Rhode Island History: Vol. 80, No. 2

Rhode Island History T HE JOUR NA L O F T H E R H O D E I S LAN D HISTORICA L SOC IETY spring 2023 · volume 80 · number 2

Rhode Island History

spring 2023 · volume 80 · number 2

74 Editor’s Note Published by The Rhode Island Historical Society 110 Benevolent Street Providence, Rhode Island 02906–3152 Robert H. Sloan, Jr., chair Luther W. Spoehr, vice chair Mark F. Harriman, treasurer Peter J. Miniati, secretary C. Morgan Grefe, executive director Publications Committee Marcus Nevius, chair Charlotte Carrington-­Farmer Catherine DeCesare J. Stanley Lemons Craig Marin Seth Rockman Luther Spoehr Evelyn Sterne Staff Jerrad Pacatte, editor Richard J. Ring, editor J. D. Kay, digital imaging specialist Silvia Rees, publications assistant

opposite: Exterior view of the Women and Infants Hospital, 50 Maude Street, Providence. Photo (July 1985) by B. C. Schoettle, courtesy of RIHPHC. cover: Weathervane in the shape of a stork sitting atop the Women and Infants Hospital, 50 Maude Street, Providence.

Photo (July 1986) by B. C. Schoettle, courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission (RIHPHC), image provided by Joanna Doherty.

Jerrad P. Pacatte 77 The Providence Lying-­In Hospital, the Rhode Island Medical Society, and the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s Joseph DiZoglio, Jr., MD 109 Branching Out: Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods, 1870s–1932 Patricia Raub, Ph.D. 145 Rhode Island Book Notes

Rhode Island History is a peer-­reviewed journal published two times a year by the Rhode Island Historical Society at 110 Benevolent Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02906-­3152.

Postage is paid at Providence, Rhode Island. Society members receive each issue as a membership benefit. Institutional subscriptions to Rhode Island History are $25.00 annually.

Individual copies of current and back issues are available from the Society for $12.50 (price includes postage and handling).

Our articles are discoverable on ebscohost research databases.

Manuscripts and other correspondence should be sent to editor@rihs.org.

The Rhode Island Historical Society assumes no responsibility for the opinions of contributors. © The Rhode Island Historical Society Rhode Island History (issn 0035–4619)

Editor’s Note

The late historian Sydney V. James defined institutions as “the ways in which human beings act together on a routine or recurring basis and also the organizations they form to conduct this action.”1 James’s foundational study The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island: A Study of Institutions in Change charted how colonial Rhode Islanders created and developed a host of social, religious, and political institutions in the pre-­statehood period. These organizations and their members gave structure and direction to a fractious society whose founding stemmed from a shared sense of skepticism toward centralized authority.

This issue of Rhode Island History continues James’s work in studying Rhode Island institutions undergoing change. In the early-­nineteenth century, shortly after Rhode Islanders ratified the Constitution, the smallest state in the union transformed exponentially in the wake of industrialization and urbanization. Between 1820 and 1860, the state’s population increased by 154 percent. During the same period, the population of Providence swelled by more than 1,000 percent—­a change due in large part to foreign immigration.2 Newcomers brought new ideas and perspectives as well as the raw material needed to fuel the twin engines of industrialization and entrepreneurship: human labor. Cities like Providence evolved into laboratories of innovation and became fertile grounds for a host of new institutions, including the Catholic church, mutual aid societies, and eventually anti-­slavery and suffrage organizations. During the nineteenth century, “the ingenuity and experimentation of Rhode Islanders enabled them to survive and prosper against heavy 72

odds,” historian William G. McLoughlin asserts in his still essential survey of the state’s history.3 Over time, Rhode Islanders found community and a shared sense of purpose in these institutions. Three of these institutions—­the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, the Rhode Island Medical Society (RIMS), and the Providence Public Library (PPL)—­are examined at length in the pages that follow.

The first article in this issue is by Dr. Joseph DiZoglio, Jr., an obstetrics and gynecology resident physician and a 2020 graduate of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. DiZoglio’s article traces the birth of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (renamed Women and Infants Hospital in 1974) and the foundational role that the RIMS and its members played in the hospital’s creation. As DiZoglio shows, a number of factors—­among them, the absence of a state medical school (between 1827 and 1972), the RIMS’s centralized authority, and the proliferation of local medical journals—­culminated in the creation of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital in the late nineteenth century. Established in 1885 to “provide a place for the confinement of women who are without means and suitable abode at the time of childbirth,”4 the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, DiZoglio argues, institutionalized obstetric and gynecological theories and practices first developed in the plantation south through experimentation on enslaved Black women.

Meticulously combing through annual reports, medical journal articles, and public health reports, DiZoglio’s article illustrates the migration of these ideas northward and the ways in which ideologies of white supremacy infiltrated the medical practices of and

scholarship published by leading Rhode Island obstetricians and gynecologists.

The second article is by Dr. Patricia Raub, a faculty member in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College and a past president of the Providence Community Library’s Board of Directors.

A sequel to her earlier article “‘A Bewildering Variety’: The Beginning of Libraries in Providence,” published in the fall 2021 issue of Rhode Island History, Dr. Raub’s article explores the development of neighborhood branch libraries in Providence between the early 1870s and 1931. During this period, eight neighborhood libraries opened their doors to patrons of all ages and ethnicities. Neighborhood branches, Raub shows, were a direct byproduct of the city’s population boom in the late-­nineteenth and early-­twentieth centuries.

Raub’s article highlights the community organizing efforts spearheaded by Providence club women, businessmen, philanthropists, settlement house workers, and civic organizations that resulted in the expansion of library services to Providence residents across the city, an expansion that was unlike that of other public libraries across the United States that self-­funded the construction of local libraries. Raub’s article explores the vital educational and social functions these local libraries served and the subsequent incorporation of these neighborhood branches into the larger Providence Public Library system.

Finally, I am honored to be joining Richard J. Ring as co-­editor of Rhode Island History, a journal that has delivered high-­quality content to our audiences since 1942. In my newly created role as Director of Historical Research and Content Development at the RIHS, I am

eager to carry on this tradition of scholarly excellence.

I also look forward to expanding the scope of whose stories we tell and how we tell them.

Jerrad P. Pacatte Editor, Rhode Island History Director of Historical Research and Content Development

Notes 1. Sydney V. James, The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island: A Study of Institutions in Change, ed. by Sheila L. Skemp and Bruce C. Daniels (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2000), 2.

2. William G. McLoughlin, Rhode Island: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 125.

3. McLoughlin, 109.

4. Charter, Constitution, and By-­Laws of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (Providence, RI: J. A. & R. A. Reid Printers, 1884), 5.

73

JOSEPH DIZOGLIO, JR., MD

The Providence Lying-­In Hospital, the Rhode Island Medical Society, and the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

editor’s note: This article contains graphic clinical descriptions which may be disturbing to some readers.

The first cesarean section ever performed at the Providence Lying-­In Hospital ended in tragedy.

A 1900 retrospective written by Rhode Island Medical Society member Dr. Halsey DeWolf and published in the Providence Medical Journal, recounted the events.

The procedure was performed in 1889 on a physically disabled woman described as “a dwarf with a marked hyphosis [sic]” and six months pregnant.1 Though she arrived experiencing labor pains—­meaning the uterus was contracting and putting pressure on the pelvis— her cervix never dilated to allow her to deliver the fetal head.

By obstetrical standards of this time, it was a grim moment for both mother and baby. Clinicians had two options to resolve this complication: perform a craniotomy to extract the likely stillborn fetus, or risk a cesarean section. At that time, cesareans carried a 50 opposite above: 1. Exterior view of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, corner of State and Field Streets, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (Providence, 1897), Sidney S. Rider Collection, box 32, folder 23, John Hay Library, Brown University (cited hereafter as Hay Library).

Left: 2. Operating room of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (Providence, 1897), Rider Collection, Hay Library.

percent mortality rate for mothers in the nineteenth-­ century United States and were understood by many doctors as being little better than murder; thus, the procedure was only to be employed if maternal death was expected.2 Ethical practice of the time required not only the pregnant patient’s consent but also the consent of every person present before the doctor would begin. DeWolf’s report stated that all on-­duty staff met to discuss the case and agreed to pursue the potentially lethal operation.

One can imagine tall Victorian doors hurriedly swept open by attending nurses as they brought the moribund patient into the wood-­paneled operating room of the manor the hospital occupied. Within moments, the neatly arranged antiseptics, bowls of boiled water, and surgical instruments on white sheeted tables would be stained with blood as death slipped into the room. The newborn “died after a few gasps,” while the unnamed mother passed away two days later of abdominal infection or “septic peritonitis.”3 DeWolf then described the autopsy and the careful details the physicians made of the patient’s pelvis: “These measurements offered sufficient proof that delivery per vaginam [sic] would have been impractical without a craniotomy [of the fetus].” This evaluation was the only way that hospital administrators could justify the mortal outcome of the procedure.

The cesarean section was necessary, they emphasized, because it was geometrically impossible for the fetus 75

Rhode Island History

to have safely exited the woman’s pelvis due to the distortion of her spine.

This additional postpartum information functioned to reassure peer physicians that despite this particularly poor outcome, the hospital was capable of making justified surgical decisions. When read alongside DeWolf’s medical reflections, however, the Providence Lying-­In Hospital presented its donors and patrons with a different institutional narrative of their first patient’s death. The hospital’s 1898 report reads: The loss of our first patient, a young creature scarcely seventeen years of age, whose physical condition was much against her when she came to us.

Every means that the physicians could devise were used, and on the part of the nurses every exertion was made to save this life.4 The report’s solemn tone conveyed a sense of institutional mourning. In this case, readers of the annual report were the business-­minded hospital donors who needed to be assured that the hospital was providing exceptional care to an innocent, unlucky woman.

The social need to serve a disabled and marginalized woman with philanthropic hospital care ran against the harsh reality of obstetrics in the late nineteenth century; the hospital had a maternal mortality rate of 1.63 percent, or twenty deaths among the 1,226 adults treated in its first fifteen years of operation.5 During this period, the same wealthy New Englanders who donated to hospitals rarely, if ever, took laboring family members to lying-­in hospitals.

Even families of modest means expected to host the 76

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

childbirth process at home given that obstetrical hospitals of this time, known as “lying-­ins,” had little additional technology or services to offer. To paraphrase medical historian Morris J. Vogel, lying-­in hospitals had a particularly poor reputation among the public due to the institutions’ additional stigma of treating homeless patients or those who delivered out of wedlock.6 Vogel’s observation about Boston obstetrical practice matches what can be seen in Providence’s meticulous birth records: most mothers-­to-­be avoided the Providence Lying-­In Hospital.7 This social discrepancy cannot be solely explained by statistical risk; the hospital’s mortality rates were roughly the same as the state average. The hospital reported one maternal death among 130 adult admissions in the year 1900, or 0.8 percent, while the state observed 99 maternal deaths among its 11,084 documented births, or 0.9 percent, across all five counties that same year.8 Instead, the hospital’s census would have been determined by a set of social conditions and cultural beliefs surrounding gynecologic and obstetrical care.

Among cities in the Northeast, Vogel argues that hospitals in the late nineteenth century represented spaces where physicians practiced clinical skills on the despondently ill.9 Narratives like DeWolf’s typified the kind of woman in need during this era who had no other choice but to receive the care of strangers and deliver at a lying-­in facility. In the process, practitioners of the twin fields of obstetrics and gynecology, medicine of pregnancy and female reproductive organs, respectively, had access to vulnerable patient populations in a state with little academic oversight.

Though Rhode Island was more densely populated,

it had a much smaller concentration of medical experts compared to other states.10 By this time, several neighboring states had functioning medical schools, but the short-­lived Brown Medical School closed its doors in 1827 after just sixteen years of operation.11 This meant that Rhode Island lost the early-­nineteenth century arms race for academic medical centers and would instead turn to an alternative organizational model, the Rhode Island Medical Society (hereafter cited as RIMS), to produce a network of physicians spanning the state’s 1,200 square miles.12 Most of these physicians were country doctors making home visits. Without a local medical school, they needed to train out of state or arrived as recent graduates to establish practice.13 As a result, physicians in Providence, Newport, and the surrounding towns had fewer mutual connections than the Brahmin class of physicians who dominated neighboring Massachusetts’s medical economy. In Boston, this elite familial network controlled both acceptances to Harvard Medical School and city hospital appointments.14 In contrast, New York City hospitals were “idiosyncratic community institutions” marked by neighborhood, religious, and ethnic affiliations scattered throughout the city’s boroughs.15 Compared with physicians in these cities, Providence physicians lacked the academic affiliation and the resulting political and financial connections that allowed the New York City and Boston medical establishments to prosper in the late-­ 1800s. However, when Brown University reestablished its medical school program in 1972, institutions such as Butler Hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, and the Providence Lying-­In (renamed Women and Infants

Hospital in 1974) had already spread deep roots in community care. This growth invites questions of how Rhode Island’s medical community survived in the intervening 132 years without a medical school.

Previous histories of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, written by physicians or later commissioned by the hospital, have overlooked the social relations of race and gender in the city, markers of identity that rest at the heart of a reproductive institution.16 In a 1902 state history, the Lying-­In Hospital was mentioned in a chapter titled “Epidemics and Medical Institutions” as “an institution that has been of great benefit to the city of Providence.”17 Local canon tells that Dr. Oliver Chase Wiggin, one of the three physician co-­founders, felt inspired to start the hospital after delivering babies in horse carriages and trains and because he felt appalled by the inhospitable locations for these births.18 Through Wiggin’s dedication and the generous support of Providence donors, so the story goes, women were given a safe space to “confine” or spend the last few weeks of their pregnancy and deliver. This official narrative represents white elite propaganda that glorified the white doctors and benefactors rather than considering the patient narratives of this burgeoning hospital or the physician infrastructure that allowed it to become the regional maternity hospital in southern New England.19 The founding of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital deserves an analysis grounded in the multiracial working-­class experiences of Providence citizens and the public health policies they experienced at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, this article maps how gynecologic knowledge and racial categories were exchanged 77

Rhode Island History

and reinforced between practicing physicians. It also reveals the stakes of reproductive power that mostly white, male physicians held over the state’s Black and immigrant populace.

Providence’s population had doubled between the years 1865 and 1900 to meet growing factory labor needs, and the growth of the city’s population overlapped with the founding of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital. Immigration contributed to the population boom and incited white Anglo-­Saxon anxieties about the state’s future racial demography.20 At the same time, the population influx led to the development of a public health bureaucracy. The city’s first superintendent of health Dr. Edwin M. Snow assumed office in 1856. Dr. Snow was charged with collecting “very complete and valuable exhibitions” of statistics and sanitation in the city.21 From the medical bureaucracy’s perspective, Providence was a city primed to be made healthy, regardless of how such programs might vilify Black and immigrant families struggling to survive.

By reading the state’s public health reports, census data, and RIMS documents alongside the hospital’s annual reports, this article examines how the state’s doctors processed new developments in the field of gynecology and how they understood their patient’s illnesses. These documents—often published as transcripts of the RIMS or later as articles in the Providence Medical Journal—represent a repository of local knowledge. While they had a smaller footprint than powerhouse publications from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, these documents contained obstetric and gynecologic information shared within the state’s medical community. Though one cannot assume phy78

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

sicians staffing the Providence Lying-­In Hospital read every article, the existence and circulation of the RIMS medical journal indicates Rhode Island physicians’ desire for a local outlet to publish new medical research.

Unfortunately, certain archival gaps appeared in my review of these records. First, Women and Infants Hospital’s archives from this period no longer exists according to current hospital librarians. Except for the hospital’s annual reports now housed in the John Hay Library at Brown University, documents and other artifacts from the first decades of the hospital’s operation are not known to exist. Secondly, published medical articles from this period erased the subjective experiences of patients, particularly those of poor women of color. In the absence of these women’s firsthand testimonies, I rely on critical archival recovery techniques pioneered by Black feminist theorists including Saidiya Hartman to interpret these absences to better conceptualize how these women experienced such public health and reproductive care policies.

Ultimately, I argue that the Providence Lying-­In Hospital could not have been founded without the knowledge economy established by the RIMS and the city’s public health literature. These two institutions were key organizing factors in a state without a medical school. They produced and protected the medical knowledge needed for doctors to arbitrate confidently over reproductive mortality and morality at the hospital. This article also suggests that these organizations welcomed theories about Black biological inferiority advanced by southern physicians practicing on enslaved patients and in turn, the RIMS and Provi-

dence Lying-­In Hospital’s physicians then injected these ideologies into the state’s medical discourse to justify their ongoing racial categorization project.

Finally, consolidating this power allowed Rhode Island gynecologists to transition the Providence Lying-­In Hospital from a charity-­based model into a revenue generating model of care that reinforced white, upper-­ class values.

Black Patients, Knowledge Production, and the Emergence of Rhode Island Gynecology, 1852–1884 Race was essential to the construction and understanding of gynecologic knowledge in the United States and is a central analytic framework employed throughout this article. In recent years, many scholars have examined the history of gynecology in American society through the lenses of race, gender, and class.22 Their investigations explain the nexus of ideologies, practices, and surgical operations used by the U.S. medical establishment to compete with European peers for scientific prestige. Central to this medical and ideological power struggle, described recently by medical historian Deirdre Cooper Owens, was knowledge derived from reproductive medicine practiced on enslaved women during the long nineteenth century.23 In her book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, Cooper Owens argues that nineteenth-­century medical literature was used to discover treatment to improve the fertility, and therefore the perceived values, of enslaved Black women.24 Cooper Owens coined the term “medical superbod-

ies” to describe the process of medicalizing Black patients to justify experimentation, a prevailing belief guided by the racist assumption that people of African descent were biologically inferior to Europeans.25 The bodies of enslaved women were viewed as inferior in comparison to white patients, and these women and their “superbodies” were expected to endure excruciatingly painful surgeries and other procedures without anesthesia due to the prevailing belief that Black bodies had a higher threshold for pain. Southern physicians experimented with these procedures on enslaved women first before later performing them on free white women. American gynecologists including Dr. J. Marion Sims extracted medical knowledge and prestige from the bodies of enslaved women just as white enslavers extracted domestic and agricultural value from the bodies of other enslaved laborers. To complete the cycle, these gynecologists then published their findings in medical journals under the guise of “scientific advancement” to reinforce this racial hierarchy and further justify continued experimentation and the racial segregation of medical care. These medical journals can therefore be read as historical documents carrying messages that amplified and codified white supremacist beliefs, or as Cooper Owens succinctly puts it: “In medical journals, biological findings became ideology.”26 To better understand how Rhode Island doctors were influenced by and injected these racial ideologies into their own medical practices and belief systems, this article applies Cooper Owens’s method of reading medical literature to elevate unspoken Black experiences hidden within texts that otherwise assert white 79

Rhode Island History

scientific dominance. Although non-­white Rhode Islanders made up a minority of patients treated in the state during this period, these populations also would have been targets of the same nationwide project of medicalized white supremacy. For example, physician-­ historian Dr. Darshali Vyas and her colleagues have demonstrated that pelvimetry, the same calculations used in Dr. DeWolf’s autopsy report mentioned at the beginning of this article, was part of a broader anthropometric skillset from the time used to categorize and racialize women’s pelvises.27 In the decades prior to the Providence Lying-­In Hospital’s founding, there is strong evidence indicating physicians exercised power by controlling the medical knowledge economy. During this time, the RIMS—an organization first incorporated by the state legislature as a body of forty-­nine physicians in 1812—­ took on political projects such as advocating in 1849 for the state legislature to register all births, deaths, and marriages and in 1869 to establish a State Board of Pharmacy to register and regulate druggists within Rhode Island’s jurisdiction. More importantly, however, this organization seized the right to physician self-­government and professional reproduction within the state by wielding “full power and authority to examine all candidates for the practice of Physic and Surgery” and educating its members on the most up-­ to-­date medical practices.28 The RIMS regularly published meeting minutes and transcripts of lectures delivered during quarterly meetings held at locations across the state. As Rhode Island historian Edward Field noted, “Many valuable papers have been read and discussed in the meetings and a 80

spirit of mutual professional harmony maintained.”29 The knowledge circulated among RIMS publications continued to expand over the decades beginning with the Atlantic Weekly medical journal published between 1893 and 1898 and later the Providence Medical Journal that ran from 1900 until 1916.

From its founding, RIMS members prioritized knowledge preservation by making the librarian a member of their elected administrative board.30 The position proved to be overwhelming as the journals they collected soon grew outdated and were donated to Rhode Island Hospital in 1868. The second attempt at a library was organized in September 1877. Initial plans called for a committee of elected library officers who would collect dues for a book fund, though the members ultimately decided to impose a voluntary donation system.31 After confirming its location in 1879, the RIMS collated internal documents and Rhode Island-­ based medical publications with subscription periodicals mailed from New York, Philadelphia, London, and Edinburgh to build a unified archive of Anglophone medical knowledge within the state.32 By May 31, 1882, the librarians proudly reported 2,094 acquisitions stored at 56 North Main Street and donations totaling $1,085.33 This accomplishment demonstrates how the RIMS acquired and supported the dissemination of knowledge among its fellows independent from a university or medical school library system.

More importantly, the RIMS encouraged knowledge production independent of medical school research through the Fiske Prize, a yearly prize given in recognition of the best essay on a chosen medical topic that was first awarded in 1835. Dr. Caleb Fiske was a physi-

cian from Scituate, Rhode Island, and one of the original members of the RIMS who endowed the society with this prize fund. In his donation letter to the society, he wrote: It is my intention to provide a Fund; the annual income whereof will furnish the means of exciting Competition in the Investigation of such medical subjects as the Society may from Time to Time propose for discussion and also for printing the same so as to give each Member a Copy annually.34 The RIMS’s call for submissions expanded beyond New England with prizes awarded to doctors as far west as Indiana and as far east as London.35 Each essay was posed as a clinical question, and there were multiple years that obstetricians won with titles such as “Displacement of the Uterus; its local and constitutional effects, and best mode of treatment,” or “Does pregnancy accelerate or retard tubercular disease in the lungs, in persons predisposed to this disease?”

These essays from 1852 and 1856 went to Dr. J.F. Peebles of Virginia and Dr. Edward Warren of North Carolina.36 For Peebles and Warren, race and gender would have been intimately connected in the rural healthcare settings where they practiced, as historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz has found that both men practiced on enslaved Black women while conducting their field research.37 Peebles also pursued an interest in gynecologic tumors that inhibited fertility in enslaved women, while Warren’s steadfast belief in the power of white supremacy ultimately led him to enlist during the Civil War as a Confederate surgeon.38 As these examples

3. Engraving of Dr. Edward Warren, Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore, MD: Cushings and Bailey, 1885).

suggest, the RIMS regularly consumed and disseminated medical knowledge generated by doctors practicing on enslaved women in a scientific climate that normalized white supremacy.

