Roger Williams Park

Roger Williams left the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 after being banished for his religious views, and with the help of the Narragansett people he established a settlement at the head of the bay that he named Providence, founded on the idea that government should have no authority over matters of conscience. The land that became the park stayed in his family's hands for more than two centuries.

In 1871 Betsey Williams, his descendant, deeded roughly one hundred acres of the old family farm to the city of Providence to be kept as a public park in his memory, on the condition that it never be sold. The city expanded the holdings and hired landscape designers to shape it in the picturesque Victorian manner then in fashion, damming streams into a chain of ponds and threading carriage roads through the grounds.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the park filled with the ornaments of its age: the Temple to Music, a bandstand, boathouses, bridges, and statuary, along with the Museum of Natural History, one of the oldest of its kind in the region. Betsey Williams's own 1773 cottage still stands within the park as a small museum of early Rhode Island life.

Generations of Providence families have marked their summers here, on the ponds and the lawns and at the carousel, and the park remains the city's central gathering place, from summer concerts to winter holiday light displays that draw crowds through the dark months.

The heart of the park is its water: a linked series of ponds you can circle on foot or bike, or cross by paddle boat in the warm season, with the Temple to Music reflected on the surface and small islands scattered across it.

Several distinct attractions share the grounds. The Roger Williams Park Zoo is one of the oldest in the country. The Museum of Natural History holds the state's only public planetarium. The Botanical Center, the largest indoor display garden in New England, keeps a tropical world green through the winter. A restored carousel turns near the ponds in season.

Scattered among these are the quieter pleasures the Victorian designers intended: shaded benches, arched stone bridges, the Betsey Williams Cottage, and long carriage drives that reward an unhurried walk more than a checklist.

The park's ponds are a magnet for water birds. Ducks, geese, swans, herons, and egrets work the shallows and the shorelines, and in migration season the water draws a rotating cast of visitors that make the park a favorite of local birdwatchers.

Turtles bask on logs in the warm months, and the mix of open water, wooded islands, and lawn creates a surprising amount of urban habitat for a park ringed by a city. Squirrels, songbirds, and the occasional fox move through the wooded corners.

The mature trees are part of the appeal in their own right, a nineteenth-century arboretum's worth of specimens shading the drives, spectacular in fall and stately even in the bare months of winter.

Spring greens the lawns and fills the ponds with returning birds, and the Botanical Center is at its most fragrant as its collections come into bloom.

Summer is the park's social season, with paddle boats on the water, the carousel turning, outdoor concerts, and families spread across the grass in the evening cool.

Fall sets the park's many old trees ablaze and thins the crowds, ideal for a long walk along the carriage drives.

Winter brings the holiday light displays that have become a Providence tradition, transforming the dark grounds into a route of illuminated scenes, while the Botanical Center offers a warm, green refuge from the cold.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.