenue.  Metacom or Metacomet is King Philip’s Indian name.  The name King Philip was bestowed upon him by the English settlers.  In 1.5 miles we will turn right on State Route 114.     
    
Ask a present day Rhode Islander where is the Wampanoag Trail and he is likely to tell you that it is State Route 114.  The Wampanoag Trail, so named after the nomadic indigenous people, ran generally from their summer home spread widely on the lower Bristol peninsula to as far north as Worcester, Massachusetts.  For the yet extant Wampanoag, mostly exiled to an offshore island, the chair and the trail are significant parts of history and life.  

Route 114 through the historic center of Bristol is Hope Street.  There are many points of interest along this street including Roger Williams College, The Colomban Fathers, Blithewold Mansion and Arboretum (which has the tallest sequoia on the east coast), Herreshoff shipyard and Museum, Linden Place and many seventeenth and eighteenth century homes and other very interesting architecture too numerous to list.

After passing through the center of town we will turn left on Oliver Street and walk one block to the bike path.  The fourteen mile bike path will take us through the historic towns of Warren, Barrington and East Providence and State and local parks and past many waterways, inlets, streams and bay views in a mostly park-like setting.

Once in East Providence we will continue along the Sakonnet River following Valley Street, North Brow and Massasoit.  Massasoit is Matacomet’s Father.  At the end of Massasoit we turn left on North Broadway and after two city blocks left on Roger Williams Avenue.  Within two miles we will past Roger Williams Spring where he first settled after leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  

Three more miles and we turn left on Pawtucket Avenue which becomes Service Road and then Prospect Street before going under Interstate 95.  Continue straight to the end where before turning left you have a picture postcard view of Slater Mill, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.

At this point we diverge from the Wampanoag Trail by crossing the Blackstone River into Narragansett Indian territory and turn southward and embrace changes in the land brought about by European settlers.   

We will pass the Modern Diner, the first diner to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.  We will walk through the fashionable East Side of Providence and through Brown University Campus.  Then we will walk the “Mile of History”, one of the largest collections of seventeenth century homes in America, down the equally historic South Main Street with its First Churches of America, brought about by Roger Williams’ founding doctrine, Freedom of Religious Choice.  Again the historic landmarks are too numerous to list.  Finally we walk along River Park Place where modern man returns to the importance of his connection to nature.  As recently as the sixties this river was covered by what early editions of Guinness Book of Records describes as the widest bridge in the world.  At the turn of the century the river was so fouled and degraded that the city fathers decided to cover it completely from sight by entombing it beneath a bridge which spanned much of its length through downtown.  Today the river is recovering, has been rediscovered as a valuable resource to the human spirit and has reached a compromise with development.  It has been transformed into a park where thousands enjoy a return its soothing tranquility.

Our hike terminates at the state house, whose unsupported white Georgia marble dome compares in size to the Vatican and the Taj Mahal and is acclaimed to be our nations most beautiful.