The awards and knowledge the RIMS spotlighted also demonstrate how the organization catalyzed interstate knowledge exchange in the decade leading up to the Civil War. The Fiske Prize provided an intellectual forum for this male-­dominated specialty to characterize and control the knowledge production about pregnancy and women such as Dr. David Hutchinson’s 1857 piece, “What Are the Causes and Nature of that Disease Incident to Pregnancy and Lactation, Characterized by Inflammation and Ulceration of the Mouth?”

Along with the Fiske Prize, lectures on obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive physiology appeared with increasing frequency in the second half of the 1800s (Table 1). Lectures were primarily about delivery complications and allowed members to share their 81

Rhode Island History

clinical insights. Most of the transcribed lectures contained theoretical accounts of pathology and regular citation of both American and European publications, in addition to more visceral narratives of patient cases seen in Rhode Island. These printed transcriptions demonstrate that Rhode Island’s medical community had the capacity to start institutionalizing obstetrics care by the time of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital’s founding in 1884. Obviously, starting a hospital required not only medical expertise but also social capital as well. The founding doctors also depended on the professional relationships and trust accrued as RIMS members to achieve their goals.

RIMS gatherings often were lively events where physicians presented lectures, shared surgical specimens, delegated committees, voted on resolutions, and socialized over dinner and drinks. Without medical specialization that divides today’s practitioners, RIMS attendees welcomed conversations about all of the body’s ailments. Their meetings, more importantly, represented one node in a larger network of state medical associations that exchanged correspondence or—­in the case of nearby New England states—­ visiting representatives. By 1878, the RIMS treasurer recorded a total of 112 volumes of meeting minutes exchanged between their out-­of-­state colleagues.39 These volumes, along with the Fiske Prize publications and other library collections, demonstrate how successful Rhode Island physicians were at importing contemporary clinical expertise into the state.

A few notable threads appear in these preceding decades relevant to the Providence Lying-­In Hospital. First, its three cofounders were early and active 82

Table 1: Selection of obstetric and gynecologic lectures presented at RIMS meetings, 1860–188340

members of the RIMS. Dr. Oliver C. Wiggin was first elected as a fellow of the society in 1867 at the age of twenty-­eight, just one year after graduating from Harvard Medical School. By 1879, he earned a Fiske Prize for his essay “Artificial Feeding of Infants” along with an appointment to the state board of health.41 Co-­ founder Dr. John W. Mitchell joined the society in 1872 at age thirty-­nine, one year after he graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City.42 While initially not as active, Dr. Mitchell participated as a delegate for other regional medical society meetings before joining the RIMS Committee on New Remedies in 1877.43 Dr. Wiggin’s activity was difficult to interpret in the meeting minutes due to the presence of two other doctors with the surname Wiggin whose first initials were not always indicated in meeting minutes. However, the author “O. C. Wiggin” published a number of articles showcasing a broad set of medical skills and knowledge including a report on alcohol metabolism in 1873 and an article summarizing a lecture he gave on malpractice law in 1876. Dr. Oliver Chase Wiggin also represented Rhode Island as an American Medical Association delegate in 1876 before he joined the committee on “Public Hygiene and Medical Topography” in 1877.44 These contributions helped prepare Rhode Island doctors for future political aspirations in the RIMS–Wiggin was elected its 35th president in 1884, while Dr. John Mitchell would serve as its 38th president in 1889.45 Dr. George W. Porter, the third co-founder at just twenty-­nine years old, did not arrive until 1876, two years after he earned his medical degree from Harvard.46 Porter’s attention was split between serv-

† Lecture transcribed and published in entirety * A drug used during this time to increase uterine contractions during delivery

Date

Lecturer

Title

Dec. 1860

Dr. Eldredge Case of Interrupted and Renewed Lactation†

Dec. 1861

Dr. Ray

Hereditary Transmission†

Oct. 1861

Dr. Turner

Supplementary Mammae†

Oct. 1861

Dr. King

Removal of sero-­cystic tumor of the female breast

Dec. 1866

Dr. Collins

Remarks on Cases of Ovariotomy

Sep. 1870

Dr. Gardner

Two cases of Ovariotomy

Mar. 1871

Dr. Capron

Remarks Upon Ergot*†

Mar. 1871

Dr. Clapp

Report of a case of Visico [sic] Vaginal Fistula

Mar. 1871

Dr. Garvin

Case of Latent Bright’s disease and Pregnancy

Sep. 1871

Dr. Capron

Removal of pedunculated fibrous tumor from os uteri

Sep. 1871

Dr. Perry

Extra Uterine Foetation

Sep. 1871

Dr. Wiggin

Three cases of Endometritis and Endocervicitis

Dec. 1871

Dr. Gardner

Hydatid degeneration of the kidneys of the foetus

Dec. 1871

Dr. Capron

Report of a Case of Breech Presentation†

Dec. 1871

Dr. Capron

Report of a Successful Case of Cephalic Version†

Mar. 1872

Dr. Brown

Uterine diseases and the “irritable Uterus”

Mar. 1872

Dr. Eldredge Paper on Placenta Previa

Sep. 1872

Dr. Collins

Labor Complicated by Fibrous Tumor

Mar. 1873

Dr. Becker

Two cases of Dysmenorrhora [sic]

Mar. 1873

Dr. Garvin

Analysis of Twenty-­eight Cases of Mammitis†

Sep. 1873

Dr. Garvin

Case of Labor with Ergot Administered

Dec. 1873

Dr. Eldredge Management of the Secundines†

Dec. 1873

Dr. Capron

Report of a Case of Cephalic Version with Remarks

Sep. 1874

Dr. Capron

Uterine Hemorrhage

Sep. 1874

Dr. Tyng

Eclampsia Puerperalis†

Dec. 1876

Dr. Fisher

Case of Mammary Tumor

Mar. 1877

Dr. Porter

Laceration of the Perineum

Sep. 1877

Dr. Eldredge Case of labor with puerperal convulsions

Sep. 1877

Dr. Capron

Personal Observations in Placenta Previa†

Mar. 1878

Dr. Capron

Puerperal Convulsions†

Dec. 1878

Dr. Hardon

Mechanical Dysmenorrhea†

Dec. 1878

Dr. Capron

Rupture of the Uterus†

Mar. 1879

Dr. Brown

Remarks upon a case of ovarian dropsy

Mar. 1880

Dr. Tyng

A Case of Removal of Both Ovaries by Abdominal Section†

Mar. 1880

Dr. Eldredge The Forceps and their Alternatives in Lingering Labor

Sep. 1880

Dr. Porter

Battey’s Operation†

Dec. 1880

Dr. Capron

General Remarks on the Use of Obstetrical Forceps†

Dec. 1881

Dr. Caswell

Treatment of puerperal convulsions occurring at the time of labor

Mar. 1882

Dr. Morton

Case of cancer of the os uteri†

Mar. 1882

Dr. Fuller

Manual Dilation of the Os Uteri as a Part of Artificial Delivery†

Mar. 1882

Dr. Garvin

Case of puerperal convulsions in a primiparous woman

Mar. 1882

Dr. Capron

Value of Venesection in the Treatment of Puerperal Convulsion

Mar. 1882

Dr. Ballou

Five cases of puerperal convulsions

Sep. 1882

Dr. Eldredge Management of Tedious Labor from Rigid Os†

Sep. 1882

Dr. Capron

Miscarriages and Some Incidental Remarks Upon Nearly Allied Subjects†

Mar. 1883

Dr. Burge

Case of spontaneous separation of the funis

Sep. 1883

Dr. Anthony Management of the Third Stage of Labor†

Dec. 1883

Dr. Tyng

Three cases of ovariotomy

Dec. 1883

Dr. Terry

Case of tubal pregnancy†

83

Rhode Island History

4. Title page of a medical journal article published by Dr. Anita Elizabeth Tyng in the late nineteenth century, Dr. Anita Elizabeth Tyng, On Causes of Ill Health Among Women (Providence, RI: [1879]), Medicine in the Americas Collection, 1610–1920, National Library of Medicine (National Institute of Health), http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101227584, accessed on June 13, 2023.

ing both the Providence Lying-­In Hospital and the Department of Gynecology he founded at Rhode Island Hospital in 1877.47 When Rhode Island Hospital banned abdominal surgery in its operating theater due to high death rates (although these rates were not recorded), Porter opened a tent on the hospital’s grounds to continue his operations. He then successfully petitioned for a surgical cabin so he could operate in the winter. In 1884, the hospital’s “Gynecological Cottage,” as it was then known, was built at the cost of $1,454, paid in part by fellow gynecologists including Drs. John Mitchell and E. T. Caswell.48 Although precise operating records have not survived, the lecture list included in Table 1 suggests that at least three other surgeons, Drs. Collins, Gardner, and Tyng, performed operations along with Porter. This included the ovariotomy, an operation to remove the female gonads that was first successfully performed by Kentucky physician Ephraim McDowell in 1809. The ovariotomy was performed in Rhode Island as early as 1866. This procedure represents another site where Rhode Island doctors imported medical knowledge and technical skill from other regions of the United States.49 The RIMS was almost exclusively male during this time, which makes the debate surrounding the election of Dr. Anita Elizabeth Tyng relevant to this survey of the RIMS. According to Mary Korr’s review of early women physicians in Rhode Island, Dr. Tyng graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1864, practiced in Boston despite being denied admission to Harvard in 1866, then arrived in Rhode Island to continue her career as a surgeon.50 Though clinical specialty was not strictly demarcated in this

era, Dr. Tyng demonstrated acumen in obstetrics and surgical gynecology through her thorough lecture on eclampsia puerperalis (a disease of high blood pressure and seizures after delivery) presented to the society in 1874 and what was later a renowned operation she performed in 1880 to remove a patient’s ovaries to hormonally suppress a uterine fibroid.51 Despite her promising training, Tyng generated resistance when members of the society first denied her entrance application in 1870 and continued to question whether the bylaws permitted women members in September 1872 (the same year Dr. John W. Mitchell was accepted).52 It was not until committee appointments and the membership reconvening in March 1873 that Dr. Edwin M. Snow and other supporters garnered the votes to motion Tyng’s acceptance.53 After becoming a member at age thirty-­five, Tyng appeared intermittently in later meeting minutes as a participant in case discussions, a delegate to the American Medical Association conference, and a donor to the RIMS library fund.54 Her RIMS application would be followed by fellow alumnae from Pennsylvania, Drs. Lucy R. Weaver and Harriet G. Belcher, in 1879.

On the subject of gynecology, Tyng often provided the sole counterpoint to patriarchal assumptions made by the society’s predominantly male members. Records indicate after Dr. Hardon’s 1878 lecture on dysmenorrhea, or painful menstruation typically involving abdominal cramps, Dr. Tyng corrected his mistaken belief that all women suffer pain during menstruation.55 In a 1880 lecture given at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, she proclaimed: “I do not believe that we are born to suffer, or born sick

84

and malformed simply because we are born women.”56 Tyng would be celebrated as the first female member of the RIMS and for being the surgeon in the state’s first operation staffed entirely by women in a 1913 memorial piece written by Dr. George H. Hersey.57 Tyng’s ultimate acceptance into the state’s medical cadre highlights the control men had in not only creating Rhode Island’s medical politics but also dictating the standards women practitioners needed to meet before their clinical wisdom was accepted or valued.

Within the context of male-­dominated medicine, scholars have argued that doctors’ discourse around gender was inseparable from other systems of social exclusion. One cannot discuss gender, notes historian Laura Briggs, without considering its relationship to race, class, and imperialism.58 When applying this argument to Rhode Island’s public health records, it becomes evident that the same white male doctors who tried to exclude Tyng from the RIMS were complicit in establishing a racial hierarchy within the state.

Public Health and Black Patient Care While the RIMS established its knowledge economy, documents from this period point to a simultaneous boom in city and state public health discourse.

A Report on the Medical Topography and Epidemic Dis-

eases of Rhode Island is an early epidemiologic document compiled by Dr. Charles W. Parsons who served as RIMS president from 1860 until 1862.59 This 1864 report, published by the American Medical Association, is not explicitly concerned with clinical obstetrics, but it captured the anxieties and xenophobia that white Rhode Islanders felt about the reproductive potential of the state’s immigrant population. Parsons estimated that one-­sixth of the state’s population in 1850 was foreign born. He then tracked Providence’s immigrant population from 24.7 percent to 27.7 percent between 1850 and 1855.60 With foreign-­born status came an assumed excess in fertility as Parsons’s report reflected xenophobic accusations that the above-­average number of children born to immigrant parents would be raised with the “sanitary, social, and moral influences” of their parents and thus “properly belong to the foreign class.” Parsons’s alarmist diatribe ended with a rhetorical flourish meant to invoke fear of replacement among the state’s English descendants: “persons of foreign parentage” (jingoist code for immigrant children) amounted to 41.06 percent of Providence’s population.61 This kind of language linked fertility statistics to the state’s ongoing political battle between the established Protestant political machine and newer Catholic voting blocs. As historian Evelyn Savidge Sterne noted in her work on 85

Rhode Island History

ethnic politics and the Catholic church in Providence, Rhode Island, immigrants needed to own land to vote.

However, American-­born individuals of “foreign parentage” would not be limited by such restrictions and represented a democratic threat to the white, Anglo-­ Saxon Protestant political establishment.62 Not all public health documents blamed diseases on immigrant status or lifestyle, however. In an earlier 1855 Providence cholera report, Dr. Edwin M. Snow avoided anti-­immigrant sentiments by identifying and explaining a health disparity using the logic of environmental factors. He contended that though immigrants made up less than 50 percent of the Providence population, they accounted for 88 percent of cholera deaths that season.63 Snow extensively toured the hardest hit neighborhoods to ask locals what was making them so susceptible to illness. Based on his observations and by comparing his findings with similar immigrant neighborhoods in Boston, he concluded his report by calling for improved sanitation infrastructure and for the creation of a superintendent of health in the city.64 Returning to Dr. Parsons’s Report, race received minimal epidemiologic attention. Parsons kept commentary on Black and Native American Rhode Islanders to a single paragraph in his report. On par with other white supremacist rhetoric of the era, he invoked a commonly held belief that non-­white races would die out due to biologic inferiority.65 The colored inhabitants are so few that they have little effect on the general character of statistics. They usually report more deaths than births, and are par86

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

ticularly liable to consumption. They are thought to be somewhat less subject to epidemic diseases than the whites. In several years, the registered deaths by respiratory diseases among the colored were three times as many as those by zymotic diseases.66 Parsons attributed Black race as protective of epidemic and zymotic diseases in this passage (e.g., typhus, diphtheria, and other acute illnesses associated with fever) but still associated Black people with having a poor pulmonary constitution. His belief in inherent Black susceptibility to consumption and respiratory disease mirrors what historian Lundy Braun has described as racist beliefs that enslaved Black workers had poorer lung function than their white counterparts.67 This ideology marks yet another instance of Rhode Island officials conforming to biological racism of the day and shows how less than 100 years after the state enacted its gradual emancipation statue of 1784, legislation that freed the children of enslaved mothers once they reached the age of majority (eighteen for women, twenty-­one for men), the state’s 4,087 Black residents (2.21 percent of the population) experienced profound health disparities.68 When Parsons later discussed the health of Black patients, he returned to this concept of Black resistance to contagious disease. These passages frame the patients as unique phenomena rather than as a population worthy of health interventions. As one example, in a section comparing infection rates among different contagions, Parsons commented on the relatively low rates of diphtheria transmission, a bacterial throat infection:

In one instance, six colored children were unavoidably kept a good deal of time for several days, in the two adjoining small rooms, partly underground, in which two adults were sick with diphtheria; and not one of these children was attacked. Such an escape would have been surprising, if the disease had been measles or scarlatina.69 Parsons’s passive language amplified his lack of empathy for the family, and in congruence with Cooper Owen’s thesis, he was primarily interested in using Blackness to demonstrate a disease process. The limited data we have about this family’s subjective experiences of illness requires that we read Parsons’s narrative against the grain. In other words, we can read Parson’s writing without agreeing to Parson’s objective claims about the events described in this scene. This methodology of reading archival documents against the grain requires that we acknowledge that the subjective conditions this family experienced, along with those experienced by many other Black families in Rhode Island during this time, are fundamentally unknowable because official accounts denied them a voice.70 One wonders what economic conditions forced a family of eight to live “partly underground.” What kind of familial or neighborhood support did this family receive when the presumed parents or caretakers fell ill? Were these children confined to the home, or could they wander outside to play or provide help for the family during this crisis? Only the first question has a possible answer. Later in his report, Parsons cited an 1859 city registrar report claiming that one of Providence’s favorable urban features is “the almost total

absence of cellar tenements and underground population.”71 This quotation suggests that this Black family likely lived in particularly substandard housing. Yet Parsons’s rhetoric overlooked the social conditions of Black Rhode Islanders to instead focus on their supposed resistance to contagion.

Another instance of Parsons pathologizing illness, poverty, and Blackness occurred in his response to a report published about typhus fever in Newport in the spring of 1864. The report’s author, Dr. Henry E. Turner, dedicated a segment to prison health in an assessment of the “pauper inmates” at the asylum on Coasters Harbor Island, an islet near Newport. In this vulnerable population of between sixty and seventy pauper inmates, 16 percent died in the outbreak, a rate that Parsons found “frightful” and “absolutely astounding.” Parsons blamed Black Rhode Islanders for bringing the disease to the prison: “a family of colored persons, who had been living in a poor neighborhood, in filth and squalor and debauchery, without sufficient food or clothing or fuel, so that the woman was absolutely frost-­bitten in her bed.”72 This is by and far Parsons most extravagant prose in an otherwise dull public document, and his report is saturated with layers of accusatory blame. First, it must be understood that paupers were citizens dependent on local poor relief for basic material resources like firewood or food. Historian Gabriel J. Loiacono has shown that in a bid to reduce government welfare costs, pauper asylums such as Coasters Harbor were opened in Rhode Island to gather the most economically destitute with an explicit policy goal of isolating these people from preexisting social support systems in the towns and 87

Rhode Island History

cities where they lived.73 Clearly, there were underlying socioeconomic factors that made this family particularly vulnerable to illness given their lack of access to adequate food, heat, and sanitary living conditions.

Instead of criticizing the failed policy that put people in congregate housing, Parsons pathologized the poor, Black family as both the source and site of typhus.

Like the family living “partly underground,” this family disappears from the historical record almost immediately, never to be mentioned again. Without additional information, one can only speculate about the relationship between poor health and poverty this Black family experienced. The way Parsons framed this case suggests that by 1864, the state’s public health leaders readily characterized Black residents as sources of disease that could virulently threaten the health and well-­being of other citizens. This includes Providence Lying-­In Hospital founder Dr. Oliver C. Wiggin who held a part-­time role as a Providence public health official under the mentorship of Dr. Snow in 1869.74 Racist conclusions about Black health disparities seen in Parsons’s report likely were widespread beliefs and appeared when examining reproductive care policy in the state.

A lecture from the June 7, 1900, meeting of the RIMS published in the Providence Medical Journal the following month underscored how gynecologists in the state used Black patient pathology to their academic and professional benefit. The case, one of seven in a series presented by gynecologist Dr. J. H. Davenport concerned “C. H.,” described as a thirty-­seven-­year-­ old “colored” woman admitted to Rhode Island Hospital after decades of “excessive” menstrual bleeding.

88

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

Though married for seventeen years, C. H. had never been pregnant. At the age of thirty-­five, her health worsened when she developed abdominal swelling, severe pain, and “menorrhagia” (a term for pathologically heavy periods). Davenport identified multiple fibroids in her uterus as the source of her pain and likely the source of her infertility. Davenport treated the disorder by removing C. H.’s uterus and appendix, which had grown irritated by the fibroids.75 C. H.’s case represents the earliest mention of a Black gynecologic patient in the state’s medical journals and lecture transcriptions to my knowledge and again demands reading against the grain of Davenport’s published report. Since the race of the other patients is not mentioned in the report, we can assume the remainder were white. Also relevant is that one patient died of infection, but the rest, including C. H., recovered. Two subtle differences emerge from reading the case series. First, C. H.’s case has no intraoperative comments, as if the surgeon did not remember or did not document the steps in her case. In contrast, the other cases had clear details of how the pelvis looked intraoperatively and what steps were taken to remove the inflamed organs. The second difference is that the five presumably white patients were seen for follow-­up care, and the surgeon commented on their postoperative experiences, such as the regularity of their periods, or in the case of one patient who stated that she had returned to performing ballet. In contrast, C. H. only had her immediate surgical survival documented as “recovery.” Dr. Davenport then portrayed C. H. as a pathological anomaly versus a patient worthy of individualized care: “This case is of interest from the fact

that not until the appendix had been involved were the symptoms of the fibroid so serious as to call for their removal.”76 These differences make C. H.’s section the shortest case in Davenport’s series. The absence of her recovery from the medical report forces us to speculate whether she had the resources to return to the hospital or not, if she trusted her surgeon to return to his care, or if she was even permitted to enter a private medical office. The severity of C. H.’s disease and concurrent anemia qualified her as a “medical superbody” presented to members of the RIMS to pique academic interest all while her personal recovery and the long-­ term effects of this drastic procedure were ignored.

She is given a presence in the record only to be considered as a case of unusual pathology to teach younger doctors how to treat appendicitis in women. C. H.’s presence in the medical literature mimics the historiography of enslaved Black medical subjects described

by Cooper Owens in the antebellum south.

Using a contemporary understanding of racial trauma, C. H.’s disease process represents a vicious cycle of medical suffering under racism known as “weathering.” This process describes an emerging theory in public health that daily psychologic stress on the body severely impacts the health of a person’s genes.77 Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher, argues that weathering is the body’s physiological response to intense social and environmental stressors. In the case of Black women, research shows that experiencing persistent racism in their daily lives correlates to greater rates of chronic disease at earlier ages.78 Stress directly alters cell biology and makes their genetic code more volatile. The cells in C. H.’s uterine lining were more

likely to grow into pathologic fibroids, rather than shed with regular menstrual cycles.79 Given this context, it’s not unreasonable to view C. H.’s infertility as a manifestation of the racism she endured while living in Rhode Island in the late 1800s. And although hysterectomy is a reasonable treatment for debilitating fibroids, it cannot be ignored that it also provided a definitive method of sterilization.

