Before there was Waterplace Park, there was the Great Salt Cove, and before there was the Rhode Island State House, there was Snowtown— a mixed-race workingclass neighborhood known as a haven for brothels, gambling houses and other unsavory enterprises that occupied Smith Hill in the 1830s. A massive archaeological project in Providence in the early 1980s uncovered thousands of artifacts.
In 2013, archaeologists at the Public Archaeology Laboratory (PAL) began to catalog and study those artifacts. Many of the items revealed exciting new information about life in the lost neighborhood known as Snowtown. Heather Olson, PAL laboratory manager, is a member of the Snowtown Project research team, an independent group of archaeologists and historians who are studying the artifacts from Snowtown to recover a picture of what life there was like.
On Thursday, December 2, she will show us some of those lost and-found items and tell us about the project’s most recent discoveries.
Check out the Zoom presentation on our YouTube Channel here.
See our Fall Newsletter for more information.