Roger Williams Park
Near Providence, Rhode Island
Roger Williams Park began with a single gift. In eighteen seventy-two, Betsey Williams, a descendant of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, left her family farm of one hundred and two acres in her will to the City of Providence. The city hired landscape architect Horace W.
S. Cleveland to lay out winding carriage roads and meadows in the English pastoral tradition. By the end of the century the park had grown to about four hundred acres, added a zoo, a natural history museum, and a bandstand that drew Sunday crowds from across the city.
Today it remains one of the finest Victorian urban parks in New England, largely unchanged in layout from Cleveland's original design, and the zoo is among the oldest in the country.