Cooper Owens’s thesis, it must be remembered, had a second sinister component. “Gynecological experimentation relied on the sick bodies of women of color and poor women who were considered not quite white [in order] to heal white women.”80 In this case, the knowledge acquired by RIMS’s gynecologists eventually would be used to provide excellent fertility-­ restoring surgical care to white patients. A case in point involved a woman named Mrs. McG. whose experiences were examined by Dr. John W. Keefe in a 1901 report.81 At age thirty-­five, Mrs. McG. received perineal lacerations after a physician delivered her baby using forceps—­a technique using tongs to pull the newborn through the birth canal—­in January 1897.

McG. subsequently experienced chronic back and pelvic pain and the urge to urinate; upon examination, her uterus had prolapsed and hung four inches out of her vagina between her legs—­“the size of a small orange”—­Dr. Keefe observed.82 After her initial exam, the first corrective operation was scheduled one month later. Dr. Keefe’s records provide a detailed history of McG.’s recovery as well as his notes about a second corrective operation he performed on her months later in August 1901. It then appears that McG. suffered some psychiatric illness reported as “melancholia,” in 89

Rhode Island History

November, perhaps from the stress of her prolonged recovery.

She recovered by the end of the month with the help of a trusted nurse and then went on to deliver another child in March 1899. “Six months after delivery,” Keefe noted, “I examined her. . . and found the uterus in the normal position . . . the cervix and perineum showed no evidences [sic] of any recent laceration.”83 The quality of this care is astounding. Despite rudimentary surgical options, the patient clearly experienced multidisciplinary longitudinal expertise, with numerous medical providers working together as the surgeon guided her through each course of treatment and recovery. Her story was not an anomaly; several other articles in the journal described similar corrective operations performed by Rhode Island gynecologists who hoped to cure white women from problems caused by childbirth. These accomplishments demonstrate how physicians in the state achieved their decades-­long project to improve white patients’ fertility using skills first acquired by practicing on the nation’s most vulnerable women.

These early surgical miracles represent the end goal of medical racism. The RIMS Fiske Prize spurred the state’s knowledge economy by importing gynecologic expertise like Dr. Peebles’ 1852 article on uterine displacement (another term for prolapse). The vaginal surgery techniques first developed by Dr. J. Marion Sims in Montgomery, Alabama, migrated north with him to New York State Women’s Hospital in 1853 where he practiced on impoverished Irish women.84 Sims’s surgical techniques subsequently spread to Rhode Island through lectures like Dr. Clapp’s in 1871 to demonstrate techniques for adequate vaginal heal90

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

ing and ultimately allowed white patients like McG. to benefit from these medical advancements.

The tension between race, gender, and biomedical knowledge appearing in these medical publications also appeared in Providence Lying-­In Hospital records. This final set of documents reveal another factor influencing reproductive health care of the time: capital. Financial success was a major goal for hospital administrators. The last section of this article critically examines the hospital’s annual reports to understand the contradictions between the hospital’s medical and financial incentives. Under the pressure of yearly monetary reports, health disparities solidified as patients with more wealth were prioritized over those with the greatest need. My analysis complicates the altruistic narrative presented by previous Providence Lying-­In Hospital historians. The promise of profit at the hospital meant that obstetricians in the RIMS could secure a comfortable livelihood. In the process, the knowledge and beliefs produced by the RIMS promoted policies for social control enacted on hospital grounds and vulnerable patient populations.

Morality and Race under Hospital Bureaucracy In his 1982 book The Social Transformation of American Medicine, historian Paul Starr offers a compelling narrative to explain the rise of hospitals and the allopathic physicians who controlled them during the first two centuries of American history.85 Allopathy, when compared with competing theories of the time like Thomsonianism or homeopathy, describes the dom-

inant present-­day belief that medications foreign to the body treat sickness (i.e., using Tylenol to treat a sore knee). In the context of obstetrics and gynecology, allopathic theory encompassed both medications and early painkillers used during labor alongside invasive tools and procedures such as using forceps during deliveries. Male obstetricians who desired to distinguish themselves from the female worlds of midwifery needed spaces to perfect these techniques. Given this context, the Providence Lying-­In Hospital should be understood as a space where male physicians institutionalized allopathic care.86 Prior to the allopathic takeover, hospitals in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century often were charity homes or almshouses where society expected the chronically ill to receive indefinite medical care and housing. Starr’s sweeping narrative matches the scenario in Rhode Island: “pest houses” and a “Marine Hospital” were built to confine people who contracted infectious diseases while working near the ports in the 1700s, and two asylums—­Dexter Asylum and Butler Hospital—­were established later to treat the mentally ill, indigent, and often physically disabled.87 Starr illuminates how physicians gradually staked claim to these hospital operations and transitioned the care they provided.88 They stopped caring for chronic illness and focused instead on diagnosing and curing acute, biomedical pathologies. The hospital takeover allowed doctors to work from centralized locations where they treated and exacted payment from a greater volume of patients.89 This process occurred in many US urban centers and permanently altered rev-

enue streams. “Hospital after hospital began to note increased dependence upon paying patients,” writes New York hospital historian David Rosner.90 The Providence Lying-­In Hospital made a similar realignment after its first few decades of operation.

As the treatment model changed, upper-­class philanthropy encouraged the creation of public and private organizations dedicated to population health.

This new synergy of medicine, capital, and public health in the 1890s and early 1900s has been characterized as a period commonly referred to as a progressive era of social change.91 Hospital documents from this period are suffused with the language of social control and categorization as dictated by the capitalists who foisted their morals onto the working poor.

The 1889–1902 annual reports from the Providence Lying-­In Hospital mirror much of Starr’s observations concerning the bureaucratization of medicine at the turn of the twentieth century.92 The Providence Lying-­In Hospital expanded in these years, moving from the original site on Slocum Street on the west side of the city to the more centralized Smith Hill neighborhood, located just north of the Rhode Island State House, which was not completed until 1901.

Each year, the annual report followed the same template with a characteristic authorial pomp. Its sections included a trustee registrar; graduation rolls from the newly opened on-­site nursing school; and statements of revenue, costs, and charitable contributions. These reports, small, unadorned pamphlets, were printed by local Providence printing presses, Snow & Farnham, and later, Standard Printing Company, publications accessible to both physicians and hospital trustees.

91

Rhode Island History

5. Mothers lying-­in in the hospital’s patient ward, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (Providence, RI, 1897), Rider Collection, Hay Library.

6. A hospital nurse, mother, and newborn child photographed in a private ward of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (Providence, RI: 1897), Rider Collection, Hay Library.

Physicians and trustees shared power over hospital operations from the beginning. Local bank and railroad tycoon Benjamin A. Jackson and Reverend James G. Vose of a local Episcopal church were among the nonphysicians who appeared on the hospital’s original charter.93 Such a mutual relationship between business, church, and medicine helped solidify the institution’s early finances and reputation.94 These men knew how to wield gender in their favor when they added the Board of Lady Visitors to the hospital charter in 1893.95 These organized upper-­class women were tasked with hospital improvement projects and fundraising while serving the secondary role of normalizing the functions and operations of an obstetrical hospital among the city’s wealthiest residents. The men who published the annual report welcomed the work of the Board of Lady Visitors, as they believed that this new branch of the corporation would be both “valuable” to management and “favorable” to patients.96 For instance, the Board of Lady Visitors held a charitable concert in 1897 to endow the hospital’s first free bed and cover its operating costs for that year.97 From the perspective of wealthy Providence donors, serving impoverished patients was indistinguishable from socializing with their peers.

Nevertheless, budget deficits were common. Expenditures in 1900 were $13,678, while revenue totaled only $9,291, a deficit of more than $4,300.98 According to historian David Rosner, “Modest and temporary poverty was as much a characteristic of nineteenth-­ century hospitals as it was a characteristic of the people hospitals sought to serve.”99 The board struggled balancing care for mothers of lower socioeconomic 92

classes alongside attracting patients who could afford the full price of delivery. A comment from the first annual report demonstrates administrators’ preoccupation with identifying patients who could put them in the black: “The receipts from patients the second year shows a large increase over the preceding year, owing to the fact of a more prosperous class entering the hospital.”100 Comments like these suggest that hospital leaders viewed success as not simply treating patients but specifically treating patients who could foot the bill for their stay. Balancing service and financial solvency constituted a core challenge for hospital leadership, and it guided their decisions for hospital expansion in the coming decades.

In 1892, the hospital launched a trial infant ward with the hope of expanding revenue and attracting parents who would spare no expense for the pediatric care of severely ill infants and toddlers.101 At least, this is implicitly coded in the language of the 1893 annual report: “These infants do not in any way come from the ordinary class of hospital patients, but represent all classes of society.”102 Contrary to intentions, it seems that the ward attracted a disproportionate number of impoverished families, although specific racial demographic data was not recorded. Dr. H. G. Partridge, a Lying-­In Hospital physician, observed that most infant deaths occurred among patients from the “power classes,” and in his estimation, these deaths were caused by “vices of heredity and impaired vitality.”103 Infant mortality among the poorest patients ranged from 27–29 percent in the Lying-­In Hospital’s first sixteen years of operation. Like public health officials who blamed immigrant classes for their poor

Rhode Island History

health, Partridge attributed newborn deaths to the poverty of families and their presumed genetic inferiority. A similar report written by Dr. Halsey DeWolf considered these mortality rates at the Providence Lying-­In Hospital less than those observed at other children’s hospitals of the time where infant mortality rates sometimes exceeded 50 percent. The explanation offered by Dr. DeWolf was that most of the babies entering the infant ward at the Providence Lying-­In Hospital were the healthy babies delivered on site.104 Obviously, this was a problem, since sick babies admitted from the community could infect healthy newborns and would have contributed to the stigma of sin and death that surrounded other lying-­in hospitals of the time.105 The board ultimately closed the infant ward in 1907 after sixteen years of operation, citing insufficient resources to prevent the spread of contagion on hospital grounds. The class divide in mortality suggests they did so to protect their revenues by protecting babies of the wealthy and healthy.106 Between the tireless Board of Lady Visitors and numerous other bourgeois connections, the hospital fought for relevance and funding. One such stabilizing fund arrived in 1898 from state-­issued grants to support the maternity care the Providence Lying-­In Hospital provided to the community.107 While there is more to be said about these gendered divisions of philanthropy, clearly the hospital had proven by the end of the century that it was a valuable social enterprise.108 In the eyes of Providence legislators and business leaders, the hospital’s social and political value was worth supporting even if revenue from medical care was not yet profitable.

94

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

Perhaps the strongest proof that patient demographics mattered just as much as medical presentation lies in the “Statistics of the hospital,” a yearly summary table of all the admissions, discharges, and deaths on hospital grounds. Starting with the eleventh annual report, this table appeared separately from the “Report of the secretary of medical staff.” While the latter list included medical jargon and a thorough tally of diagnoses, the “Statistics” table streamlined the data into three categories of information: maternal deaths, stillbirths, and newborn deaths. Three additional lines were given to provide the patient’s place of origin: Providence resident, state resident, or out-­of-­state resident. In addition, two columns of demographic data—­married/unmarried and free/ paying—­reduced patients into binary social statuses that allowed the men reading the table to focus on who was coming to the hospital, rather than their medical experience.109 Once patients were categorized, hospital administrators either welcomed or excluded them. Until 1898, the hospital’s annual statistics table included a line for “applications for admissions refused.” In total, twenty-­nine patients were declined medical service between 1886 and 1898. During the same period, the hospital accepted 1,081 patients whose demographics and delivery outcomes constituted the remaining data.110 Most admitted patients were native-­born Providence residents, in roughly equal proportions of married and unmarried statuses. This data matched Boston’s delivery statistics; at the New England Hospital for Women and Children during the 1870s, 48 percent of patients were unmarried, and at the Bos-

ton Lying-­In between 1880 and 1889, 49 percent were unmarried.111 According to the Providence Lying-­In Hospital’s 1884 founding constitution, the staff sought to serve women lacking “a suitable abode at the time of child-­birth” or any woman who could afford a “well-­ regulated” hospital room.112 A statement found in the first annual report posed an immediate contradiction: “The hospital is not intended for persons of dissolute character or doubtful reputation.”113 This vague language about the sexual morality of admitted patients was clarified in the third annual report from 1888 that explicitly stated unmarried pregnant patients “who have been betrayed or made a misstep, yet are not wholly bad” would remain invited to the hospital. This can be interpreted to mean a first child out of wedlock was a tolerable moral offense to the hospital staff who would assume the patient had been manipulated into premarital sex. However, hospital administrators viewed patients with repeated out of wedlock pregnancies as being sexually promiscuous and determined that these mothers should be punitively excluded from the hospital for their “avowedly vicious . . . course of life.”114 This harsh tone can be reasonably interpreted to mean sex workers were not welcomed at the hospital given that recurrent pregnancy would have been a risk associated with their work.

There are no surviving records detailing who changed these hospital policies. Intriguingly, later annual reports contained contradictions about the number of patients who were denied admission in the first few years of operation.

The third annual report also contains information that seventy-­seven patients applied for confine-

ment between May 1886 and May 1888. Sixty-­six were accepted, and eleven were denied admission.115 However, statistics in the fourteenth annual report, published in 1898, indicated that no women were refused entrance until 1889, without mention of the discrepancy.116 By the next year, the 1899 report and its future iterations stopped reporting “admissions denied” entirely, an omission that makes it impossible to calculate the number of mothers denied admission in subsequent years. Unfortunately, there is no record of the hospital’s internal politics or procedures for denying admissions. Those patients’ stories have been reduced to a single number without a lead to where they ultimately delivered or if they protested this exclusionary policy. The near erasure of this practice reveals the almost total control that the hospital had over its public image, and these actions illustrate how hospital administrators sought to maintain the illusion of achieving Dr. Wiggin’s original vision of creating a place where some, but not all, women could safely deliver their children.

Dr. DeWolf’s 1900 article refers to these morality rules, and he seemed unimpressed by them. He took a realist’s perspective that sex workers and individuals having premarital sex would continue needing hospital services by stating: “Statistics show that this purpose of the incorporators to admit only the more decent women has been fulfilled to a satisfactory degree; about 52 percent of the whole number confined being married women,” and he likely did not expect the institution to increase that percentage anytime soon.117 All in all, these records suggest that hospital leadership attempted to institutionalize and enforce moral 95

Rhode Island History

expectations over the sexual lives and family planning activities of its patients, especially unwed mothers, in the first decade of operation. Women who had unsafe housing and desired delivery at the hospital needed to conform to moral expectations as part of the elite-­ enforced contract for medical care.

In addition to these judgments, one article also revealed racist presuppositions harbored by some Providence Lying-­In Hospital physicians. In the October 1901 issue of the Providence Medical Journal, the same Dr. H. G. Partridge wrote about anesthesia procedures during delivery.118 At a time when chemicals like chloroform and ether were used to help with labor pain, medical beliefs about pain were fundamentally racialized.119 Much of Partridge’s rhetoric aligned with the racist notion that non-­white patients were more adapted to cope with pain and thus somehow more biologically fit for childbirth: We know from observations made among savages and the less civilized peoples, that pain is not necessary to the successful result of labor. The Indian squaw, when taken in labor, retires by herself, is delivered, with little or no pain, and immediately takes the child, and proceeds on the march. So it is with the negress of the South, and with other less cultured races.120 Partridge’s writing makes women of color appear more animal-­like by inventing scenes where mothers labored alone. Moreover, his statements tacitly discredited midwifery culture and communal care practices present in non-­white communities while elevating 96

the supremacy of white obstetrical medical practices.121 Insidiously, this narrative also suggested that women of color needed less obstetric attention. White women, by natural extension of this perverse racial logic, required anesthesia (and perhaps a hospital where it could be administered) during labor because they were the fairer sex of a more civilized race. Given that Partridge would go on to write the first history of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital in 1934, his racist writings were not a fringe belief but rather a venerated mouthpiece for the hospital.

The race of patients rarely appeared in official hospital records. Notably, the fourteenth annual report was the first to include images of the hospital’s patients: figure 8 is a photograph of babies playfully posed on couches and rocking chairs, although no caption was printed to contextualize the image in the original report.122 Figure 7 appeared in the Fifteenth Annual Report and showed a less staged scene of a white nurse caring for a nursery of Black and white babies. Both images depicted the faces of Black and other babies of color. Their appearance complicates the Providence Lying-­In Hospital’s position and acceptance of non-­white patients at the hospital. During the first decades of operation, race did not appear in the annual reports’ demographic data.

Instead, hospital statistics seem limited to “Americans” and “foreigners.”123 Race categories reported by the hospital partly match the standards of the 1895 Rhode Island census, which distinguished between “Native” and “foreign born” state residents but failed to include more specific demographic data that the census recorded.124

7. Newborn babies photographed with an attending nurse in the hospital’s infant ward; note the child of color in the right hand side of the image. Thirteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital (Providence, RI: 1897), Rider Collection, Hay Library.

8. A staged photo depicting infants of various races at the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, Mark H. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles: A History of Providence Lying-­In and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island (East Greenwich, RI: Meridian Printing, 1996), 37.

The Providence Lying-­In Hospital did not publicly record how many patients of color from the commonly accepted racial categories at the time sought out their services.125 Secondary sources, however, show that race was, at least for a time, recorded internally, according to a photograph of an 1885 hospital ledger featured in Mark Dunkelman’s history of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital.126 This photograph shows a table with columns for patient name, age, color, con-

dition, nationality, occupation, and residence. Among the first five patients admitted to the hospital, all were white, as noted with the letter “w” in the color column.127 Without other evidence, there remains an incomplete picture of how the hospital’s medical team categorized the racial makeup of their patient population. We know that Black patients delivered their babies at the hospital, but no surviving records indicate how many did so or what kind of care they 97

Rhode Island History

9. Living conditions in Providence, 11 Lily Drive, ca. 1900, Providence Board of Health Photographs Collection, 1898–1963, Rhode Island State Archives.

received. These gaps in the historical record further silence the birth experiences of mothers of color and make it difficult, if not impossible, using extant formal documents to discern the maternal health of these women and their children in turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­ century Rhode Island.

There remains a question of whether obstetricians and gynecologists affiliated with the hospital could transfer their power to spaces beyond it. Providence Medical Journal records demonstrate that these physicians continued to publish their findings and cases to reach a wider audience. In addition, there is evidence that hospital physicians worked as consultants for other institutions around the state. Surviving promotional material from the Hopeworth Sanitarium in Bristol, Rhode Island, indicate that Dr. George W. Porter was on staff as early as 1883 treating patients with chronic illnesses.128 Another piece of extant evidence from the archives is a blank physician’s report printed by the Rhode Island Board of State Charities and Corrections in 1897. These books were blank templates printed for attending physicians in order to efficiently tally diseases they identified among the institutionalized patients. On review, the document’s gynecologic options included: endometritis; fissure of the nipple; mammitis [sic]; menopause; metrorrhagia; miscarriage; hysteria; prolapse of the uterus; vaginitis; and various sexually transmitted infections (chancre, chancroids, gonorrhea, and syphilis).129 Though not exhaustive, this list demonstrates that women’s health was at least acknowledged by these state institutions and valued enough that physicians were expected to diagnose patients under state care. Other

institutional records highlight the accomplishments that various hospital founders achieved during their careers. The names of Drs. Keefe and Mitchell can be found on the consult list for the state sanitorium as early as 1909.130 It is clear that several physicians associated with the Providence Lying-­In Hospital benefited from their connections to the institution as well as its growing prestige within the Rhode Island medical community.

98

Conclusion In 1899, nationally renowned surgeon Dr. William Osler visited Providence from Johns Hopkins University to speak to the Rhode Island Medical Society.

In his lecture, he remarked on Rhode Island’s absent medical school: The existing conditions in Providence are singularly favorable for a small first-­class school . . .What is lacking? Neither zeal, persistence nor ability on the part of the physicians, but a generous donation to the University of a million dollars with which to equip and endow laboratories of anatomy, physiology, pathology and hygiene; the money should be the least difficult thing to get in this plutocratic town.131 Obviously, Dr. Osler’s bias favored large academic medical centers like his employer. His speech ignored how the society’s zeal and persistence produced a viable alternative to traditional academia. By establishing a medical library, knowledge-­sharing practices, and public health roles, the RIMS had codified a med-

ical hierarchy that dictated how white and Black lives mattered to state health officials without a centralized medical school to teach, promulgate, and indoctrinate practicing physicians with these beliefs.

In the same year as Osler’s visit, the RIMS flexed its national influence by hosting the Fortieth Annual American Medical Association conference in Newport, Rhode Island, in June 1889.132 According to the meeting notes, the conference held an entire section dedicated to obstetrics and diseases among women over the course of three days, and physicians from eight states and Washington, DC, presented a total of fifteen papers. Rhode Island was now ready to host and share gynecologic prestige after previously importing a variety of practices, literature, and beliefs. In turn, this prestige attracted wealthy patients and introduced them to the idea of hospital deliveries, a fundamental shift in the region’s birthing practices.

One year later, Dr. DeWolf, a RIMS member and the author of the Providence Medical Journal article that recounted the first death at the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, wrote a report that the hospital was “no longer an infant.” It survived early crises of financing, staffing, and mission that many hospitals faced during this era. Hospital administrators began the century leading a politically valuable institution for obstetri-

cal and gynecologic expertise in the state. By 1902, the trustees announced: the Hospital is being used more and more by married women, especially by those who are unable to be confined at home. This is a most desirable feature of the increase patronage, as it brings to the Hospital the class of women we wish to reach and also brings the Hospital and its manifold necessities to the attention of the public. I doubt if there is another lying-­in hospital in the country where an equally large percentage married women are admitted.133 Without the diligent politicking and publications from members of the RIMS, the Providence Lying-­In Hospital never would have achieved this kind of favorable change in opinion. The trustees clearly were proud of this widening clientele that was on par with trends seen in other allopathic institutions in cities such as New York and Boston.134 The landscape of obstetrics and gynecology changed as more families trusted these hospitals with their delivery and were willing to pay for medical care, although the hospital never abandoned its original mission to help a narrow category of poor patients deemed morally acceptable by hospital leadership. Judging by a public health official’s photograph 99

Rhode Island History

in 1900 (figure 9), the communities who initially benefited from the hospital’s charity continued to struggle.

The image depicts a working-­class neighborhood in Providence whose pregnant patients may have gone to the hospital to deliver. These needs did not disappear, even as the hospital expanded its reach to the benefit of well-­to-­do mothers and babies.

The marginalization of Black and working-­class patients by practitioners in the twin fields of obstetrics and gynecology in the state of Rhode Island in the late nineteenth century was an insidious yet coordinated effort that required physicians to adopt and cul-

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

tivate a language of biologic racism that aligned with the values of their trustees and other philanthropists.

The intertwined histories of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital and the RIMS underscore the beliefs and prejudices that emerged alongside the rise of obstetric and gynecologic medical care in the state, branches of medicine that intentionally marginalized poor women and women of color.

staff, the school could not function. Robert W. Hopkins, J. Robert Bowen, and Warren W. Francis, “History of Surgery in Rhode Island,” Archives of Surgery 136, no. 4 (2001): 461–466, accessed May 12, 2020, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery /fullarticle/391294.

