Rhode Island

An island name for a mainland state

Nobody knows for certain where Rhode Island’s name came from. It first belonged to Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay, which English colonists renamed Rhode Island in 1644, and only later became shorthand for the whole colony. Two explanations are usually offered, and the English may have blended them: the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano had compared an island off the coast, generally taken to be Block Island, to the Greek island of Rhodes, while Dutch sailors had called Aquidneck Roodt Eylandt, “red island,” for its red soil. The mainland settlement’s name, Providence Plantations, came from Roger Williams, who credited divine providence with bringing him there safely in 1636.

First to break, last to join

Rhode Island had a habit of going its own way. On May 4, 1776, its General Assembly passed the Act of Renunciation, making it the first colony to formally cast off its allegiance to King George III, two months before the Declaration of Independence; May 4 is still Rhode Island Independence Day. But it was the last of the thirteen original states to ratify the US Constitution. Its convention’s final session met in Newport, and ratification came on May 29, 1790.

For centuries the state’s official name was “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” In 2020 voters approved dropping “and Providence Plantations,” and the state seal was changed to match.

A capital on the move

For most of its history Rhode Island had no single capital. Under the 1663 Royal Charter the General Assembly moved its sessions among state houses in the five county seats, Newport, Providence, Kingston, East Greenwich and Bristol, with each new session year opening in Newport in May. A constitutional amendment ended the five-way rotation in 1854, and the legislature then alternated between Newport and Providence until 1901, when it moved into the new marble State House on Smith Hill in Providence. The capital page tells the story.

Hope and the anchor

Rhode Island’s emblem is an anchor, chosen for the colony’s seal in 1647, and its motto is the single word “Hope.” The state traces the pairing to the biblical image of hope as an anchor of the soul. Both are on the white state flag, ringed by 13 gold stars, and a bronze figure known as the Independent Man, holding a spear and leaning on an anchor, stands on top of the State House dome.

A chicken and coffee milk

Rhode Island has 26 official state symbols, several of them unlike any other state’s. The state bird is a chicken, the Rhode Island Red, which beat the osprey and the hummingbird in a 1954 public vote. The violet is the state flower and the red maple the state tree. The state drink is coffee milk, milk sweetened with coffee syrup; the state shell is the quahog, whose name comes from the Narragansett language; and the Looff carousel in East Providence, built in 1895, is the state’s official folk art. See every symbol on the Rhode Island symbols page.

Land and people

Rhode Island covers just 1,545 square miles, the smallest of the 50 states, and about a third of that is water. It had about 1.11 million residents in 2025, 44th in the country, and with about 1,078 people per square mile of land it is the second most densely populated state, after New Jersey. It borders Massachusetts and Connecticut and faces the Atlantic. Providence, with about 195,000 people, is the largest city, followed by Cranston, Warwick, Pawtucket and East Providence.