Narragansett Bay, The Body of the State

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union, and Narragansett Bay takes up roughly a tenth of its total area. That ratio has shaped everything. The bay is not incidental to Rhode Island's story.

It is the reason the story exists at all. The bay runs twenty-eight miles from its northern end at Providence to its mouth at the Atlantic. It holds three large islands, Aquidneck, where Newport and Portsmouth sit; Conanicut, which the English eventually called Jamestown; and Prudence, mostly undeveloped even now, occupied mainly by deer and migratory birds.

Dozens of smaller islands dot the water between them. The Narragansett people used the bay's islands as summer camps, fishing grounds, and, during King Philip's War, defensive strongholds. The bay is a drowned river valley, its shape set by faulting and by glaciers that retreated about fourteen thousand years ago, which left deep, navigable channels.

Those channels made Providence one of the premier colonial trading ports on the Atlantic seaboard, even though it sat at the head of a long estuary rather than on the open coast. By the twentieth century, the bay had been heavily degraded. Factory discharges, sewage outflows, and agricultural runoff had depleted the shellfish beds that once made Narragansett Bay quahogs famous nationwide.

A sustained restoration effort beginning in the nineteen nineties reduced nitrogen loading significantly. The quahog harvest has recovered. Seagrasses have returned to portions of the bay floor.

Rhode Islanders call their state the Ocean State, though technically it borders a bay rather than open ocean. The distinction does not matter much when you are watching the light change over the water at dusk, which is something this state has always done better than almost anywhere else.