Joseph DiZoglio Jr., MD is an Obstetrics and Gynecology resident physician and amateur historian who lives in Hartford, Connecticut. Dr. DiZoglio graduated from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in 2020.

14. Vogel, The Invention of the Modern Hospital.

Notes 1. This is likely a spelling error for kyphosis, a spinal disorder caused by abnormal curvature. Halsey DeWolf, “A Brief Account of the Work of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital during the Fifteen Years of Its Existence,” The Providence Medical Journal 1, no.

4 (October 1900): 146–150, Accessed July 3, 2020, https://hdl .handle.net/2027/hvd.hc4dme.

8. Gardner T. Swarts, Forty-­Eighth Report Relating to the Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, and of Divorce In The State of Rhode Island (Providence, RI: E. L. Freeman & Sons, State Printers, 1902), 4, 57–58, accessed May 12, 2020, https:// hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112111046345.

2. Jacqueline H. Wolf, “Risk and Reputation: Obstetricians, Cesareans, and Consent,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 73, no. 1 (January 2018), 7–28, Accessed May 12, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrx053.

10. Ward, Prothero, and Leathes, “United States Population Density, 1900,” The Cambridge Modern History Atlas (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912), accessed May 12, 2020, https://etc .usf.edu/maps/pages/7400/7493/7493.htm.

3. Dewolf, “A Brief Account,” 148.

4. The Providence Lying-­In Hospital, Fifth Annual Report (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1889), 10.

5. DeWolf, “A Brief Account,” 147.

6. Morris J. Vogel, The Invention of the Modern Hospital: Boston 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 11–14.

7. J. J. Spengler, “Fertility in Providence, Rhode Island, 1856– 1929,” American Journal of Sociology 38, no. 3 (1932): 377–97, accessed May 12, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1086/216115.

100

9. Vogel, The Invention of the Modern Hospital.

11. Neighboring schools included the University of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania), established in 1765; Columbia University (New York), established in 1767, Harvard University (Massachusetts), established in 1782; Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), established in 1797; University of Maryland (Maryland), established in 1807; and Yale University (Connecticut) established in 1810.

12. Ironically, Brown’s program was suspended because physician professors who would have needed to travel to their patients could not meet the university’s executive order that all Brown faculty had to reside on campus at the time. Without available local

13. Joseph E. Garland, “Chapter IV, The New Century: Expansion of Services,” in To Meet These Wants: The Story of Rhode Island Hospital, 1863–1988 (Providence, RI: Providence Public Relations Department, 1988) 51–84, Accessed May 12, 2020, https://hdl .handle.net/2027/ien.35558005684200.

15. David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New York, 1885–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Legacy Library, 1987), 3–4.

16. See Mark H. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles: A History of Providence Lying-­In and Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island (East Greenwich, RI: Meridian Printing, 1996), and Herbert G. Partridge, History of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, February 29, 1884 to February 28, 1934 (Providence, RI: Board of Trustees, 1934).

17. Edward Field, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century: A History (Boston: The Mason Publishing Company, 1902), 66, accessed March 1, 2023, https:// upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/State_of _Rhode_Island_and_Providence_Plantations_at_the_end_of_the _century_-­_a_history_%28IA_stateofrhodeisla03fiel%29.pdf.

18. Patricia Adams Sheehan [preparer], “Providence Lying-­In Hospital,” United States Department of the Interior, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, April 3, 1986, 6, accessed 7 May 2023. https://preservation.ri.gov /sites/g/files/xkgbur406/files/pdfs_zips_downloads/national _pdfs/providence/prov_maude-­street-­50_lying-­in-­hospital.pdf.

19. Field, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 66–68.

20. Cynthia Comery Ferguson, “Public Need and Public Health: The Early Years of the Providence District Nursing Association,” Rhode Island History 59, no. 1 (February 2001).

21. See “Dr. Edwin Snow,” Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame, accessed May 6, 2023, https://riheritagehalloffame.com/Dr-­Ed win-­Snow, and Charles W. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography and Epidemic Diseases of Rhode Island” in The Transactions of the American Medical Association (Philadelphia: Collins, 1864), 18.

22. Laura Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-­Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June 2000): 246–273.

23. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

24. Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage.

25. Dorothy E. Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-­create Race in the Twenty-­First Century (New York: New Press, 2011).

26. Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage, 10.

27. Vyas, et al., “Challenging the Use of Race in the Vaginal Birth after Cesarean Section Calculator” Women’s Health Issues 29, no.

3 (May 2019): 201–204, accessed March 1, 2023, https://doi .org/10.1016/j.whi.2019.04.007.

28. Field, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 50–56.

29. Field, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 56.

30. George D. Hersey, “The Library of the Rhode Island Medical Society,” Medical Libraries 4, no. 1 (January 1901): 47–49, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC 2047360/.

31. See Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society, for the years 1877–78 (Central Falls, RI: E. L. Freeman & Co. 1878), 6–7, and Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society, for the years 1878–1879, Volume II Part Second (Central Falls, RI: E. L. Freeman & Co., 1879), 87–88.

32. Hersey, “The Library of the Rhode Island Medical Society,” 48.

33. Transactions, 1879, 414.

101

Rhode Island History

34. Field, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 54.

35. Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society Vol. 1. (Providence, RI: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1859), 57–59.

36. For a record of both essays, see The American Journal of Medical Sciences: Vol. 26 (Berkeley, CA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1853), 13, accessed May 12, 2020, https://hdl.handle.net/2027 /uc1.c075216160, and Vol. 34 (Berkeley, CA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1857), 87, accessed May 12, 2020, https://hdl.handle .net/2027/uc1.c075215555.

37. Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 262.

38. Admittedly, Warren’s memoir paints a rosy picture of certain select relationships he recalls with Black patients. These stories need to be put in the context of the counter-­Reconstruction project to ameliorate Antebellum race relations. Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore: Cushings & Bailiey, 1885), accessed May 7, 2023, https://wellcomecollection .org/works/d57ys8nu.

39. Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society, for the years 1878–1879, Volume II -­Part Second (Central Falls, RI: E. L. Freeman & Co., 1879), 60.

40. See the following print compilations of individual year and multiyear volumes in the John Hay Library: Communications of the Rhode Island Medical Society, with an Appendix, Containing the Proceedings of the Society from 1859 to 1877 (Providence, RI: The Society, 1859–77), and Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society (Providence, RI: The Society, 1878–1910).

41. Second Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Rhode Island (Providence, RI: E. L. Freeman & Co., 1880), 9 and 246, accessed May 5, 2023, https://upload.wikimedia.org /wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Annual_report_of_the_State_Board _of_Health_of_the_State_of_Rhode_Island%2C_for_the_year _ending_.._%28IA_annualreportofst1879rhod%29.pdf.

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

for the years 1874–76 (Providence, RI: Angell, Burlingame & Co., 1876), 119, and Transactions, 1878, 10.

tion,” Providence Medical Journal XVII, no. 5, (September 1916): 295–297, and Communications, 1874, 70.

44. The trajectory of Wiggin’s career appears in Communications of the Rhode Island Medical Society for the years 1872–74 (Providence, RI: Providence Press Company, 1874), 85; Communications, 1876, 110, 116; and Transactions, 1878, 10.

53. Communications, 1874, 76.

45. “Presidents 1812–Present,” Rhode Island Medical Society, 2016, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.rimedicalsociety.org /presidents-­1812-­present.html.

55. See print compilation in John Hay Library, Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society (Providence, RI: The Society, 1878–1910).

46. Historian Mark Dunkelman makes an uncited claim that Porter trained under Dr. J. Marion Sims in New York City, although I could not find supporting direct evidence in my review of the Rhode Island medical archives. Future cross-­state inquiry into a New York City archive might find the definitive evidence of Porter’s pedigree and particular transference of surgical skills into Rhode Island. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles, 20–23.

56. Regina Markell Morantz-­Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), 217.

47. Hopkins, et al., “History of Surgery in Rhode Island,” 461.

60. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography,” 11.

48. Garland, “Chapter IV, The New Century: Expansion of Services,” 39–40.

61. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography,” 12.

49. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the archives about how gynecologic surgery developed in Rhode Island. Clapp’s 1871 lecture on vesico-­vaginal fistula, a talk that would demonstrate how the experimentation on “medical superbodies” translated care for white patients in Rhode Island, received limited comment in the RIMS records. This absence leaves another ghost of J. Marion Sims in Rhode Island medical history and limits our understanding of how Sims’s techniques migrated northward.

50. “Matriculation of Women at Harvard Medical School,” The Joint Committee on the Status of Women, 2020, accessed May 12, 2020, https://jcsw.hms.harvard.edu/matriculation-­women -­harvard-­medical-­school.

42. Communications of the Rhode Island Medical Society (Providence, RI: Hammond, Angell & Co., 1872), 49.

51. See Communications 1874–1876, 407–422, and Mary Korr, “Daughters of Asclepius: Early women physicians in Rhode Island,” in Medical Odysseys: A Journey through the Annals of the Rhode Island Medical Society (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Medical Society, 2011).

43. See the Communications of the Rhode Island Medical Society,

52. See George D. Hersey, “Anita E. Tyng, M.D.—­An Apprecia-

102

54. See Transactions, 1888, 183–184, Transactions of the Rhode Island Medical Society, Volume III (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Medical Society, 1888), 69, and Transactions, 1877, 124.

57. Korr, “Daughters of Asclepius,” 2011.

58. Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria,” 267.

59. “Presidents 1812–Present,” 2016.

62. Evelyn Sterne, “Immigration to Rhode Island,” EnCompass: A Digital Sourcebook of Rhode Island History, http://library .providence.edu/encompass/immigration-­to-­rhode-­island /immigration-­to-­rhode-­island/, accessed on April 24, 2023.

63. Edwin M. Snow, “Statistics and Causes of Asiatic Cholera, as It Prevailed in Providence, in the Summer of 1854,” City Document No. 5 (Providence, RI: Knowles, Anthony & Co. City Printers, 1855).

64. Charles V. Chapin, “Sixty Years of the Providence Health Department,” American Journal of Public Health, VI, no. 9, September 1916, accessed May 7, 2023, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi /pdf/10.2105/AJPH.6.9.905-­b.

65. Meagan Wierda, “The ‘Colonization Graveyard’: Morbidity and Mortality in Anti-­Colonization Discourse,” Lecture, Eighth Annual Natura Conference on Science and Epistemology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, February 15, 2019.

66. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography,” xlvii.

67. Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

68. See “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Rhode Island,” Brown University, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.brown.edu /Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/exhibitions/jcbexhibit /Pages/exhibSlavery.html, and Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780– 1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 119–162.

69. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography,” 19.

70. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-­ Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10.

71. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography,” 9.

72. Parsons, “Report on the Medical Topography,” 26.

73. Gabriel J. Loiacono, “Economy and Isolation in Rhode Island Poorhouses, 1820–1850,” Rhode Island History 65:2 (Summer 2007), accessed May 7, 2023, https://www.rihs.org/wp-­content /uploads/2020/02/2007_Sum.pdf.

74. Edwin M. Snow and Oliver C. Wiggin, “A Communication on the Adulteration of Milk” (Providence, RI: Hammond, Angell & Co., 1869).

75. J. H. Davenport, “Appendicitis in Women,” Providence Medical Journal 1, no. 3 (July 1900): 100–106.

76. Davenport, “Appendicitis in Women,” 104.

77. Chae, David H., et al., “Discrimination, racial bias, and telomere length in African-­American men,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 46, issue 2, February 2014, 103–111, accessed May 7, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2013.10.020.

78. Arline T. Geronimus et al., “Do US Black Women Experience Stress-­Related Accelerated Biological Aging?” Human Nature 21, no. 1 (March 2010): 19–38, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861506/.

79. Laure A. Wise, et al., “Perceived Racial Discrimination and Risk of Uterine Leiomyomata,” Epidemiology 18, no. 6 (November 2007): 747–757, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm .nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2150737/.

80. Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage, 111.

81. John W. Keefe, “Two Cases of Normal Labor Following

103

Rhode Island History

the Gynecologic Formation of Racial Hierarchy in the Late 1800s

Alexander’s Operation,” Providence Medical Journal 2, no. 1 (January 1901): 32–34.

97. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­in Hospital (Providence, RI: Standard Printing Company, 1898), 15.

118. Herbert G. Partridge, “Anesthesia in Obstetrics,” Providence Medical Journal 2, no. 4 (October 1901): 160–163.

82. Keefe, “Two Cases of Normal Labor,” 33.

98. Partridge, History of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, 1934.

83. Keefe, “Two Cases of Normal Labor,” 33.

99. Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise, 42.

84. Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage, 89–107.

100. Providence Lying-­In Hospital: 1st Printed Report Issued July ’87 (Providence, RI: Providence Press Company, 1887), 8.

119. See Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria,” 246–273, and Claude Edwin Heaton, “The History of Anesthesia and Analgesia in Obstetrics,” Journal of the History of Medicine 1, no. 4 (October 1946): 56–-­572.

85. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1982).

86. Consider both Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 79–144, and Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) for a more specific feminist history of obstetrics.

87. Elihu S. Wing Jr., “The Providence Medical Association,” in The History of the Rhode Island Medical Society and Its Component Societies: 1812–1962 (East Providence, RI: Roger Williams Press, 1966), 145, and Brian C. Jones, Rhode Island Hospital 150th Anniversary (Providence, RI: Signature Printing, 2013), 14.

101. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles, 37.

102. Providence Lying-­In Hospital Ninth Annual Report (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1893), 11.

103. See DeWolf, “A Brief Account,” 149, and H. G. Partridge, “Resume of Six Months’ Service in the Infants’ Department of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital,” Providence Medical Journal 1, no. 1 (January 1900): 43–50.

104. DeWolf, “A Brief Account,” 149.

105. Vogel, The Invention of the Modern Hospital, 12–13.

88. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 145–179.

106. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles, 50.

89. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 145–179.

107. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles, 37.

90. David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New York 1885–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59.

108. Lindsay Reed, “A Place for Women: The Growth and Development of the Providence Lying-­In Hospital, 1884–1934,” Thesis for Bachelor of Arts in History, Brown University, 2011.

91. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

109. The Providence Lying-­In Hospital Eleventh Annual Report.

(Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1895), 12.

92. The Sixteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­in Hospital (Providence, RI: Standard Printing Company, 1901).

111. Vogel, The Invention of the Modern Hospital, 13, 117.

93. “An Act to Incorporate the Providence Lying-­In Hospital,” Rhode Island General Assembly, January 1881, and Elizabeth S. Warren, “Benjamin Aborn Jackson House,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2002.

113. Providence Lying-­In Hospital Annual Report (Providence, RI: Providence Press Company, 1887), 9.

94. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 152, 171–172.

95. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles, 40.

96. Providence Lying-­In Hospital Eighth Annual Report (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1892), 12.

104

110. Fourteenth Annual Report, 1898, 18.

112. Providence Lying-­In Hospital Constitution, 1884.

120. Partridge, “Anesthesia in Obstetrics,” 160.

121. For more on the history of African American midwifery, see Jenny M. Luke’s 2018 book, Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-­Century South.

122. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­in Hospital (Providence, RI: Standard Printing Company, 1898).

123. Supplementary documents and secondary analysis suggest that Black patients likely were categorized as “native” in this binary, but the Providence Lying-­In Hospital reports I reviewed never state this choice. Spengler, “Fertility in Providence,” 378.

124. This included racial categories of white and Black, as well as mixed race categories of ”Mulatto, Quadroon, and Octaroon” in addition to Asian nationalities such as Chinese or Japanese, accessed May 1, 2023, https://www.census.gov/history/www /through_the_decades/index_of_questions/1890_1.html#:~:text =Enumerators%20were%20instructed%20to%20 write,%2C%22%20or%20%22Indian.%22.

125. Henry E. Tiepke, Census of Rhode Island, 1895, Rhode Island Census Board (Providence, RI: E. L. Freeman & Sons, State Printers, 1898), accessed April 17, 2020, https://catalog.hathi trust.org/Record/001306881/Home.

126. Dunkelman, For Generations of Miracles, 28.

127. Since Women and Infants Hospital no longer carries an archive from this era, the only extant image of this document is a photograph in Dunkelman’s history.

128. Hopeworth Sanitarium Bristol, RI (1883), 5, accessed May 8, 2020, http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101600524.

129. “Physician’s Report of the Asylum for the Insane, Almshouse, House of Correction, State Prison, Sockanosset and Oaklawn Schools,” Rhode Island Board of State Charities and Corrections (Howard, RI: Sockanosset School for Boys, 1897).

130. Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees of the State Sanatorium at Wallum Lake (Providence, RI: E. L. Freeman Company, 1910), 7, accessed May 12, 2020, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id =uiug.30112099442284&view=1up&seq=13.

131. Joseph E. Garland, To Meet These Wants: The Story of Rhode Island Hospital, 1863–1988 (Providence, RI: Public Relations Department, Rhode Island Hospital, 1988), 51.

132. The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Official Record of Its Proceedings, and the Reports and Papers Presented in the Several Sections, XIII, July—­December (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1889), 61–63.

133. The Eighteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­in Hospital, (Providence, RI: Standard Printing Company, 1902), 17.

134. Vogel, The Invention of the Modern Hospital, 117 and Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise, 59.

114. Providence Lying-­In Third Annual Report (Providence, RI: Providence Press Company, 1888), 2.

115. Third Annual Report, 1888, 6.

116. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Providence Lying-­in Hospital (Providence, RI: Standard Printing Company, 1898) 18–20.

117. DeWolf, “A Brief Account,” 146.

105

PATRICIA RAUB, PH.D.

Branching Out Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods, 1870s–1932

The Providence Daily Journal covered the opening of Providence Public Library (PPL) on February 4, 1878, reporting that the event “was a perfect success. As soon as the doors were opened to the second-­floor room in the Butler Exchange, people entered and within half an hour, the public portion of the room was full, and there was general interest and admiration. A large number of registration slips were signed, and the prospect is for a large demand of books at once.”1 After much discussion over the years and more than one unsuccessful start, the city of Providence, Rhode Island, finally had a public library. Once it had opened and had begun providing free access to books for all city residents, its presence had a profound impact on libraries then operating in Providence. Ready availability of books at no cost to patrons, including some current novels and other popular books of the day, led many of the city’s circulating libraries to reduce or curtail their book rental business, and, with the exception of the Providence Athenæum, which continued to hold its own against this new competition, most of the social libraries established in the nineteenth century eventually discontinued operations.2 Throughout most of the twentieth and into the twenty-­first century, the Providence Athenæum and PPL—­both private corporations, one membership 1. Olneyville Branch of the Providence Public Library, Waterman Building, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, Providence Public Library (cited hereafter as PPL). Special thanks to Kate Wells for providing high-­quality photographs of the images featured in this article.

only and the other open to anyone with a library card—­ would be the two principal libraries in the city, outside of Brown University’s library system with its more restricted membership.

Both PPL and the Providence Athenæum were situated within easy reach of most city residents when they were founded, but this would not be the case by the turn of the century. One of the fastest growing cities in the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, Providence expanded outward, annexing large sections of North Providence, Johnston, and Cranston between 1868 and 1898. The management of PPL recognized early on that the people in these developing neighborhoods needed library services, but in the years before PPL fully mobilized to establish library branches, other organizations were founded to administer to community needs, especially in the heavily immigrant communities, and these groups opened small libraries that PPL would eventually absorb into a branch system.

Although PPL had no branches in 1878, by 1931, it had eight.3 Most public libraries in the United States opened branch libraries themselves as cities grew beyond the reach of the central library. Providence, however, did not conform to this top-­down pattern.

Instead, groups of social club women, businessmen, settlement house workers, civic groups, and others independently concluded that a local public library in their neighborhood was an essential amenity that area residents deserved. If PPL was unable to provide 107

Rhode Island History

nearby library services, then the members of these voluntary clusters of individuals or local organizations would do so, and in the period from the late nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, those living outside the downtown enjoyed library services thanks largely to the efforts of the determined men and women who founded small libraries throughout the city. Thus, Providence provides us with a case study of grassroots community activism. Library advocates aimed to offer local residents access to books and an opportunity to further their education at a time when approximately two-­thirds of the city’s children left school at fourteen, population figures soared as immigrants flocked into the city, and nearly 17 percent of these foreign-­born residents were illiterate.4 In tracing the evolution of these neighborhood libraries, one can examine the composition of those who established them, consider the functions these local libraries served, and explore the ways in which PPL’s financial situation shaped its relationship with these early libraries, which eventually were adopted by PPL as neighborhood branches.

The Branch Concept Branch libraries were not a new concept by the turn of the century. Boston Public Library (BPL) opened its first branch in East Boston in 1870, and by 1899, BPL had ten branches with large permanent collections of books.5 PPL, however, barely had the operating funds to maintain its Washington Street building; thus, establishing and maintaining a library branch system was out of the question at that time in Prov108

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

idence. As PPL librarian William E. Foster noted in PPL’s 1899 annual report, “The practice [of opening branches] is common and, indeed usual, in cities of this size; and the advantages to be secured seem obvious. But it has been our plain duty to equip the main library itself in at least an approximately adequate manner before expanding our operations.”6 Boston and Providence were alike in their need for public libraries.

In 1910, US census takers found that three-­quarters of the residents in each city were immigrants or children of immigrants.7 Rapid immigration over the past half century had led to a steep climb in each city’s population. Boston’s grew by over 250 percent between 1870 and 1910 and Providence’s by more than threefold.8 Despite similar need, however, only BPL had the means to open branches in the late nineteenth century: a 1869 city ordinance permitted BPL to establish local libraries, using appropriations voted upon by the city council. By 1895, Boston had opened eight branches and nine delivery stations.9 If PPL were to follow suit, however, it would have had to rely on its own limited resources.

What were the “advantages” that seemed “obvious” to Foster? Library leaders were not in agreement as to the function and purpose of branch libraries at this time. At the 1893 annual meeting of the American Library Association, some regarded branches merely as delivery stations where patrons could order and return books from the main library. BPL apparently saw its early branches in this light, judging by BPL librarian Justin Winsor’s observations at the first meeting of the American Library Association in 1876, when he referred to Boston’s first six branches

as “deliveries of the central library.”10 This perception of libraries was consistent with the understanding of a library’s function shared by most from the opening of the earliest libraries in the mid-­eighteenth century throughout the nineteenth century: libraries were collections of books available for circulation. The role of the librarian, therefore, was limited to that of keeper of the books, opening the reading room and library a set number of hours each week, charging books out to patrons, making sure that volumes were returned promptly and in good condition, collecting fines for late returns, and, in many cases, preparing a catalog of the books in the collection.11 Often, the members of a social library in conjunction with the paid librarian selected the books for purchase and handled donations. A good collection not only would enable readers to expand their knowledge, but it also would serve to divert patrons from less worthy pastimes, such as frequenting nearby saloons.

