Working Class Providence: The Gaspee Street Neighborhood in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For the last six years, The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. has worked to catalog and analyze the Providence Cove Lands Collection. This assemblage represents artifacts from two archaeological sites from the edges of what was once the Great Salt Cove: the Carpenter’s Point Site (on the south shore), and the North Shore Site (on the north side of the Cove). During the nineteenth century, Providence was a typical urban industrial city: it was home to a diverse range of people from many ethnic groups, industries, and economic positions. The North Shore site was in a “rough” part of town, with a constant flow of undocumented residents, ramshackle housing, and varying levels of what many city-dwellers considered “unsavory behavior.” This paper will discuss the history and archaeology of the North Shore Site, focusing on the mid-nineteenth century working class residents of the Gaspee Street neighborhood.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 306