Connecticut to Providence: The Yankee Corridor

The stretch of Interstate Ninety-Five from New Haven north to Providence passes through the oldest industrial region in the United States. The Naugatuck Valley in Connecticut, the Blackstone Valley in Rhode Island, these river valleys were the sites of the first American textile mills in the seventeen nineties and eighteen hundreds, drawing power from the falls and rapids of rivers that dropped sharply from the interior plateau to the coast. The Blackstone River is credited by some historians with initiating the American Industrial Revolution: Samuel Slater reproduced British textile machinery from memory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island in seventeen ninety-three, and the Slater Mill is now a museum and National Historic Landmark.

The cities those mills built, Waterbury, Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence, have spent the last sixty years managing deindustrialization. Providence has had a more complex reinvention than some of its neighbors, partly because Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design provide an economic and cultural base that Waterbury and Bridgeport lack. The Narragansett people, whose territory covered most of Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut, were one of the most powerful nations in southern New England before King Philip's War in sixteen seventy-five and sixteen seventy-six, the deadliest war per capita in American history.

The Narragansett were largely destroyed as a political entity by the war. The Narragansett Indian Tribe holds federal recognition and a small land base in Charlestown, Rhode Island. Providence was founded on land purchased from the Narragansett by Roger Williams in sixteen thirty-six.