Memorial Park contains our World War I and World
War II memorials along with the Korean War and a
memorial to Verrazano who explored here in 1524 not
long after Columbus in 1492. Across the street is our
Supreme Court and Superior Court – it was the first court
with a Ladies Room marking the changing role of women
when it was built in the 1920’s.
Size Matters
When it comes to small nobody is bigger than Rhode
Island. The biggest little state in the nation proudly
wears its smallness. Small has been big here since
our founding. It was by design not accident. Other
states thought that the rights of natives American’s
were superseeded by their claims and simply grabbed
as much land as they wanted. One story is that states
thought that their western boundries extended out as
far as there was land – not knowing that the Pacific Ocean
was a little further than they knew. Roger Williams
believed that the land had to be bought fairly . He was
a minister and the meager size of his landholdings was
comensurate with his meager purse. Rhode Island is all
of 1014 square miles. Smaller than some Texas ranches.
Rhode Islanders revel in being small the way Texans
swagger about being big. At 32 miles by 52 miles it is
easy to get from one end of the state to the other in less
than an hour. So you would assume that in such a small
place every one has visited ever corner of the state –
to the contrary we balk at travelling even the shortest
distances – it is a quirky contradiction . A single area
code covers the entire state. We also love that we are
a unit of measure used to compare everything from the
size of huricanes and wildfires to pieces that break off
the artic ice shelf. What other state is a unit of measure?