As librarianship became professionalized with the formation of the American Library Association in 1876 and Columbia University’s introduction of the first library science program in 1887, many began to envision an enlarged role for the library and the librarian. Some maintained, “If we are to fulfill the proper functions of a library we are not merely to give books and create reading, but to direct reading.” This also applied to branches. To carry out “the missionary work of the library,” qualified library personnel needed to be available not only at the main library but also at every branch to provide patrons with advice in selecting books and with reference help.12 Moreover, by the 1920s, these smaller libraries also had become com-

munity centers, buildings in which “lecture courses, discussion groups, organization meetings and adult classes of many types” could be held.13 PPL’s branches began taking on this function almost from their inception, holding periodic community nights to familiarize the public with the programs and services offered, encouraging the nearby schools to bring students to the library, forming clubs for young people, and providing meeting space in the community rooms for neighborhood organizations.14 In 1932, Foster observed of the Wanskuck Branch, for example, that the “use of the Library’s Community Room continues to help make the branch the hub of the little Wanskuck universe.”15 Following the lead of settlement houses serving the poor and recent immigrants and operating in many cities by the early twentieth century, branches were social centers meant to serve the neighborhoods in which they were located. The tripartite function typical of most US branches by the early twentieth century was reflected in the architectural layout of PPL’s first four purpose-­built libraries, all of which had a reference space, reading rooms for adults and children, and a community room.16 Although not privy to the debate in the library journals regarding the nature of a branch library, the founders of Providence’s neighborhood libraries would have agreed with the professionals’ definition of a branch library as a place providing patrons with an opportunity to continue their education, offering access to books and reference help and functioning as a neighborhood social center. Most importantly, the founders wanted to provide local residents with a library within walking distance of patrons’ homes. This 109

Rhode Island History

has remained an important characteristic of Providence’s branch system to this day.

The First of the Neighborhood Libraries The first of Providence’s local libraries was founded in the village of Olneyville three years before PPL first opened. By the 1870s, Olneyville was becoming a manufacturing hub within the Providence metropolitan area. Wool and worsted mills lined the Woonasquatucket River as it flowed through the village of Olneyville, part of the town of Johnston until Olneyville was annexed by Providence in 1898. Primarily a community of factory workers employed in the nearby mills, Olneyville was “one of the most densely developed industrial areas in the city of Providence” by the late nineteenth century.17 Factory housing and private residences clustered near the intersection of Valley Street, Broadway, and Westminster Street, then known as High Street, with shops, a post office, a hotel, food markets, a church, and a newspaper office facing the main thoroughfare. An omnibus company had opened by midcentury. Omnibuses, horse-­drawn carriages carrying several passengers at a time along major thoroughfares, were common in mid-­nineteenth-­ century American cities until they were replaced by the somewhat speedier horsecars by the early-­1880s and by electric streetcars by the 1890s.18 Even with access to public transit, Olneyville in the 1870s remained relatively removed from Providence, far enough from the social libraries available in the city center to warrant starting its own library.19 No doubt one of the motivating factors for the 110

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

middle-­class founders of Olneyville Free Library, as for those who formed PPL at approximately the same time, was anxiety regarding possible worker unrest. A subscriber to the Providence Daily Journal in the four years leading up to the opening of a reading room in Olneyville in 1873 would have read about wage strikes by carpenters in Belgium, cigar makers in Havana, and miners in California. Closer to home were ones by “collar girls” in Troy, New York; laborers building the Brooklyn Bridge; and New York City piano makers. In Olneyville itself and nearby Wanskuck, woolen workers protested reduced pay rates in January 1870. Although those forming Olneyville Free Library would not have known it when their reading room opened on February 22, 1873, a larger protest over workers’ rights would soon take place in Olneyville and other Rhode Island mill villages and towns when “for three weeks in [May of] 1873, textile operatives and their families marched in torchlight parades to agitate for a ten-­hour [work] day.”20 While middle-­class residents were probably relieved when the financial Panic of 1873 brought an end to the agitation, the economic downturn forced the library advocates to close the reading room after only nine months of operation.21 One year later, they were ready to try again. Collecting donations from Weybosset and Riverdale Mills and from several individuals, including James Eddy, a wealthy art dealer, and G. A. Waterman, a member of the locally prominent Waterman family, a total of $400 had been raised when library advocates called upon their fellow townspeople to contribute, writing that “even those who cannot give thousands towards the free library in this city may, perhaps, be able to

give tens towards the free library” to meet the $1,000 goal. In justifying the need for a public library, the founders noted that some five thousand workers lived in the town and, they believed, “many would read if they had the wherewith; some in a pleasant apartment free to themselves would be saved from worse places and to themselves [sic].”22 No doubt the founders and others who contributed toward the inception of the library had not forgotten the labor agitation they had read about in distant places and also witnessed firsthand in Olneyville the year before. Those who formed PPL asserted in 1871 that, without such institutions of learning as libraries, “short-­sighted ignorance” would threaten established society.23 It seems likely that Olneyville’s library organizers held similar views.

Three months later, in February 1875, the Olneyville Free Library again opened its doors to the public. Its small collection included fifty books donated by the Sunday school of Grace Church in Providence, others given by the Union of Christian Work, books contributed by individuals, and the remainder purchased with the library’s slender funds.24 As the collection grew and patronage increased, the library outgrew both its first and second homes. Upon her death in 1886, Johnston resident Sarah Ann Waterman bequeathed property in Olneyville Square to the library with the stipulation that the library association was to build a permanent brick building on the lot within five years, a condition that the association met.25 In 1888, the organization was incorporated. Like their counterparts at PPL, Olneyville’s founders established a private nonprofit organization rather than attempting to become a department within the munic-

ipal government. For much of Olneyville Free Library’s history, as for that of PPL, this status provided organizational independence but also created financial problems. Even though Olneyville Free Library was able to pay a substantial proportion of its operating overhead through the rental income derived from the shops on the first and third floors of the new library building after it opened in 1891, this was not enough to cover all library expenses. From the beginning, the town of Johnston contributed some funds, starting with $100 a year and eventually providing $800 by 1895. However, the town’s taxpayers voted to allocate no money to the library the following years, leaving it with only an annual appropriation of $150 from the State of Rhode Island in public funds and forcing Olneyville Free Library to drastically reduce its hours.26 Providence annexed Olneyville in 1898, although it was not until 1906 that the City of Providence began allocating a small amount of money toward the library’s operating expenses. Nevertheless, PPL did provide some assistance to the Olneyville Free Library as early as 1890 when PPL purchased the books in the Franklin Lyceum’s collection and donated the copies of all books PPL already owned to the Olneyville Free Library, increasing its collection by some 2,200 volumes.27 In PPL’s annual report of 1895, Foster wrote that it has been “an occasion for exceptional pleasure to aid it [Olneyville Free Library] in every way, by the loan of books, by the preparation of [book] lists, and the communication of any useful impulse.”28 Foster wrote in the library’s 1899 annual report that PPL would have liked to have added Olneyville Free Library as a branch when the City of Providence 111

Original Name of Library and Principal Address(es)

2. Interior of the Olneyville Branch of the Providence Public Library, Waterman Building, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

Founded

Founder(s)

Acquired

by PPL

Later Branch Names, Location, and Year Occupied

Olneyville Free Library 1873, 1875 Waterman Building, 12-­14 Olneyville Square

Local mill owners and other wealthy residents

1921

Olneyville Branch 1 Olneyville Square (1990)

Sprague House Library 7 Armington Avenue

Mount Pleasant Working Girls Club

1906

Mount Pleasant Branch 315 Academy Avenue (1949)

ca. 1891

North End Library 49 Orms Street

1896

North End Working Girls Club

1910

Smith Hill Branch 31 Candace Street (1932)

Wanskuck Library Wanskuck Hall, 754 Branch Avenue

1903

Wanskuck Company

1910

Wanskuck Branch 233 Veazie Street (1928)

South Main Street Library 403 South Main Street

1912

Virginia and Hope Shepley

1925

Fox Point Branch 90 Ives Street (1975)

Elodie Farnum Memorial Library Rochambeau Avenue School

1915

East Side Monday Morning Musical Club

1915

Rochambeau Branch 708 Hope Street (1930)

Elmwood Public Library Greenwich Avenue Fire Station

1915

Elmwood Public Library Association

Broad Street Library Broad Street Grammar School

Mid-­1910s

Broad Street Grammar School Mother’s Club

1931

Washington Park Branch 1316 Broad Street (1956)

South Providence Community Club

1927

South Providence Branch 441 Prairie Avenue (1930)

South Providence Community Library Oxford Street School (1923–1926) Burnside Street Fire Station (1926–1930)

1923

1962, 1994 Knight Memorial Library 275 Elmwood Avenue (1924)

Providence’s Neighborhood Libraries31

annexed Olneyville the previous year, as BPL had added the libraries in Charlestown and Brighton when those towns were annexed to the City of Boston.

Unfortunately, wrote Foster, PPL could not do so due to “inadequate funds.” While he added that negotiations between Olneyville Free Library and PPL had begun and “are still in progress,” in fact, it was not until 1921 that Olneyville Free Library finally became a branch of PPL.29

Expanding Library Services to Children In the same decade that Olneyville Free Library and PPL began operations, William I. Fletcher, later president of the American Library Association, observed that most public libraries turned away those younger than twelve or fourteen. Indeed, the presence of large numbers of children in a library had not been typical throughout most of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1876, Fletcher asserted that libraries should serve to cultivate good taste in the young and level the play112

ing field for those children whose families were too poor to have books at home. The library, he maintained, should be an “adjunct to the school system,” reinforcing the values taught by a child’s teachers and serving as a form of continuing education for those children who left school at an early age to go to work, a goal that appears to have been shared by the founders of the early neighborhood libraries in Providence.

Libraries should set no age restrictions for patronage; instead, Fletcher recommended, they should provide a “judicious and proper extension of the benefits of the library to the young.”30 From the time of its opening in the 1820s, the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers Library placed no restrictions on the age of those apprentices who used the library with the permission of their masters. Nineteenth-­century Sunday school libraries provided small collections of books to children. Although Sunday school libraries often were dismissed as containing collections of “namby-­ pamby literature which revolted the children,” most

of these libraries offered young readers a more balanced selection of titles.32 The Union of Christian Work established a library in 1868 primarily for the use of working-­class adults, and it opened a Street Boys Reading Room soon afterward. It was not until the 1880s, however, that it began to attract youngsters in large numbers, offering bootblacks and newsboys games, educational lectures, and a variety of boys’ magazines and books.33 Other libraries in the city for most of the nineteenth century primarily were for adult users. Providence was by no means atypical. According to library historian Jesse Shera, between 1733 and the 1850s, there were only twenty-­one “juvenile and youth” libraries across New England.34 Most libraries simply were not intended for children.

Like other nineteenth-­century libraries, Olneyville Free Library and PPL initially ignored children. PPL librarian Clarence E. Sherman admitted half a century later that there were at first “no accommoda-

tions for children in the [Providence Public] Library [and] the menu was indeed meager when compared with the resources at the disposal of the boys and girls of the 1930s.” Nevertheless, despite the limited space available in its first locations, PPL soon “offered to the children of Providence the beginnings of a library service especially adapted to their juvenile minds and tastes.”35 With the move to a new building at 150 Washington Street in 1900, the library could at last offer young people a room tailored expressly for them.

For its first two decades, Olneyville Free Library appears to have focused mostly upon serving young men employed in local factories. By the 1890s, though, the librarian began establishing connections with the village’s schools and encouraging children to use the library. With cramped quarters, children and adults were forced to share a common space, where “the little ones often cause annoyance” to their elders. In 1906, Olneyville Free Library opened a separate children’s 113

Rhode Island History

room, providing its younger patrons with “more freedom” while presumably providing the adults with peace and quiet.36

Another Library for Factory Workers Although most of the libraries that opened in Providence after the turn of the century aimed their services at children from the outset, Wanskuck Library, like Olneyville Free Library before it, was initially founded to provide services to local mill workers. Located northeast of Olneyville and, like Olneyville, dominated by textile factories, Wanskuck was relatively isolated at this time. As Foster remarked in 1928, “There is perhaps no other portion of territory within the corporate limits of Providence that can be so truthfully conceived of as a community by itself, as the Wanskuck district.”37 Wanskuck was a company-­built mill village with several blocks of factory housing, as well as stores, saloons, two churches, public and parochial schools, and a boarding house on or near Branch Avenue. The Wanskuck Company, a worsted manufacturing firm, attracted skilled textile craftsmen from England, who were later joined by French-­Canadian operatives and their families. Many Italian immigrants also settled in the area by the 1920s.

Like several other manufacturing firms in Providence, the Wanskuck Company provided a library for its workers, which opened in 1903.38 According to the 1910 US census, more than 40 percent of Rhode Island’s worsted and wool workers were women, and about 6 percent were children under the age of sixteen.

The company library’s assortment of books would 114

have reflected these demographics.39 Recognizing the need for a public library for the surrounding village, which was located nearly three miles from the center of Providence, the company turned over to PPL in 1910 its collection of some 1,000 books, provided an appropriation to cover the cost of staffing the library, and allowed PPL to keep the library in the company’s Wanskuck Hall.40 PPL sent the library a “considerable number of books from the central library, and the Union of Christian Work donated 6,000 volumes from its own book collection to PPL for use at Wanskuck Library, along with the income from the Union’s book funds.41 In the Quarterly Bulletin of the Providence Public Library, Foster wrote in 1910, “The teachers and pupils of the schools in this part of the city will be interested to know that a large share of the books are intended for school children.”42 Books also were likely borrowed by young factory workers.

The library remained in Wanskuck Hall for the next eighteen years. By the 1920s, some 11,000 volumes were crammed into the one-­room space, which sociologist Mary Hall James described as “ill-­adapted to library purposes,” adding that the “floors and walls and furniture are worn and unattractive.”43 The community also believed it was time for a new library facility, and nearly 4,000 people signed a petition circulated by the Fortnightly Reading Club asking the PPL Board of Trustees to erect a new library building for the Wanskuck community, asserting that “the ever increasing need of proper facilities for reading and reference rooms for both children and adults is especially apparent and imperative in this particular district.”44 The petition was presented to the PPL board

3. Wanskuck Branch of the Providence Public Library, Wanskuck Hall, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

4. Interior of the Wanskuck Branch of the Providence Public Library, Wanskuck Hall, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

115

Rhode Island History

at its annual meeting on February 13, 1925. Foster and the board were receptive to the plea, themselves all too aware of the inadequate state of the branch facilities, and PPL would construct a new library building at 233 Veazie Street in 1928.

Expanding Services to Immigrants As Providence spread out beyond the city’s center, ever larger numbers of newcomers from abroad and north of the Canadian border settled in industrial neighborhoods such as Olneyville and Wanskuck to work in the many factories in and around the city.

The largest immigrant groups in the city were Irish, French-­Canadian, Italian, Eastern European, and Cape Verdean, and they tended to cluster by nationality in neighborhoods surrounding the downtown district, especially in the neighborhoods of Fox Point, Smith Hill, Olneyville, and Wanskuck. As neighborhood libraries opened in these areas, they attracted many immigrant patrons, and local librarians grappled with how best to relate to these newcomers.

Concerned about the influx of rising numbers of people from cultures different from that of native-­born white, Anglo-­Saxon Protestants, many politicians and other community leaders mounted campaigns to “Americanize” newcomers. “The Americanization movement,” one historian has written, was “one of the largest social and political movements in American history,” a movement that grew in scope and intensity during the years of World War I (1917–1918).45 Some proponents “insisted that Americanization necessitated the complete rejection of one’s ethnic or national 116

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

culture and the full adoption of American standards.”46 Seeing Americanization as a one-­way street, the director of BPL editorialized in 1920 that the library should serve as the “bridge by which the immigrant may pass from old world traditions and prejudices to American ideals.”47 However, underlying anxiety about the potential threat posed by increasing numbers of newcomers from foreign cultures often was not far from the surface.

Catholics from Southern Europe, Ireland, and French-­ Canada, along with Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia, now vastly outnumbered native-­born Protestants in Providence. Threatened by the newcomers’ religious practices, Old Stock Americans disapproved of their foreign cultural practices, political orientation, retention of their native languages, and slow rate of naturalization. John Foster Carr, director of the Immigrant Publication Society, for example, expressed the suspicion many harbored when he counseled librarians that it was imperative that they make immigrants feel at home on their first visit to the library. If not, if the new patron meets with a “critical reception,” there is the chance that he will become a “bitter human being with one more impulse toward class hatred, toward the I.W.W. and Bolshevism.”48 Similarly, Carr added that “the [North End] Providence library has shown that tactful librarians with adequate accommodations can turn gangs of potential criminals into habitual readers and keep them out of reform schools.”49 In some ways, middle-­class attitudes toward working-­class immigrant children and youth had changed little since the mid-­nineteenth century, when library advocates touted the role the library could play in steering young male

apprentices, many of whom were Irish, away from a life of “hooliganism” and worse.

Nevertheless, the PPL staff appeared to have welcomed foreign-­born patrons with fewer reservations than many of their native-­born neighbors. Seeking to meet the needs of the library’s newly arrived patrons, Foster reported in 1907 that PPL had gathered all of its foreign-­language books into a new department under the supervision of reference librarian Marguerite Reid as “gradually, it has been found necessary to supply more and more detailed assistance to the readers who use these books,” with the heaviest demand in the circulation of Russian and Yiddish books.50 When Reid retired nine years later, Foster praised her for assembling an impressive collection of books in twenty-­two languages along with a small grouping of English language books “designed to familiarize the newly arrived citizen of foreign birth with what is in general is conceived of under the term of ‘Americanism.’” He noted, in particular, the librarian’s “sympathy which avoids in every way a patronizing or condescending attitude” toward her patrons.51 In an address in 1922, Reid’s successor, Francis W. Wetmore, stressed the “need of Americanization and of assimilating our foreign-­born element” while simultaneously acknowledging “the contributions made by the foreign-­born to our national life.”52 Important though it was to recognize the immigrants’ contributions, it seems clear that their assimilation into American values and behavior was of still greater importance to library staff.

Neighborhood libraries, situated in the heart of immigrant communities and attracting large numbers of children, were on the front lines of these American-

ization efforts, and many library proponents regarded local libraries like these as uniquely situated to promote “community uplift and Americanization.”53 Charles Belden of the BPL observed, “For the large city, the library branch in the Italian or Polish or Jewish district becomes a friendly center, where guidance may be had in anything that pertains to the new country.”54 At the Wanskuck Branch, Foster noted, “Americanization books have been given a prominent place on the shelves and have fully repaid for their position by a wide circulation.”55 By this time, Providence’s North End was the nucleus of the city’s Jewish population, and the library attracted “hundreds of Greeks, Jews, Russians, Poles and Lithuanians [who] crowd[ed] into its tiny rooms.”56 To make certain that all residents were aware of the library’s offerings, in 1920 the North End Library staff conducted a house-­to-­house canvass of the neighborhood to inform residents of the resources and services available at the library, which included “facilities for reading in patrons’ own languages.”57 Given Providence’s heavily immigrant population, it is apparent that the staff at the central library and branch librarians took their responsibility seriously to Americanize the foreign-­born while also meeting their needs.

Women Organize Libraries on Providence’s West Side The Olneyville Free Library was closer to a nineteenth-­ century social library in that it was established by a small group of men, many of whom were the social, cultural, and business leaders in the community.

117

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

5. Exterior of the North End Branch of the Providence Public Library, 49 Orms Street, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

6. Interior of the North End Branch of the Providence Public Library, 49 Orms Street, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

118

However, with its free admission to all, it reflected the emergence of the public library movement at this time—­albeit without substantial municipal funding.

The Wanskuck Company’s library was one of many such libraries provided by factory owners for the use of their employees and their families. The rest of the libraries whose inception this article examines are quite different in origin from Olneyville Free Library and the Wanskuck library.

The Mount Pleasant Working Girls Association and the North End Working Girls Club were the first of several groups of women to establish neighborhood libraries in Providence in the quarter century between 1890 and 1915. If libraries had been founded primarily by men up until this time, women nevertheless had played a significant philanthropic role. Throughout the nineteenth century, women in the United States formed benevolent societies, and at a time when municipal governments were too weak to provide adequate aid to those unable to provide for themselves, as women’s historian Anne Firor Scott observes, “Women’s societies created community institutions. First came orphan asylums, then schools, employment services, homes for wayward girls, libraries, old ladies’ homes, and the like.”58 As early as 1800, Providence women formed the Providence Female Charitable Society for the “relief of indigent women and children,” and in 1835, women established the Providence Children’s Friend Society to work more specifically with poor children.59 The Women’s Employment Society was founded by a group of affluent Providence women in 1837 to aid poorly paid seamstresses, and the following year, women

formed the Providence Shelter for Colored Orphans.60 Among other female societies, the Providence Women’s Christian Association, organized in 1868 (and renamed the Young Women’s Christian Association in 1988), focused on providing respectable boarding facilities for single women and gradually expanded.

By 1906, it housed 126 longtime boarders and seventy-­ nine short-­term ones.61 The Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Rhode Island was chartered in 1883 to fight alcoholism, while the Young Women’s Christian Temperance Union opened a tearoom in 1883, serving inexpensive meals in comfortable surroundings with a variety of reading material in a setting meant to shelter young working women from the “perils and attractions of the streets.”62 By the latter years of the nineteenth century, upper-­ middle-­class women found themselves with more leisure time than their counterparts had in earlier times, with the ready availability of low-­wage domestic servants, factory-­made clothing and other goods, and new labor-­saving household machines.63 Consequently, the number and type of women’s organizations increased dramatically.64 This activity continued past the turn of the century, with the Providence Daily Journal observing in 1912, “At no other period in history have women been so active in philanthropic endeavors as in this century.”65 And one of the campaigns women frequently undertook was that of establishing local libraries.

