Founded by a man they banished
Providence exists because Massachusetts didn't want Roger Williams. Banished in 1636 for arguing that magistrates had no business enforcing religion, he fled south, bought land from the Narragansett at the head of the bay, and named the place for the providence he credited with getting him there. He meant it as a shelter for people distressed in conscience, and it worked — Quakers, Baptists, and Jews arrived for the simple reason that nowhere else would take them, though Williams himself never stopped raging at the Quakers. The rivers downtown spent much of the 20th century hidden beneath what was once billed as the widest bridge in the world; a decade-long project in the 1980s and 90s uncovered and rerouted them. Barnaby Evans lit eleven braziers on the new water in 1994 to give people a reason to come look, and WaterFire has been burning ever since.
