Cranston: Rhode Island's Second City

Cranston was set off from Providence in seventeen fifty-four, named, historians think, for Governor Samuel Cranston, who served Rhode Island for nearly three decades in the early seventeen hundreds. It grew as a manufacturing town along the Pawtuxet River, producing textiles, jewelry, and later industrial chemicals. By the twentieth century, Cranston had become the second-largest city in Rhode Island with a population around eighty thousand.

Its identity is part suburban, part old industrial, woven through with Italian and Irish neighborhoods that formed around the mill economy. The Cranston Print Works, dates to the early nineteenth century and became one of the country's major printers of fabric.