College-­educated young women established settlement houses in poor neighborhoods in many urban centers, living among those with whom they worked to form social clubs, to offer classes, help to acclima119

Rhode Island History

tize recent immigrants to a new culture, and to provide residents with access to books. As settlement house workers saw firsthand the problems facing poor, working-­class people, the volunteers joined with other progressives to campaign for housing, labor, and political reform. They also lobbied for playgrounds, kindergartens, and food safety. Thus, their emphasis often shifted from a focus on social service within a single community to an effort to improve the lives of people throughout a city, state, or the nation through political action.66 While Providence’s first settlement house was established by men associated with the Universalist Church on Weybosset Street, who formed the Union for Christian Work in 1868, the other two settlements were begun by young women.67 Both the Mount Pleasant Working Girls Association and the North End Working Girls Club were launched in the late 1880s by middle-­class women for the benefit of less fortunate women and children in working-­class neighborhoods.68 The working girls’ club movement originated in New York State in 1883 and aimed to “protect working girls from less desirable amusements, promote self-­improvement, and reconcile class differences.”69 To achieve these objectives, the founders of these clubs sought, first, to “furnish pleasant rooms where members can pass the evening. Their second objective was to organize classes for mutual enjoyment and improvement as the members may desire.

Third, to select a circulating library for the use of all the members.”70 As one can see from their stated goals, the working girls’ clubs tended to remain local and relatively apolitical, unlike some other groups in the settlement house movement.71 Nevertheless, 120

7. Exterior of the Sprague House Branch of the Providence Public Library, 7 Armington Avenue, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

issues of class were never far from the surface in the relationships between and among founders and members. Club leaders often disapproved of the morals and attempted to instill middle-­class habits and values in the working-­class girls, while the club members resented the founders’ sense of superiority and hold on the leadership positions within the clubs.72 The Mount Pleasant Working Girls Club Association was created in 1887. As membership grew, the organization raised the money to build a clubhouse at 7 Armington Avenue. It was named Sprague House in honor of the society’s first president and opened in late December 1890. In 1903, the name of the organization was changed to Sprague House Association; by this time, its officers included a mix of working-­class residents along with the more socially connected volunteers, and its work primarily centered on providing classes and sponsoring social clubs rather than upon campaigning for political and economic reform.73

8. Interior of the Sprague House Branch of the Providence Public Library, 7 Armington Avenue, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

Early in its history, Sprague House provided neighborhood residents with a library. In a February 1891 report, Sprague proudly described the association’s new home with its library room and collection of four hundred books.74 PPL lent books monthly to schools and clubs throughout the city, including Sprague House. In 1906, PPL opened its first branch there, augmenting the association’s collection of 579 volumes to bring the collection total to 1,747 on opening day—­a total that would more than double within five years.

The Sprague House Association’s 1902 report indicated that the organization provided age-­graded clubs that included ones for children under the age of twelve, and it noted that “the library was patronized regularly by the older classes, but for the younger children there was an insufficient supply of simple short stories.”75 In 1906, the year the Sprague House library became a PPL branch, only 241 books in its collection were intended for children.76 Nevertheless, with more books for adults and children added weekly, the branch’s cir-

culation rate for children had reached about 60 percent of the total by 1908.77 Two years after the opening of the Mount Pleasant Working Girls Club Association, a sister organization began operations in the North End, then a largely Irish-­English community of mill workers. An offshoot of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the North End Working Girls Club was started when two women physicians working in the North End saw the need for a working girls’ club in the neighborhood.

The YWCA rented a building in Randall Square for a clubhouse, and the new organization began in 1889 with Elizabeth Brown, wife of Henry T. Brown and a member of the YWCA board, as its first president.78 It remained affiliated with the YWCA for several years.

The club started a medical dispensary; held classes in reading and writing, sewing and millinery, dancing, cooking, and gymnastics; and sponsored parties.

By 1896, it provided a small library of donated books for the use of its members, and, with demand in the 121

Rhode Island History

community growing for a circulating library, opened its library in 1907 on Saturday afternoons, with four club members in charge of lending books. PPL began sending books to the library, and within months, the small library was designated as a PPL deposit (delivery) station. The following year, with neighborhood use of the library increasing rapidly, PPL provided the club with a librarian; together with the two volunteer assistants, they were able to open the library on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In 1910, the North End Library became a branch of PPL, and within a decade, it was open six days a week and supervised by a librarian and an assistant librarian.79 Although adults visited the library, the majority of users by this time were children.

The Children’s Library Helpers While working girls’ clubs were instrumental in starting the libraries in both Mount Pleasant and the North End/Smith Hill areas of the city, other women’s groups fostered library development elsewhere in the city. They included the East Side Monday Morning Musical Club, the Elmwood Public Library Association, and the Broad Street Grammar School’s Mothers Club. In addition, the Children’s Library Helpers played a strong supporting role in encouraging the formation of several local libraries.

Although there is no comprehensive history of library friends groups in the United States, it appears that the Children’s Library Helpers groups predate friends groups by at least two decades.80 The Providence group was formed in November 1905 “because of a crying need for more books for children in the vari122

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

ous city libraries.”81 By the mid-­1910s, the membership included the wives of several prominent local men and at least one single woman, Sarah E. Doyle, co-­founder of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The leader of the group, however, was Charlotte Binney, wife of a well-­known Providence lawyer. In 1913, Foster opined that the Children’s Library Helpers “were probably unique in the annals of Children’s Libraries” as they were “entirely outside of the library organization, for the purpose of supplying additional funds for the Children’s Library.” In addition to purchasing children’s books for the central library, the group raised money to increase the children’s collections in the neighborhood libraries.82 In at least two cases, the group took an active part in the formation of new libraries, working closely with PPL children’s librarian Mary Elizabeth Stafford Root. According to Foster’s 1915 account, the “needs of the city were carefully studied [by the Children’s Library Helpers], in order to discover where the urgency was greatest, and it was decided that at Elmwood and in the vicinity of Rochambeau Avenue . . . would be feasible to make a beginning in supplying local libraries.” This suggestion “met with so hearty and enthusiastic support, from the local community that the establishment of a local library was almost a foregone conclusion.”83 Although the group seems to have become less active after 1915, perhaps due to the loss of its longtime president Josephine Binney the year before, it had nevertheless contributed to the formation of two of PPL’s future branches—­in Rochambeau and Elmwood—­and helped to serve children throughout the city.

Mary Root and Neighborhood Branch Development Besides the women’s organizations that spearheaded the creation of libraries in Providence’s neighborhoods, one woman in particular, Mary Root, deserves special credit for helping to launch these libraries.

Mary Root belonged to the first generation of women librarians in the United States. At the turn of the century, an increase in the number of middle-­class, educated women eager to find work was accompanied by an escalation in the number and size of libraries and a resulting need for additional library personnel. Librarianship, like teaching or social work, was considered an appropriate occupation for women. This also was a period when libraries began providing services for children, and, given the widespread belief that women were particularly well-­suited to working with the young, it is not surprising that the majority of the workers filling the new children’s library positions were female. Consequently, by 1920, “the year American women won the vote, they accounted for 88 percent of 15,297 librarians listed in the [federal] census.”84 The number of library staff at PPL increased from eighteen to fifty-­six between 1900 and 1921, and the proportion of women to men jumped from 67 percent to 95 percent.85 Women composed all of the branch library staff and nearly all of the library positions in the central library with the notable exception of PPL librarian William E. Foster.

While some women gained professional training at the early library schools, such as Melvil Dewey’s School of Library Economy that opened in 1887, others

were hired without specialized education and learned their profession on the job, as did Mary Root, whom Foster hired in 1899. Most were single, although a small minority were listed as “Mrs.,” as was Root. In her case, she was divorced from her husband.86 Root’s job as detailed in the library’s 1905 annual report involved much more than ordering children’s books and reading to youngsters.87 Among her other duties, she energetically sought to extend the library’s reach into the community. She worked with a succession of Providence school superintendents to bring students to the library for what today we would call information literacy classes, and she organized a committee of teachers to strengthen relations between the schools and the libraries. She sent books and made visits to “vacation playgrounds,” she prepared graded reading lists for children, and for several years she wrote a series of questions given to students just before the close of school for summer to encourage them to use the library during the vacation. In addition, she constructed a survey in 1913 of children’s reading habits throughout the city. Her work with the schools, the Providence Journal reflected later, “bore much fruit in the establishment of branch libraries.”88 Root also worked with neighborhood clubs. She gave talks at meetings of the Providence Mother’s Club, a group founded in the 1890s to “help mothers with homemaking and child training,” and she worked closely with the two working girls’ clubs and the Wanskuck Library, locations that would become PPL’s first three branches, sending out sets of books and conducting story hours.89 She organized the delivery of so-­called “Home Library” boxes as well as other 123

Rhode Island History

collections of books to schools and clubs outside the downtown district.90 In 1912, two years after PPL designated Wanskuck Library as a branch, the first of two East Side libraries opened in Fox Point with support from Root. Bordered by the Providence River, Narragansett Bay, and the Seekonk River, Fox Point was a heavily immigrant district close to downtown. Nineteenth-­century Irish dockworkers had been replaced by the 1890s by newcomers from Cape Verde, the Azores, and Portugal who continued to work in the maritime trade and in the area factories. The first library in the district opened in 1912. As the Providence Journal later observed, “Like several other branches it had its origin in measures of co-­operation with a social agency.”91 In this case, the library was founded by two young society women, Virginia and Hope Shepley, daughters of George L. Shepley, “one of the most prominent insurance men in New England,” who had amassed an extensive library of rare books and other materials relating to early American history.92 Equally significant to the development of this library was the Association for Organizing Charities, part of an international charity movement that had opened in Providence in 1892 and was located at 403 South Main Street. Anne T. Vernon, a member of the association’s staff, purportedly suggested to the sisters that they provide the neighborhood with a library, and the association offered them space on the second floor of their building to do so.93 The sisters solicited furnishings and books, while PPL loaned additional books. Soon open three afternoons a week, South Main Street Library attracted children “from the Jewish settlement on South Main 124

Street adjoining College Street and from the Brava [Cape Verdean] settlement around Fox Point.”94 Root “showed a keen interest in this new project and went to the South Main Street Library from time to time to tell stories to the children and to offer suggestions about the work.”95 In 1917, the little library was designated a subbranch by PPL. With increasing patronage from those living on the nearby streets, the library needed a better home and a more professional staff.96 In March 1925, it moved into a former store in a tenement building in the heart of Fox Point at the corner of James and Brook Streets. Simultaneously, it was upgraded from subbranch to branch status, and its name was changed to the Fox Street Branch.97

9. Exterior of the South Main Street Branch of the Providence Public Library, 403 South Main Street, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

Root and the Formation of Rochambeau Library Root’s role in the formation in 1915 of the Elodie Farnum Memorial Library, which would become Rochambeau Library, was more direct, since it was brought about by a suggestion that Root made to the East Side Monday Morning Musical Club. As John Gilkeson observes in his book Middle-­Class Providence, social clubs proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with clubs “separated from each other by income, social status, neighborhood, ethnicity, gender, and race.”98 The women in the East Side Monday Morning Musical Club, like those in the Children’s Library Helpers, were members of Providence’s social elite, women whose activities frequently were featured on the society pages of the Providence Daily Journal and Evening Bulletin.99

10. Interior of the South Main Street Branch of the Providence Public Library, 403 South Main Street, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

125

Rhode Island History

The club was organized in 1904, and members met in each other’s homes for musicales, held annual concerts to raise money for charity, and financed training for promising young musicians. An unusually gifted child whom the club sponsored in the early 1910s was Elodie Farnum, who displayed remarkable talent as a violinist but died of tuberculosis in 1914 at age twelve. At Root’s suggestion, the club decided to use the money that had been donated toward young Elodie Farnum’s musical education abroad to purchase books and furniture for an Elodie Farnum Memorial Library.

Like many of the neighborhood libraries formed in the early twentieth century, this one was intended primarily for children. The books were installed in a room at the Rochambeau Avenue School. Most of the collection was chosen by Root, with additional donations from Farnum’s parents and others. PPL provided a staff member to oversee the library, which opened on June 12, 1915, as a branch of PPL.100 By 1920, PPL librarian Foster was reporting that “the crowded quarters of this branch make its use more and more inconvenient each year.”101 With the grammar school’s relocation to Summit Avenue in 1924, the library was able to occupy a larger space in the new facility and to provide library services for adults in addition to children. Library use continued to expand, outgrowing this space, too. The Rochambeau Parent-­ Teacher Association organized an appeal to the PPL Association to “find more adequate quarters for the Elodie Farnum Memorial Library, in keeping with the development of the Hope Street section of the city.”102 It was not until 1930 that PPL would be able to do so, however.

126

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

Upon the occasion of Root’s resignation from PPL in 1922, Foster particularly noted “the special attempt made in 1915, under Mrs. Root’s inspiration, to secure library facilities in some of those portions of the city in which the need was greatest.” The Rochambeau Library was one of these libraries, but Foster singled out Root’s involvement with another: “the Elmwood Public Library, now flourishing under its own separate organization.”103 The Children’s Library Helpers were closely involved here, too.

Root and Elmwood’s Library In 1915, the same year that the Elodie Farnum Memorial Library opened, another group of women on the other side of the city held a meeting in the Adelaide Avenue home of Carrie Hancock to take the first steps toward establishing a library in the Elmwood neighborhood. The founders of the Elmwood Public Library Association, convened by Emma Shaw, whose husband Frederick E. Shaw was a prominent Providence engineer and contractor, also included the wives of the city’s police commissioner, a jewelry manufacturer, and a city alderman. Another participant, Sarah Lippitt Knight, had married into the wealthy textile manufacturing family that would later erect an imposing library building to house the Elmwood Library and to serve as a memorial to the parents of her husband Webster.104 The membership of this organization was somewhat more diverse than that of the more tightly knit East Side Monday Morning Musical Club, and, at the same time, more singularly focused upon forming a library. Once the library

opened, it would be members of this group who would administer it as well.

From the middle of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, the Elmwood neighborhood was an upper-­middle-­class “suburb of pleasant homes and tree-­lined streets.” Residents were a mix of wealthy manufacturers whose mansions lined Elmwood Avenue and some of the adjacent streets; middle-­class retailers, building contractors, real estate brokers, and the like who occupied smaller single-­family homes; and working-­class families, many of whom were recent immigrants, occupied modest dwellings or rented apartments and worked in the nearby factories.105 Foster and Root precipitated the drive to establish a library in Elmwood. Based upon a 1915 citywide survey of children’s reading habits, Foster and Root found that youngsters in the Elmwood district were “doing the least and the poorest reading of any children in the city.”106 Given the distance between Elmwood and PPL’s central library, it was clear that the neighborhood would need a library of its own in order to help children increase their reading literacy. Foster and Root, supported by the Children’s Library Friends, encouraged Elmwood residents to organize a neighborhood library. The Elmwood women got to work. They brought together women from all parts of Elmwood and sent them door to door to solicit donations. They encouraged local business firms to contribute money.

With the $450 the women raised, they purchased furniture and books, which they processed for circulation under the guidance of the PPL staff. Meanwhile, the Elmwood Boys’ Triangle collected and then sold newspapers and old paper to buy library books.107 A

number of area residents donated books and other furnishings.108 With the assistance of several of the founders’ husbands with ties to local government, the Elmwood Public Library Association was able to move into the Ward Room of the city-­owned fire station on Greenwich Avenue—­and the city took responsibility for cleaning, renovating, and painting the room prior to the library opening. When the Elmwood Public Library opened on July 10, 1915, it had 1,000 volumes on its shelves, including 300 on loan from PPL. The facility was staffed by volunteers, an arrangement that would continue until 1919, when the library grew beyond the capacity of its unpaid workers. In that year, the City of Providence began making a yearly appropriation of $2,000 to the library, which was augmented by a small fund from the state, and with the increased revenue the library could afford to hire its first librarian.109 Elmwood Public Library quickly outgrew its quarters.

To meet the need for a larger space, the children of wealthy textile manufacturer Robert Knight and his wife, Josephine, formed the Knight Memorial Library Association to finance the construction of a stately and commodious library building on Elmwood Avenue that opened in 1924. The Knights gave the structure to the Elmwood Public Library Association while retaining responsibility for major repairs.110 Knight Memorial Library remained a privately operated public library until 1962, when the Elmwood Public Library Association took the first of a series of steps toward incorporation with PPL that would result in a complete merger in 1994.111 In 1925, the year after the library in Elmwood opened, Foster praised the Children’s Library Helpers 127

Rhode Island History

for their “inestimable service,” noting that it “should be borne in mind that the history of both the recently organized libraries (at Rochambeau Avenue and at Elmwood), would have been a very different one if it had not been for the many hours of intelligent, sympathetic, effective, unpaid labor on the part of members of this organization and others, in performing the work which would otherwise have needed to have been performed by a larger staff than the funds available would permit.”112 In the same report, Foster commended Root for her “outside labors,” specifically those “in connection with the very promising beginnings of local libraries at the Broad Street School and at the Cole Avenue School.”113 While the library at the Cole Avenue School never advanced to branch status, Root’s early efforts on Broad Street eventually resulted in that library becoming the Washington Park Branch.

Root retired from her position at PPL in 1922.

From Providence, she went on to organize a children’s branch of the Lynchburg, Virginia, public library; to establish the first public library in Weston, West Virginia; and to reorganize libraries in several other cities. Foster had chosen wisely when he hired the young Root, who only had a high school education and no previous library experience, to organize the new children’s library at PPL in 1899.

The Next Chapter Two other neighborhood libraries were founded in 1923. The South Providence Community Library was established by the South Providence Community Club.

Not an organization of middle-­class women like the 128

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

groups that recently had formed many of the other neighborhood libraries in Providence, this club was composed of men—­property owners and taxpayers—­ whose ranks included Joseph P. Stone, a curbing contractor; Mason W. Tillinghast, a restaurant keeper; and the Reverend Alfred H. Wheeler, pastor of the local Episcopal church. The club originated in 1920 to protest to the city against the “’loathsome and unsanitary conditions’ prevailing at Allen’s Avenue dump.”114 As this campaign continued, the club ramped up the rhetoric, soon terming the dump a “menace to the health of the community and city, being a breeding place of flies and rats, and a source of obnoxious odors.115 In addition to their campaign to deal with the stench from the dump, they presented a resolution to the Providence City Council in 1921 calling for the city to clear snow from streets and sidewalks.116 By 1922, they had set their sights on bringing library services to South Providence, recognizing a “pressing need” for a library, “especially for the children who were not properly forming the reading habit.”117 The club set up a library committee that began to collect money for a library fund.118 People from the neighborhood donated books, as did the Union of Christian Work, and PPL agreed to deposit popular literature and children’s books in the new facility. The principal of Oxford Street School offered a room on the ground floor, and the library opened in January 1923, overseen by library students from Rhode Island College’s School of Education and with a book collection of 1500 volumes.119 Within months, PPL assumed operation of the library as a subbranch, while the South Providence Community

Club continued to maintain the facility.120 As library use increased and the collection expanded, it outgrew the schoolroom, and in 1926, it moved to the Sixth Ward Room of the nearby fire station. The next year, the South Providence Community Club transferred the library over to PPL, which operated it as a full branch from then on.

Washington Park, just to the south of South Providence on the southeastern border of the city, was another middle-­class neighborhood in the early twentieth century, not too different in demographics from South Providence, although somewhat less affluent than Elmwood. Primarily settled in the 1890s through the mid-­twentieth century, Washington Park’s residential side streets bisected the Broad Street commercial corridors to the east and west, housing mostly native-­born families in comfortable one-­and two-­ family dwellings that generally were smaller and less ornate than those that characterized Elmwood’s housing stock. As the neighborhood began to grow, the city built a fire station on Broad Street in 1895 and two years later opened the Broad Street School just down the street.121 Although Washington Park was connected to downtown Providence three and a half miles away by streetcar lines along Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue, the area was too remote for most residents to access PPL’s central library easily.

With the growth of the Washington Park neighborhood in the early twentieth century, the principal of the Broad Street Grammar School recognized the need for a local library and in the mid-­1910s provided a room to enable residents to borrow books. The school’s Mothers’ Club collected book donations, and the tiny library

opened with a small collection of about one thousand volumes under the supervision of one of the teachers.

PPL first supplied books to the community via a “book wagon” that visited the neighborhood in the summer of 1923, and PPL opened a permanent subbranch in the school that fall. Although the library was housed in the school, it was not strictly a school library as it was meant to serve the entire Washington Park community, and it could be “easily shut off from the rest of the building when school is not in session,” thereby enabling local residents to access the premises—­ although, in fact, the library mostly attracted children.122 By 1926, the library had outgrown its space, a situation that was only partially alleviated when it moved to bigger quarters in the school’s basement in 1931 when it was upgraded to branch status.123 Washington Park Library would remain in the Broad Street School for more than two decades before moving into a vacant fire station at 1316 Broad Street in 1956.124

PPL’s Cooperative Arrangements With the designation of South Providence and Washington Park Libraries as branches in 1927 and 1931, respectively, PPL’s branch system was nearly complete, with only Knight Memorial Library remaining an independent organization for several more decades. At long last, nearly every section of the city of Providence had PPL library services nearby.

Nevertheless, the process had taken a quarter century to achieve. As early as the 1890s, Foster had wanted to create a citywide network of branches, but, given the library’s limited revenue resources, he could 129

Rhode Island History

not keep up with the growing needs of the downtown library itself, much less assume the cost of opening branches. The process of branch development proceeded slowly—­too slowly, in Foster’s view, as he repeatedly bemoaned the library’s delay in opening neighborhood libraries on the East Side and then the South Side of Providence in the years before PPL was financially able to do so.

To take on added responsibilities in the neighborhoods, Foster had to work out ways to share costs. The Children’s Library Helpers pointed out in 1915 that “the library has not been able to open by itself, a single branch library. It has not been able to accept as a gift, branches put into operation by other agencies, without some sort of provision for covering the expenses incidental to administering them, being guaranteed by the donors.”125 In three neighborhoods, the libraries remained in public buildings or other spaces free of charge after they became PPL branches; in several other neighborhoods, the founding organizations donated the library buildings and book collections to PPL and in some instances covered the cost of the staff.

Equally frustrated by PPL’s inability to adequately address needs at the central library and by delays in opening branches in all parts of the city, Foster’s annual reports to the trustees reflected his increasing distress at the library’s financial situation. Just in the nick of time, the library was rescued in 1916 by a bequest from Lyra Brown Nickerson totaling about $2.5 million. The infusion of capital enabled PPL to double its services, to increase its staff by nearly 200 percent, and to expand its book budget nearly 400 percent from 1916 to 1925.126 Foster briefly envisioned 130

using a portion of the money to construct an addition to the central library to “provide relief from hampering conditions” and simultaneously to “respond to the needs of the community adequately” by adding more branches and improving branch facilities.127 Unfortunately, Foster soon realized that PPL would not be able to achieve both of these goals, and by the 1920s, he had concluded that PPL’s existing branches had the more pressing need for better accommodations. Foster summarized the situation by writing, “None of these branches or sub-­branches is doing more than a fraction of the work it would be capable of doing, at a moderate increase of expense, if properly housed, and there are some important sections of the city which have practically no library facilities.”128 Thus, the trustees decided to postpone the central library extension in favor of branch construction.129 They authorized a plan in 1926 to erect ten buildings: “seven to replace existing branches housed in totally inadequate quarters and three to serve sections of Providence which were not receiving library services.”130 The first, for the Wanskuck Branch, opened in November 1928 and was financed entirely by PPL. The same year, PPL purchased a former church building at 121 Hope Street, now the site of the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Robinson Research Center, and moved the Brook Street Branch (formerly the South Main Street Library) from its rented storefront into the first floor of the renovated church, renaming it the Tockwotton Branch.

