Providence, Rhode Island: Named by Roger Williams in Distress

Roger Williams named Providence, Rhode Island, himself. In a 1661 deed he said he chose it “in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress.” He meant real distress: when he picked the spot in 1636, he’d just been forced out of Massachusetts.

A winter without “bed or bread”

John Hayward’s New England Gazetteer of 1839 puts it plainly: Williams “was banished from the Massachusetts colony” over his religious views. He slipped away before the authorities could grab him. Samuel Greene Arnold, in his 1859 history of the state, quotes what Williams wrote about that trip 35 years later: “I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bed or bread did mean.”

His first stop wasn’t Providence. Ousamequin, the sachem who had welcomed the Pilgrims years earlier, gave him land on the east bank of the Seekonk River. Then Plymouth’s Governor Winslow told him that spot was inside Plymouth colony and advised him to “remove to the other side of the water.” So Williams and five companions got into a canoe and crossed.

“What cheer, netop”

There’s a well-known greeting attached to the landing, and Arnold is careful to call it what it is. “Tradition has preserved the shout of welcome, ‘What cheer, netop,’” he writes, that greeted Williams when he landed at a spot called Slate Rock. Williams’s own guide to the local language, as Arnold quotes it, explains that “Netop is friend.” Treat it as a tradition, not a record.

What Arnold does give as history is the next part. The small party paddled up the Moshassuck River, noticed a spring at the edge of the water, landed and started a settlement, “to which, in gratitude to his supreme deliverer, Williams gave the name of Providence.”

The deed that explains it

The best evidence comes from Williams. In December 1661 the town asked him for a formal deed to the land he’d bought from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. The deed he signed on December 20 says he had, “in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, called the place, Providence.” Then comes the line that explains the whole colony: “I designed it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.” William R. Staples printed the full deed in his Annals of the Town of Providence in 1843.

Keep in mind that Williams wrote this 25 years after the fact, in a document about land. Still, none of the other sources offers a rival story. Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal bulletin on place names quotes the same words, and so does the U.S. Geological Survey’s place-name database. If you compare them, you’ll notice both say “to me” where the deed, as Staples printed it, says “unto me.”

A name bigger than the city

The word didn’t stay put. The 1643 charter Williams brought back from England, Arnold says, called the colony “The Incorporation of Providence Plantations in the Narraganset Bay in New England.” That’s how the state ended up as “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” a mouthful that lasted until November 3, 2020, when voters cut “and Providence Plantations,” according to the USGS note on the state. You can read how the other half of that name came about in the story of Rhode Island’s name. The same 1661 deed also mentions “the river and fields of Pawtuckqut,” a spelling of a name you’ll recognize from Pawtucket.

Sources & further reading

• Roger Williams, deed of December 20, 1661, printed in William R. Staples, Annals of the Town of Providence (1843), pp. 29–31. Williams’s own explanation of the name, “in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress,” and the “shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”
• Samuel Greene Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 1 (1859), pp. 39–40, 113–114. The winter escape, Seekonk, the canoe crossing, the “What cheer, netop” tradition, the naming “in gratitude to his supreme deliverer,” and the 1643 charter.
• John Hayward, The New England Gazetteer (1839). Williams’s banishment and the founding of Providence.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 254. The name “so called by Roger Williams.”
• GNIS features 1219851 and 1219835 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Providence, with the same quotation, and the 2020 change to the state’s name.