Year Inducted: 1966
Commodore Matthew Cabraith Perry - Commodore Matthew Cabraith Perry, 1794-1858, was a career naval officer and the younger brother of Oliver Hazard Perry. He commanded the American naval forces in the siege and capture of Vera Cruz during the Mexican War. He was also a strong proponent of naval education and training programs and a technological innovator who was sometimes… …
Dr. Charles V. Chapin - Dr. Charles V. (Charles Value) Chapin, 1856-1941, was an internationally renowned pioneer in the field of public health and epidemiology, and served as Providence's superintendent of health from 1884 to 1932. During his tenure he published a medical treatise entitled Sources and Modes of Infection, which was regarded by contemporary scientists as one of the… …
Dr. James P. Adams - Dr. James P. Adams, 1895-1969, educator, college administrator, and civic leader, was born in Michigan, but was on the faculty of Brown University from 1921 to 1944, serving the last twelve years as vice president. He also taught economics and became chairman of that academic department at age thirty-three, setting a Brown record for the… …
Dr. Raymond T. Jackson - Dr. Raymond T. Jackson, originally of Providence, is an accomplished concert pianist and graduate of the Julliard School of Music. Noted for bringing the music of African-American composers to the concert stage. He has compiled a three-volume anthology containing works by two dozen African-American composers dating back to the early 1800s. He has held positions… …
Eddie Dowling - Eddie Dowling, 1889-1976, was born in Woonsocket as Joseph Nelson Goucher. As the fourteenth of seventeen children, he used his Irish mother Bridgette's maiden name of Dowling during a brilliant Broadway career as actor, composer, producer and Pulitizer Prize-winning playwright. Dowling's work helped to bring the American stage to a new level of aesthetic maturity… …
Frank W. Keaney - Frank W. Keaney, 1886-1967,the legendary coach at University of Rhode Island, came to Kingston from Everett (MA) High School to coach all sports, serve as athletic director, and teach chemistry. An indefatigable promoter of the scholar-athlete, he was responsible, more than any other, for an athletic program that would bring URI a measure of national… …
Glenna Collett Vare - Glenna Vare, 1903-1989, a New Haven native, and Providence resident, is generally regarded as Rhode Island's greatest female athlete. She was proficient in tennis, diving, swimming, and especially golf. By 1922, she had won her first U.S. Women's Golf Championship, the first of six such titles. In 1924, at the height of her prowess,she played… …
Governor Robert E. Quinn - Robert Emmett Quinn, 1884-1975, a prominent Democratic politician who served successively as state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, associate Justice of the Superior Court, and Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals. Quinn was the principle architect of the Bloodless Revolution of 1935 and a major protagonist in the Race Track War of 1937.… …
Jabez Gorham - After an apprenticeship to Nehemiah Dodge, Jabez Gorham became the foremost Rhode Island producer of jewelry and silverware. While in his twenties, Gorham established a shop at North Main and Steeple Streets, the first of several buildings that formed his original factory complex. By the end of the century, the company he founded was a… …
Milton R. Halladay - Milton R. Halladay, 1874-1961, a native of Vermont, was a noted political cartoonist for the Providence Journal for nearly fifty years, and his cartoons were published in countless other newspapers and magazines. He has been called "one of the deans of American political cartooning". His cartoon commemorating the death of Thomas A. Edison was a… …
William F. Sayles - William Francis Sayles, 1824-1894, was a prominent Pawtucket, Rhode Island industrialist who founded the W.F. & F.C. Sayles Company, reputedly the world's largest bleachery for cotton textile cloth, located in Saylesville on the Moshassuck River. Sayles and his brother Frederick, the first mayor of Pawtucket, also owned the Lorraine Mill on Mineral Spring Avenue, a… …