However, with no additional wealthy donors or accommodating neighborhood organizations stepping forward, PPL could not afford to cover the full costs

11. Exterior of the South Providence Branch of the Providence Public Library, 441 Prairie Avenue, 1925, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

for more new buildings and approached city officials to ask for assistance. Municipal and library leaders devised a cooperative arrangement that would cover some of the expenses incurred by the construction of the next three branch buildings—­those in South Providence, Rochambeau, and Smith Hill. The agreement was as follows: The Library expends from its endowment a sum sufficient to cover the cost of site, construction and equipment. The City of Providence increases the annual appropriation to the Library by $10,000, which reimburses the trustees for loss in income due to expended capital and also meets the increased expense of operating a larger and more complete branch library.131 While PPL’s investment principal would be reduced, at least the library would be able to count on the city providing the equivalent amount it had been receiving from the interest of the endowment.

Financed according to this cooperative arrangement, South Providence Branch opened in January 1930 on Prairie Avenue near Oxford Street; the Elodie Farnum Memorial Library, renamed the Rochambeau Branch, opened at Hope Street and Langham Road in November 1930; and the North End Branch Library moved into a new building on Candace Street in 1932, changing its name to the Smith Hill Branch.

As PPL noted in its monthly Books for All newsletter in 1931, PPL looked forward to continuing its building campaign with new facilities for the Mount Pleasant Branch, formerly Sprague House Library, and Washington Park Branch, which had become a PPL branch that year, “whenever the City of Providence is ready to co-­operate.”132 As the Great Depression deepened, these plans would be postponed until after World War II. The insufficiency of PPL’s revenue to adequately support its operations at both the central library and in the branches constituted a recurring problem. While community organizations were ready to raise the funds 131

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

12. Exterior of the Smith Hill Branch of the Providence Public Library.

to assemble a small collection of books and to locate a space to open a library staffed with volunteers, once PPL adopted these neighborhood libraries as subbranches and then as full branches with paid staff, the operating costs were beyond the capacity of the community to pay. Once PPL had assumed responsibility for supporting these branches, residents expected it to continue to do so. However, PPL trustees found that gifts from individual donors could not keep pace with the costs of maintaining a large library system with a strong central library and numerous branches. Unlike public libraries within a city’s system of municipal departments, the City of Providence was under no legal obligation to help fund PPL, and few patrons seem to have held the city responsible for doing so.133 In 1925, for example, Wanskuck residents addressed their petition for a new building to the PPL trustees, and the Washington Park Taxpayers Association did likewise in 1947. In neither case did the petitioners also appeal to the mayor and the city council.

132

Providence did recognize some responsibility to support the only library in the city that was providing easily accessible services to all residents, but it funded its public library at a level far below that provided to public libraries by other municipalities of the same size. In 1925, for instance, Foster reported that, while the city’s per capita expenditure for PPL was about seventeen cents, Springfield, Massachusetts’, expenditure amounted to $1.06.134 Foster maintained that the city’s financial support was not commensurate with the level of services the library provided the residents of Providence. This remained a source of contention between PPL and the city for years to come.

Were Foster and the PPL Board of Trustees unwise to open collection stations, subbranches, and branches across the city when they did not have adequate funding to maintain them? Given the rate of population growth during Foster’s thirty-­four-­year tenure as library director, Foster and the trustees may have felt they had an obligation to open library branches to

bring books and services to patrons beyond the city core and perhaps assumed they would eventually convince city officials that the city, too, had a responsibility to help fund library services. However, PPL officials never made a convincing case to the public that library funding was a municipal obligation. Perhaps if they had tried harder to enlist the public’s aid in lobbying for increased city funding, PPL would have been more successful in obtaining it. Instead, it was trustees that the library patrons petitioned to increase or to restore services or to provide better library facilities.

Despite the difficult financial times PPL faced from the mid-­1920s through the end of the century, the founders of the neighborhood libraries, including Mary Root, the Children’s Library Helpers, and all of the community organizations who had worked hard to establish library services, could be proud of their achievements. Although the neighborhood libraries in Providence were ultimately folded into PPL as branches, city residents were fortunate that they

did not have to wait for PPL to open these satellite libraries. Instead, as we have seen, individuals and organizations throughout the city established libraries themselves, evidently regarding access to local libraries as a social good that could not be delayed.

This outpouring of local support no doubt gave neighborhood residents a stronger sense of ownership in their libraries than they otherwise might have had.

Throughout the ensuing years, the people in these communities have tenaciously, if not always successfully, defended their libraries against threats of closure in the face of a funding structure that has seldom been adequate to cover the library’s needs.

Patricia Raub, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. Raub teaches courses on Rhode Island history, the history of US photography, and Providence architectural history. She earned a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University with concentrations in popular culture and urban studies. One of the founders of Providence Community Library, she is a past president of its Board of Directors.

Notes 1. “The Opening of the Public Library,” Providence Daily Journal (February 5, 1878), 1. NewsBank. Accessed 5 Jan. 2020.

2. Actually, Providence Public Library did have a negative impact upon the Providence Athenæum to some extent. Its annual report for 1880 pointed to a decline in circulation after 1878 and suggested it was due “partly to increased usage of the PPL.” Mary Huff Stevenson, “For the Benefit of the Laboring Classes” (Unpublished manuscript: University of Massachusetts Boston, April 1981), 45. Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS). Nevertheless, the Athenæum seemed prepared to put the best light on the situation, declaring in the same report that the “Providence

Public Library would satisfy the ‘multitude’ while the Athenæum would continue to appeal to a minority with ‘genuine culture.’”

Jane Lancaster, Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenæum since 1753 (Providence, RI: Providence Athenæum, 2003), 112.

Some circulating libraries continued operations well into the twentieth century, most notably Gregory’s Bookstore and Circulating Library and William A. McAuslan’s rental libraries in Providence and Pawtucket. Harry Gregory and McAuslan eventually sued PPL when the public library started renting duplicate copies of current books in the 1920s. The case reached the Rhode Island

133

Rhode Island History

Supreme Court, where the plaintiffs lost. See “Supreme Court Upholds Library,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (December 31, 1924), 10. NewsBank. Accessed April 27, 2020.

3. Knight Memorial Library would not formally merge with PPL until 1995; however, PPL began operating the library in 1924.

4. See US Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume III: Population, 1910, (Washington, DC, 1913), 615, 628, 629.

5. Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston Public Library: A Centennial History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 195.

6. Twenty-­Second Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. For the Year Ending December 31, 1899 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnam, 1900), 9.

7. For Boston, 22.9 percent of the population was listed as native white—­native parentage; 24.5 percent as native white—­foreign parentage; and 49.5 percent as foreign—­born white. Only 2.4 percent were reported as “negro.” US Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume II: Population, 1910 (Washington, DC, 1913), 881. The breakdown for Providence was similar: 26.7 percent, 36.7 percent, 31 percent, and 2.4 percent, respectively. Volume III, 628.

8. Thirteenth Census, Vol. II, 853; Vol. III, 615.

9. Mildred Catherine O’Connor, Financial History of the Boston Public Library (Boston University Graduate School, Master’s Degree Thesis, 1944), 25–30.

10. Quoted in “College and Reference Section” of the “Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-­First Annual Meeting of the American Library Association,” Bulletin of the American Library Association 3, no. 5 (September 1909): 360.

11. See, for example, the Catalogue of the Mechanics and Apprentices’ Library (Providence, RI: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1866), n.p., RIHS. It appears from the list of rules that the librarian opened and monitored the reading room several hours a day, signed out books to members, kept track of those books that were overdue and levied fines for late returns, and examined books for excessive wear and tear.

134

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

12. “Branches and Deliveries,” Papers and Proceedings of the Fifteenth General Meeting of the American Library Association, Held at Chicago, Ill (American Library Association, July 13–22, 1893): 26–28.

13. Mary Hall James, A Sociological Survey of the Providence Public Library (Providence, RI: Oxford Press, 1926), 101.

14. Once the branch concept became widely accepted in the early twentieth century, libraries began to add branches for a variety of reasons. They were established because “(1) they took pressure off demand for popular materials at the main library; (2) because of their locations they had a better chance of reaching nonusers; (3) they enabled some people who could not afford public transportation to obtain library materials closer to home; and (4) they initiated and sustained specialized services to unique communities, especially non-­English-­speaking communities. A fifth reason became obvious after they opened.

Branch library users turned the public space branches provided into community centers for activities that helped formed [sic] a sense of neighborhood and assimilated newcomers.” Pamela Spence Richards, Wayne A. Wiegand, Marija Dalbello, eds., A History of Modern Librarianship: Constructing the Heritage of Western Culture (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2015), 100.

15. Fifty-­Fifth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library (Providence Public Library: Providence, RI, 1932): 30.

16. Noted by Jean Douglas, “Branch Buildings, Providence Public Library, Providence, RI, 1926–1932,” National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form (US Department of the Interior, 1998), 9.

17. Prepared by Edward Connors of Edward Connors and Associates, “Earnscliffe Woolen/Paragon Worsted Company Mill Complex,” National Register of Historic Places (US Department of the Interior, 2006), Section 8, 1.

18. Both horsecars and electric trolleys could travel faster than omnibuses because these later modes of transportation ran on tracks rather than directly on the roadways.

19. For background on nineteenth-­century Olneyville, see

“Olneyville: Fifty Years Ago” unpublished manuscript, c. 1900, typeset. PPL Rhode Island Collection. On public transit, see John Hutchins Cady, The Civic and Architectural Development of Providence, 1636–1950 (Providence, RI: The Book Shop, 1957), 161, 179, 199.

20. John S. Gilkeson Jr., Middle-­Class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 109–10. For a more complete account of this strike, see Edith Hadcock, “Labor Problems in Rhode Island Cotton Mills, 1790–1940,” Phd dissertation (Brown University, October 1945), 152–55.

21. “Olneyville: A Free Reading Room” Providence Evening Press (November 23, 1874), 3. NewsBank. Accessed March 10, 2021.

22. “Olneyville,” Providence Evening Press (November 23, 1874), 3.

NewsBank. Accessed September 1, 2019.

23. Zachariah Allen, Edwin M. Stone, and Welcome O. Brown, Free Public Library, Art-­Gallery, and Museum in the City of Providence, R.I. (Providence, RI: Hammond, Angell & Co., 1871), 19.

24. “Card of Thanks,” Providence Daily Journal (July 16, 1875), 2.

NewsBank. Accessed December 7, 2019; “Olneyville Branch,” January 1986, typewritten manuscript, PPL Rhode Island Collection.

25. “A Magnificent Offer,” Providence Daily Journal (June 8, 1886), 6. NewsBank. Accessed April 18, 2020. By the 1930s, the trustees sought to sell the property and move elsewhere, contending in a Bill of Complaint to the Rhode Island Superior Court that Sarah Waterman did not foresee the development in Olneyville Square that had since occurred. The petitioners rather plaintively listed the problems the area posed for library users by this time: “noises of trolley cars, blowing of automobile horns, sounds of automobile motors, continuous hustle and bustle of tradespeople all centralized in and about the immediate locality of the library” which disrupted the “restfulness and relaxation to those wishing to enjoy said library.” “Bill of Complaint, Olneyville Free Library Association vs. John P. Hartigan, Atty. Gen, et al,” Rhode Island Superior Court in Equity, April 24, 1933, Eq. No. 11966.

26. In 1875, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed legislation enabling the Board of Education to make an annual appropriation to the state’s public libraries to purchase books. “An Act in Rela-

tion to Free Public Libraries, and In Addition to Chapter 44 of the General Statutes ‘of the Board of Education,’” passed April 15, 1875, 197. “Free Library Facilities Curtailed for Lack of Money,” Providence Daily Journal (June 9, 1896), 5. NewsBank. Accessed September 2, 2019. One suspects that most library users did not participate in this vote, as the majority of Olneyville residents were renters and would have been ineligible to vote in matters pertaining to the budget. Women, of course, could not vote, either.

27. “Olneyville: The Library Association,” Providence Sunday Journal (June 8, 1890), 7. NewsBank. Accesse September 2, 2019.

“Olneyville Branch,” unpublished manuscript, January 1986. PPL Rhode Island Collection.

28. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library for the Year Ending December 31, 1895 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnum, 1896), 5.

29. Twenty-­Second Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island for the Year Ending December 11, 1899.

(Providence, RI: Snow & Farnum, 1900), 9–10; “Library Reports Progress,” Providence Sunday Journal (June 29, 1924), 8. NewsBank. Accessed September 3, 2019.

30. William I. Fletcher, “Public Libraries and the Young,” in Public Libraries in the United States of America, Part I, 1876 Report.

Reprint (University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science Monograph Series no. 4, n.d.), 415.

31. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, PPL maintained a network of branches, subbranches, and deposit stations.

Branches were operated by PPL’s own staff, had a relatively extensive collection of books, and were open a number of hours during the week; subbranches had smaller book collections and were operated by PPL staff members assigned to cover more than one place and therefore could open each individual subbranch for a limited amount of time; deposit stations were simply places where patrons could borrow from a rotating selection of books sent out from the central library. Douglas, 8–9. Most subbranches were located in public schools. Hospitals, settlement houses, and other public places were often used as deposit stations. This article has focused only on those neighborhood libraries that eventually became full branches, were typically founded by local individuals

135

Rhode Island History

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

and organizations, and were still in operation when the branches were transferred to Providence Community Library in 2009.

42. “Wanskuck Branch Library,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Providence Public Library 8:2 (April 1910), 1.

53. “Public Library Aids in Americanization,” Providence Sunday Journal (April 24, 1921), 27. NewsBank.

32. Cited in Manuel D. Lopez, “Childrens [sic] Libraries: Nineteen Century [sic] American Origins,” Journal of Library History 11:4 (October 1976): 319.

43. “Public Library Faces Problem of More Branches,” Providence Sunday Journal, Three Star ed. (February 8, 1925), 61. NewsBank.

Accessed March 28, 2020. James, 30.

Accessed April 25, 2020.

33. “Street Gamins: Reading, Studying and Recreation at the Union for Christian Work,” Providence Sunday Journal (February 12, 1888), 10. NewsBank. Accessed April 26, 2020. “Gamins” is an old word for “urchins.”

44. Bound petition in the PPL Rhode Island Collection.

34. Cited in Lopez, 317.

35. Clarence E. Sherman, The Providence Public Library: An Experiment in Enlightenment (Providence, RI, 1938), 28.

36. “Olneyville Free Library,” Providence Sunday Journal (January 7, 1906), 5. NewsBank. Accessed September 3, 2019.

37. “Dedication on the New Wanskuck Branch Building,” Books for All (December 1928), 402.

38. Patricia Raub, “‘A Bewildering Variety’: The Beginning of Libraries in Providence,” Rhode Island History 79:1 (Fall 2021) 63–64.

39. According to census figures from 1910, workers in the woolen and worsted industry were about two-­fifths female. US Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910: Statistics for Rhode Island, Containing Statistics of Population, Agriculture, Manufactures, and Mining for the State, Counties, Cities, and Other Divisions, Reprint of the Supplement for Rhode Island Published in Connection with the Abstract of the Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 614.

40. William E. Foster, “Getting Acquainted with the Providence Public Library,” Providence Daily Journal (April 10, 1913), 10.

NewsBank. Accessed April 4, 2020.

41. “Providence Librarian Tells of New Branch,” Providence Evening Bulletin (September 21, 1910), 7. NewsBank.

Accessed April 4, 2020. Around this time, the Union for Christian Work was shifting its focus to working with recent immigrants.

“Starts Immigrant Bureau,” Providence Daily Journal (October 23, 1911), 5. NewsBank. Accessed January 6, 2020.

136

54. “Public Libraries and Their Work in Americanization,” Providence Daily Journal (March 7, 1920), 17. NewsBank. Accessed March 17, 2020.

45. Quoted in Leslie A. Hahner, “Public Culture and the Americanization of Immigrants” in To Become and American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt1tqx76n.5.

55. “Providence Public Library: The Wanskuck Branch. A Community Library,” Providence Journal, One Star ed. (April 26, 1920), 10. NewsBank. Accessed March 17, 2020.

See also John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955, rev. ed. 1983), which examines American nativism at the turn of the twentieth century. For works that deal with the Americanization movement in Rhode Island, see Gilkeson as well as Evelyn Savidge Sterne, Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

57. Ralph H. Bevan, “Americanization by Libraries: An Appreciation,” Public Libraries (October 1921), 461–63.

46. Charles F. D. Belden, “Public Libraries and Their Work for Americanization,” Providence Sunday Journal (March 7, 1920), 17.

NewsBank. Accessed March 17, 2020.

47. Ibid.

48. J. F. Carr, “The Library in Americanization Work,” Illinois Libraries (October 1919), 61.

49. Ibid.

50. Thirtieth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island, Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1907 (The Providence Press, Snow & Farnum Co., Printers, 1908), 8.

51. W. E. Foster, “Foreign Books at Library,” Providence Sunday Journal (September 10, 1916), 25. NewsBank. Accessed March 17, 2020.

52. “Congress of Mothers and Parent-­Teachers Associations,” Providence Sunday Journal (March 7, 1920), 17. NewsBank.

Accessed March 17, 2020.

56. Providence Sunday Journal (December 1, 1918), 32. NewsBank.

Accessed March 1, 2020.

58. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 25.

59. William Joyce, “India Point’s First Schoolmarm,” Providence Sunday Journal (December 26, 1971), 188. NewsBank. Accessed June 6, 2020.

60. Scott, 52. For a discussion of the Providence Shelter for Colored Orphans, see Jane Lancaster, “Encouraging Faithful Domestic Servants: Race, Deviance, and Social Control in Providence, Rhode Island History 51:3 (August 1993).

61. Gilkeson, 268.

62. “Young Women’s Tea Room,” Providence Sunday Journal (April 28, 1889), 8. NewsBank. Accessed April 27, 2020.

63. Scott, 80.

64. Scott, 83.

65. “Providence Women’s Work for Others,” Providence Sunday Journal (November 17, 1912), 25. NewsBank. Accessed February 28, 2020.

66. See Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

67. The Union for Christian Work opened a library and read-

ing room, offered classes, formed clubs, and eventually bought a house on Chestnut Street, hiring a resident worker and attracting college students to live on the premises, too. “Social Settlement Work in Providence,” Providence Sunday Journal (December 24, 1905), 23. NewsBank. Accessed March 21, 2020.

68. There was and continues to be confusion over the use of the term “settlement house” in reference to many of these early organizations, which had a number of characteristics in common, as J. Ellyn Des Jardins observes in “Federal House: Its Place in Providence and the Settlement Movement,” Rhode Island History 54:4 (November 1996), 100. Neither the Mount Pleasant Working Girls Association, later to become Sprague House, or the North End Working Girls Club fully conforms to the definition of a typical settlement house, since most of the women did not live on the premises. However, William Isaac Cole wrote in 1908 that although “in general, residence has been the deciding test of inclusion or exclusion,” all that is really necessary is that a settlement “establish a personal relation [with neighborhood residents] involving service through sharing in the spirit of friendship.” Motives and Results of the Social Settlement Movement: Notes of an Exhibit Installed in the Social Museum of Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1908), 3, 4. Sprague House was listed in the Handbook of Settlements in 1911 as one of two settlement houses in the city. Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1911), 287–88.

Nevertheless, the Providence Sunday Journal declared in 1904, “As yet very little has been done in the line of settlements in this city.” Even though the newspaper found no “regular settlement,” it did mention the Sprague House Association, with the implication that it was similar to a settlement house. Providence Sunday Journal (July 24, 1904), 9. NewsBank. Accessed March 1, 2020.

69. Gilkeson, 240; historian Kathy Peiss examines the subculture of working-­class New York women in her now classic study Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-­of-­the-­Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986).

70. Jane Cunningham Croly, History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (New York: Henry G. Allen & Co., 1898), 82.

137

Rhode Island History

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

71. Working girls’ clubs were only one type of women’s clubs that sprang up at the turn of the last century. Many women’s clubs across the United States focused all of their attention on founding libraries. Many clubs progressed from sharing books among themselves to establishing traveling libraries to circulate books “on a broader scale, sending libraries to remote areas where access to reading material of any kind, particularly for women and children, was severely limited.” The next step was to start libraries “for use of citizens in their own towns.” Paula D. Watson, “Founding Mothers: The Contribution of Women’s Organizations to Public Library Development in the United States,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 64, no. 3 (July 1994), 235. A 1930s American Library Association estimate “credited women’s clubs with the responsibility for initiating seventy-­five percent of the public libraries now in existence in the United States.” Watson, 235. This frequently quoted figure has not been substantiated.

most of the books were intended for adults. “The Mt. Pleasant Branch: Its Past and Present,” A Reader’s Guide to Books 16:7 (July 1949), 2.

84. Mary Niles Maack, “Gender, Culture, and the Transformation of American Librarianship, 1890–1920,” Libraries & Culture 1 (Winter, 1998): 51–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25548597.

77. Thirty-­First Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1908 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1909), 16–17. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=uiug.30112079511934&view=1up&seq=132.

85. The staff is listed by name and position in PPL’s annual reports. The figures cited above do not include the shelf and messenger force, building inspectors, auditor, book repairers, janitors, and cleaners (the latter of which are not named), etc.

72. See Peiss, Cheap Amusements. In Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs, 1884–1928 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1997), Priscilla Murolo argues that the middle-­class leaders did not fully understand the issues their members faced in the workplace, discouraging union participation and thereby impeding women’s chances of improving their working conditions.

79. “Among the Women’s Clubs: The Working Girls’ Associations of Rhode Island,” Providence Sunday Journal (12 April 1896), 12. NewsBank. Accessed March 1, 2020; “North End Girls’ Club Now Facing Crucial Period,” Providence Evening Bulletin, July 12, 1923, 27. NewsBank. Accessed March 6, 2020. Jeanne M. Carrito, “Smith Hill Branch History,” unpublished manuscript in PPL’s Rhode Island Collection, c. 1990; James, 18–19.

73. See Sprague House Association, Reports of the Mount Pleasant Working Girls’ Association, 1887–1902 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnum, 1903); J. Ellyn Des Jardin, “Federal Hill House: Its Place in Providence and the Settlement Movement,” Rhode Island History 54:4 (November 1996): 99–122; “Federal Hill House Directors Plan Annual Meeting Tuesday,” Providence Sunday Journal (May 25, 1947), 62. NewsBank. Accessed March 1, 2020.

