Central Falls: One Square Mile

Central Falls is the smallest and most densely populated city in Rhode Island, covering barely more than one square mile. It incorporated as a city in eighteen ninety-five, though its settlement dates to the seventeenth century along the falls of the Blackstone River. Those falls powered textile mills through the eighteen hundreds, drawing waves of French Canadian, Polish, and later Central American workers.

At the peak of industrialization, more than twenty-five thousand people lived in that single square mile. The mills have closed, but the density remains. Today Central Falls is majority Latino and among the youngest cities in New England, a compressed portrait of two centuries of American immigrant reinvention.