80. The Library Quarterly does not have reference to “friends of the library” groups until the 1930s. Providence’s Children’s Library Helpers, on the other hand, was begun in 1905.

74. Alida Esther Sprague, “A House of Its Own,” Far and Near (February 1891): 68. John Hay Library University Archives, Brown University.

75. “Reports for the Year Ending October 1, 1902,” Reports of the Mount Pleasant Working Girls Association, 1889–1902 (Sprague House Association, Snow & Farnum, Printers, 1903), 13. John Hay Library University Archives, Brown University.

76. The total number in the collection that year was 1,747; thus,

138

78. “North End Girls’ Club Now Facing Crucial Period,” Evening Bulletin (July 12, 1923), 27. NewsBank. Accessed March 12, 2021.

Elizabeth Brown was likely the wife of Henry Tyler Brown, a prosperous jeweler and silversmith who had a shop on Westminster Street. “Henry Tyler Brown” https://www.sterlingflatwarefash ions.com/Res/Indiv/B/BrownHenryT.html. Accessed March 12, 2021.

81. “Library Helpers’ Benefit Concert Draws Big Crowd,” Evening Bulletin (November 17, 1915), 21. NewsBank. Accessed March 13, 2021.

82. “Library Concert Is Arranged for Tomorrow Night,” Evening Bulletin, EXTRA 4:30 p.pm ed. (November 15, 1915), 17. NewsBank. Accessed May 6, 2020.

83. Thirty-­Eighth Annual Report, 8. Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1915 (Providence, RI: Loose Leaf Manufacturing Company, 1916), 8. https:// play.google.com/books/reader?id=sSYwAQAAIAAJ&hl=en&pg =GBS.RA10-­PA8.

86. She tells us in her memoir that she became engaged to Edward Thompson Root in 1889 and they married upon his completion of a two-­year architectural training course at M.I.T. Soon after, the couple had two daughters. While she does not mention the divorce, she does tell the reader that “my world suddenly collapsed around my head” and thereafter “financial difficulties arose.” William E. Foster hired her upon the eve of PPL’s opening in its new building on Washington Street. Opening New Windows or Adventures with Children: Memories of a Pioneer Children’s Librarian, 1868–1953, unpublished manuscript, Hartford Public Library Archives, 14–16.

The divorce decree and Root’s obituaries tell the rest of the story: the marriage took place in 1892, and Root left his wife and daughters five years later. The divorce was granted in 1904. In 1907, Root moved to Portland, Oregon, with a new wife and his brother and worked as an architect until he died in 1917. See Petition for Divorce: Mary E. S. Root vs. Edward T. Root, filed September 4, 1903; Final Decree, Appellate Division of [State] Supreme Court in Providence, entered September 24, 1904. “Edward T. Root Is Dead (Mortuary Notice)” Oregonian (June 22, 1917), 14. NewsBank. Accessed May 9, 2020. “Edward Thompson Root,” Providence Daily Journal (May 29, 1918), 6. NewsBank. Accessed May 9, 2020.

87. Foster wrote, “Few of the readers are perhaps aware of the multiform nature of the duties of the Children’s Librarian. They include not merely the issue of books to the children, and the cataloguing and bulletining of these books, but the mechanical details of lettering and numbering those which have been returned from the bindery or those which have been repaired, (several thousands in the course of the year); the numerous lectures to the pupils, elsewhere mentioned; and the constantly increasing detail con-

nected with the shipping of books to deliveries. When, however, we add to this the large amount of time which is consumed in connection with the selection and mailing of books in raised letters for the blind and the “traveling libraries” and “home libraries,” (these beneficent agencies being carried on from this building as a centre), a very confining and very extensive set of duties is seen to result. Twenty-­Eighth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1905 (Providence, RI: Franklin Press, 1906), 9–10.

88. “Children’s Library, Vacant Place with Mrs. Root Absent,” Providence Journal (June 26, 1922), 8. NewsBank. Accessed April 28, 2020.

89. According to the Providence Journal, the Providence Mothers Club, now known as the Providence Women’s Club, organized one of the first traveling libraries. (March 1947), 61. NewsBank.

Accessed June 13, 2020.

90. See “A Useful Department: Children’s Library Has Appealed Strongly to the Public,” Providence Daily Journal (December 1, 1902), 10. NewsBank. Accessed May 5, 2020.

91. “The Public Library and Its Branches,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (January 30, 1928), 12. NewsBank. Accessed February 7, 2020.

92. “George L. Shepley Dead in Warwick in His 70th Year,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (August 4, 1924), 1, 2. NewsBank.

Accessed March 19, 2020.

93. While the association did indeed offer the nascent library a home, Vernon’s role in the formation of the library is less clear.

James writes, “In the spring of 1912, Miss Anne Vernon, at that time social secretary of the extension work of the Association for Organizing Charities, located at 403 South Main Street, suggested that a library be established in the unused rooms on the second floor of the building. Miss Virginia and Miss Hope Shepley welcomed the plan and proceeded to solicit furniture, pictures, and books sufficient to equip two rooms. Loans from Providence Public Library became available on condition that their transportation be provided and that the books receive proper care.”

James, 24. Considering James did her research only fourteen years

139

Rhode Island History

after these events occurred, one might assume that her facts are correct. On the other hand, the Providence Journal credited Virginia and Hope Shepley with starting the neighborhood library.

See “Brook Street Library Is New Center of Neighborhood Interest,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (September 27, 1925), 78.

NewsBank. Accessed June 7, 2020.

94. James, 24.

95. James, 24.

Opening Local Libraries in Providence Neighborhoods

Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1921 (Providence, RI: Oxford Press, 1922), 11.

102. “Providence Council Indorses [sic] Move for Branch Libraries,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (March 3, 1929), 35. NewsBank. Accessed April 5, 2020.

103. “Mrs. M.E.S. Root to Quit Library after 22 Years,” Evening Bulletin (June 15, 1922), 2. NewsBank. Accessed April 28, 2020.

96. By the mid-­1920s, 403 South Main Street was no longer considered a suitable home for the library. According to James’s disparaging description in A Sociological Survey of the Providence Public Library, “This was once the dignified colonial home of some affluent Providence family, but to-­day it is in a state of decay and is surrounded by all the depressing influences of wharf life in a sea-­port town. The main streets leading to the library are scenes of many revolting occurrences,” 33.

104. For a listing of founding members, see unpublished “Outline of the Growth of the Elmwood Public Library,” n.d. For profiles of some of the founders and/or their husbands, see “Clayton A. Ballou, Alderman, Is Dead,” Providence Sunday Journal (May 11, 1919): 1, 4; “Charles E. Hancock Dies in 95th Year,” Providence Journal (February 27, 1952): 17; “Mrs. Emma Shaw Dies in 82nd Year, Providence Journal (February 18, 1944): 10; “Mrs. Benjamin Moulton, Widow of Providence Police Commissioner Dies at 89,” Evening Bulletin (July 13, 1967): 27.

97. Brook Street would not be the library’s final move. It relocated three more times over the next half century, always further to the east and changing names along the way. See “Brook Street Library Is New Center of Neighborhood Interest,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (September 27, 1925), 78. NewsBank. Accessed January 6, 2020.

105. Romance of Rhode Island Industry: Elmwood Public Library and the Knight Memorial. A Radio Presentation by the Phenix National Bank of Providence (December 19, 1946), PPL Rhode Island Collection, 3; “Elmwood, Providence: Statewide Historical Preservation Report P-­P-­3” (Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, June 1979), 11.

98. Gilkeson, 104.

106. Harry Lyman Koopman, “The Providence Libraries,” Providence Sunday Journal Magazine (December 28, 1930), 56. NewsBank. Accessed March 27, 2020.

99. One of the club’s founders was Elizabeth Nicholson White, daughter of the founder of Nicholson File Company, a major producer of machine-­made files. Mary Louise Colt Gross, niece of a US senator from Rhode Island and wife of a prominent Providence businessman and political figure, was president of the club for twenty years. See “Mrs. Mary Colt Gross, GOP Leader, Dies at 73,” Evening Bulletin (June 11, 1954), 7. NewsBank. Accessed March 25, 2020.

100. Evening Bulletin, EXTRA 4:30 p.m. ed. (June 5, 1915), 15.

NewsBank. Accessed March 24, 2020; James, 20; Jeanne M. Cerrito, “Rochambeau Branch Library,” unpublished manuscript, 1990, typeset. PPL Rhode Island Collection, 1–2.

101. Forty-­Fourth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island, Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and

140

107. “Elmwood Library to Acquire New Home,” Providence Sunday Journal (April 9, 1922), 58. NewsBank. Accessed January 6, 2020.

108. The Rev. Julian S. Wadsworth gave a collection of art books, and Ella F. Grant provided two hundred children’s books in memory of her daughter. Grant’s donation consisted of her daughter’s children’s books and a number of “the best children’s books of today carefully selected by herself.” Likewise, Sarah Knight (wife of Webster Knight) donated more than two hundred books in memory of her mother. The new library association also acquired a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, a reference desk, an American flag, a collection of reproductions of modern paintings, and a picture illustrating Pilgrim’s Progress, which Knight had “placed in a

fine mahogany frame,” Koopman, 56. NewsBank. Accessed March 27, 2020; “Elmwood Library to Acquire New Home,” Providence Journal (April 9, 1922), 58. NewsBank. Accessed January 6, 2020; ledger book with minutes from the monthly board meetings of the Elmwood Public Library Association. Rhode Island Archives, Providence Community Library.

Evening Bulletin (October 25, 1921), 27. NewsBank. Accessed April 9, 2020.

109. “Elmwood Library Formally Opened, Providence Sunday Journal (July 11, 1915), 11. NewsBank. Accessed January 6, 2020; “Elmwood Library To Acquire New Home,” Providence Sunday Journal (April 9, 1922), 58. NewsBank. Accessed 6 January 2020.

118. “South Providence Community Library,” Providence Journal (April 2, 1922), 32. NewsBank. Accessed April 9, 2020.

110. “Knight Memorial Library Nears Completion,” Providence Sunday Journal, Three Star ed. (March 30, 1924), 45. NewsBank.

Accessed January 6, 2020.

Accessed April 9, 2020.

111. During this time, the Knight Memorial Association continued to pay for the overhead of the building, while the Elmwood Library Association dealt with operating expenses and ran the library, with financial contributions to both organizations provided by the Knight family. In 1962, management of the library finally was assumed by PPL, while the library association retained its own board of trustees; in 1971, the Elmwood Public Library Association was merged into the Knight Memorial Association; and finally, in 1995, Knight Memorial Library Association officially merged with PPL; thereupon, Knight Memorial Library became a full-­fledged branch in PPL’s system of neighborhood libraries.

Deborah Del Gais, Knight Memorial Library: Chronology, unpublished document provided by author.

Accessed April 9, 2020; “Library Head Will Lead Ceremonies,” Evening Bulletin, FINAL MARKET ed. (January 17, 1930), 20.

NewsBank. Accessed April 9, 2020.

112. Thirty-­Ninth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1916 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnum, 1917), 9.

113. Thirty-­Ninth Annual Report, 9.

114. Evening Bulletin (July 8, 1921), 34. NewsBank. Accessed April 9, 2020.

115. “Allen’s Avenue Dump Is Called Menace to Health,” Evening Bulletin (March 27,1923), 5. NewsBank. Accessed April 9, 2020.

116. “City May Be Requested to Clean Snow from Sidewalks,”

117. “South Providence Community Club Conducts Library,” Providence Journal (January 6, 1923), 9. NewsBank.

Accessed March 7, 2020.

119. “Community Club Opens Library in South Providence,” Evening Bulletin (January 6, 1923), 13. NewsBank.

120. “The Public Library and Its Branches,” Providence Journal, Three Star ed. (January 30, 1928), 12. NewsBank.

121. “Washington Park,” William McKenzie Woodward and Edward F. Sanderson, Providence: A Citywide Survey of Historic Resources (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, 1986), 34–35; “The New Fire Station: Washington Park Residents Make Merry over Hose 18,” Providence Journal (January 3, 1896), 8. NewsBank. Accessed March 6, 2020.

122. James, 34.

123. James, 34; Forty-­Seventh Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1924 (Providence, RI: Oxford Press, 1925), 15.

124. In 1947, the recently formed Washington Park Taxpayers Association voted to send a petition to the PPL Board of Trustees asking that the library branch in Washington Park be moved out of the Broad Street School and into a building of its own. In response, library director Clarence E. Sherman remarked that “the Washington Park section ‘deserves and should have had a branch library in a modern building years ago.’” “Broad Street UER Service Hit,” Evening Bulletin, FINAL MARKET ed. (March 27, 1947), 19. When the Providence Fire Department announced in 1949 that it was moving Hose 19 to a new fire station on Allens

141

Rhode Island History

Rhode Island Book Notes

Avenue, the city agreed to turn the Broad Street station over to the library. Apparently, neither PPL nor the City of Providence had sufficient funds to pay for the construction work needed.

“Washington Park,” Providence Journal (October 9, 1949), 54.

Therefore, the Washington Park Taxpayers Association and Washington Park Businessmen’s Association began a drive to raise the $15,000 dollars needed to renovate the first floor for the library and the upstairs as a community room. They organized a three-­day house-­to-­house solicitation of funds from all 221 families in the district, initiated a “buy a brick” campaign aimed at Washington Park children and young people, held rummage sales, and sponsored a benefit show featuring Rhode Island magicians. “Washington Park Fund Drive Opens,” Evening Bulletin, FINAL MARKET ed. (September 29, 1949), 14; Providence Journal, May 14, 1950, 30; “Magicians to Perform,” Evening Bulletin, FINAL MARKET ed. (June 10, 1953), 61; “Library Seeks Children’s Aid,” Evening Bulletin, BASEBALL EXTRA ed. (September 30, 1949), 47). The writer of a letter to the editor in fall 1949 praised the concerted effort the community was making and concluded that, in the end, “Washington Park will have not only a new library, but also a stronger spirit of neighborliness and friendship which comes from enthusiasm and working together for a common cause.” “Washington Park Library,” Providence Sunday Journal (October 9, 1949), 54. Finally, in December 1956, the library formally opened on the ground floor of the building, having been readied for use after considerable remodeling and reconstruction with most of the expenses paid for by PPL and the remainder contributed by the community. “New Washington Park Library Ready

to Open,” Providence Journal, County ed. (December 10, 1956), 20.

Additional funds for the renovation of the upstairs as a community room, it seems, were not available.

125. “Library Concert to Aid Children Planned Nov. 16,” Evening Bulletin, EXTRA 4:30 p.m. ed. (November 8, 1915), 3. NewsBank.

Accessed March 23, 2020.

126. William E. Foster, History and Present Needs of the Providence Public Library (Providence, RI: Providence Public Library, 1926), 14–15.

127. Thirty-­Ninth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Comprising Reports of the Treasurer and Librarian, for the Year Ending December 31, 1916 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnum, 1917), 13.

128. Foster, History and Present Needs, 17.

129. Sherman, 37–39.

130. Douglas, “Branch Buildings,” 15.

131. “A Branch Library for Smith Hill,” Books for All: A Bulletin Issued by the Providence Public Library 6:10 (December 1931), 270.

132. Ibid.

133. In contrast, Boston was authorized to “establish and maintain” BPL even before the library had opened, and the city was allocating $10,000 dollars for each new branch by the 1870s.

O’Connor, 66.

134. Foster, History and Present Needs, 26.

Adrian Chastain Weimer. A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer—­ a Professor of History at Providence College—­uncovers the story of how, more than one hundred years before the American Revolution, New England colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule. With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-­ led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown’s priorities. In the face of this threat to local rule, colonists had to decide whether they would submit to the commissioners’ authority, which they viewed as arbitrary because it was not accountable to the people, or whether they would mobilize to defy the crown.

Together, these colonists crafted a potent regional constitutional culture in defiance of Charles II that was characterized by a skepticism of metropolitan ambition, a defense of civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-­government was divinely sanctioned—­all hallmarks of Rhode Island’s founding.

Dror Goldberg. Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—­such as silver—­to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system, and his book tells the story

142

of modern money in North America, primarily through the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the seventeenth century, although portions of Goldberg’s book also deal with notable Rhode Island figures including Anne Hutchinson and her family.

John K. Robertson. Revolutionary War Defenses in Rhode Island. East Providence, RI: Rhode Island Publications Society, 2023.

Revolutionary War Defenses in Rhode Island updates Edward Field’s and George Cullum’s work on Rhode Island forts produced in the late 1800s. This book covers American, British, and French fortifications within the state and includes almost 300 maps and plans, including nine period maps in color. It is designed as a reference book, and while it tells part of the story of the war in Rhode Island, it doesn’t tell the whole story—­something Robertson hopes to accomplish in his future writings.

Christian M. McBurney. Machine Guns in Narragansett Bay. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2023.

During World War I and World War II, Rhode Island was dotted with coastal forts filled with large caliber guns. Yet these guns were never fired in anger. By contrast, between 1929 and 1933 during the era of Prohibition, US Coast Guard vessels frequently fired machine guns at rumrunners in Narragansett Bay. Machine gun fire killed three rumrunners and wounded another on the notorious Black Duck. Despite the incident drawing national protests, the carnage continued. Rhode Island author and historian Christian McBurney’s newest book Machine Guns in Narragansett Bay explores the use of

143

Rhode Island History

excessive force in Narragansett Bay and other Rhode Island waters.

Robert A. Geake. Death in Early New England: Rites, Rituals, and Remembrance. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2023.

Death in early New England came early and often during those harsh first decades of settlement.

Epidemics, hunger, accidents, and childbirth contributed to a heavy toll in New England. Disease in some cases erased entire families, and almost always affected the majority of individuals in the communities. For most families, death was still a private affair. Traditions brought over with European customs and others that were strictly American were eventually interwoven, and these ceremonies, tokens and portraits of remembrance became part of these rites and rituals of mourning. Other forms of remembrance were carved into stone with heart-­wrung epitaphs, the cause of death and brief biographies. Burial sites themselves evolved from family plots and church graveyards to public, garden-­like cemeteries. Rhode Island historian Robert A. Geake explores the development of rites and rituals of death in this New World in his newest book.

Patrick T. Conley. The Makers of Modern Rhode Island. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2023.

Picking up where his previously published book Rhode Island’s Founders: From Settlement to Statehood left off, Rhode Island historian Patrick T. Conley takes us through the Ocean State’s history from 1790 to 1860.

144

Rhode Island Book Notes

Learn how Samuel Slater, the so-­called Father of the Factory System, pioneered the making of modern Rhode Island, how Elizabeth Buffum Chace founded the Rhode Island Women’s Suffrage Association, and what political circumstances led Governor Thomas Wilson Dorr to the Dorr War in 1842. This newly revised and expanded edition includes colorful biographical sketches of sixty-­ one influential Rhode Islanders who helped shape the state’s urban and industrial development into the modern Rhode Island of today, as well as twenty brief profiles of Hall of Fame inductees such as Eliza Jumel and Adin Ballou, whose twenty achievements occurred outside the confines of the Ocean State.

Christian M. McBurney. Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade.

Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2022.

In Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade, historian Christian McBurney recreates the harrowing voyage of the Marlborough, a privateer given the extraordinary task of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to attack British slave trading posts and ships stationed on the coast of West Africa during the era of the American Revolution. As McBurney shows, the voyage of the Marlborough was the brainchild of John Brown, a prominent Rhode Island merchant and slave trader. Brown and other investors’ motivations were not altruistic, McBurney argues, as the ship’s officers and crew desired to enrich themselves by selling the plunder they captured—­cargo that included enslaved Africans. Dark Voyage places the voyage of the Marlborough within the broader context of Atlantic World slavery. It is also the first study to detail

the many captures American privateers made of British slave ships during the Revolutionary War.

Marian Mathison Desrosiers. Island Girl: The Life of Justice Florence Kerins Murray: Patriot, Public Servant, Esteemed Jurist. East Providence, RI: Rhode Island Publications Society, 2022.

Retired Salve Regina University historian Marian Mathison Desrosiers’s newest book, Island Girl: The Life of Justice Florence Kerins Murray: Patriot, Public Servant, Esteemed Jurist, is a detailed biography of Justice Florence Kerins Murray (1916–2004), a respected Rhode Island judge and activist. As Desrosiers shows, Judge Murray made decisions on the constitutional rights of Rhode Island citizens, left her mark on programs for veterans, and supported various state activities. Through her selection of law clerks, Judge Murray also encouraged women to seek judgeships, and in 1990, the state of Rhode Island renamed the Newport Courthouse the Murray Judicial Complex to honor Justice Murray as “Patriot, Public Servant, Distinguished Jurist, and Champion of the Rights and Progress of Women.” Desrosiers’s book is the product of years of research and oral interviews with Judge Murray, a lifelong Newport resident.

Joyce Fairchild Almeida. The Knights of Hog Island. Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing Co., 2022.

Step into another world and a different time to discover the origins of Hog Island, an island off the coast of Rhode Island, the families who live there, and the community that grew from its founding.

Leigh Picard and Susan Ring. Roger Williams Park Zoo. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2022.

Louis Azar II. Downtown Providence. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2022.

James M. Ricci. The Pawtucket Red Sox: How Rhode Island Lost Its Home Team. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2022.

Linda L. Mathew. Charlestown Town Council Records, 1738–1775. Hope, RI: Rhode Island Genealogical Society, 2022.

Linda L. Mathew. Cranston Town Council Records, 1754–1793. Hope, RI: Rhode Island Genealogical Society, 2021.

Articles and Book Chapters Cory D. Higdon. “‘A sweete cup hath rendered many of us wanton and too active’: The Perils and Promises of Liberty in the Providence Plantations, 1636–1656.” New England Quarterly vol. 96, no. 2 (June 2023): 121–159.

Jerrad P. Pacatte. “Fitness for Freedom: The Lived Experience of Disability, Enslavement, and Emancipation in Early New England.” In Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630–1930, edited by Marla R. Miller and Nicole Belolan (Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2023).

If you’ve published an article, book, or book chapter dealing with Rhode Island history within the past two years, and you would like it to appear in the book notes of our next issue, please email the editors of the journal with the complete citation (title, publisher, etc). Please email recommendations to editor@rihs.org.

145

opposite: A man dressed in a suit holding a book looking at the renovations of the Grand Hall of the Providence Public Library, 1986, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL. back cover: Exterior of the Wanskuck Branch of the Providence Public Library, 1956, Providence Public Library Photograph Collection, PPL.

The Rhode Island Historical Society

non-profit org.

110 Benevolent Street

u.s. postage paid

Providence, Rhode Island

Milford, CT

02906–3152

permit no. 80