Year Inducted: 2000
David Wilkinson - David Wilkinson (1771-1852) a Pawtucket native, was a successful Industrial Revolution-era inventor and mill owner. When an historical movement is particularly successful, it is logical that there would be many claims of authorship. This is certainly true of the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of the American factory system. At the center of the Industrial…
Dr. Doris M. Hollway Abels - The late Dr. Doris M. Holloway Abels, formerly of North Kingstown accomplished educator, performing artist and advocate of the arts founded her own school of dance and helped to establish the Trinity Reperatory Company. The versatile Dr. Abels was also a long-time choreographer at Theater By the Sea and was a mental health counselor and…
Dr. Gordon S. Wood - Gordon S. Wood of Providence is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. As historian and scholar of international renown, he taught for 31 years and is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost historians of the American founding and has held numerous fellowships and has…
Dr. Mark P. Malkovich III - A Serbian American, Dr. Mark Malkovich was born in Eveleth, Minnesota, a mining town north of Duluth in 1930. He played the clarinet as a child, but the piano became his primary instrument. Beginning his study of the piano at fifteen years of age, he eventually tutored under Adele Marcus at New York City’s Juilliard…
Dr. Walter F. Jusczyk - Walter Juszcyk graduated from West Warwick High School in the class of 1937. He left his mark on the school having been class president for three years, Journal Honor Roll Boy, All-State in baseball, and football captain of the Wizards. He rated with the best pitchers ever coached by Jack McCarthy. In 1936, West Warwick…
Dr.Solomon Drowne - Dr. Solomon Drowne, 1753-1834, a noted physician, graduated from Brown in 1773 with Senator Theodore Foster (1752-1828). He returned to Rhode Island from his far-flung travels in 1801 to settle in Foster. His estate, called Mount Hygeia, after the Greek goddess of health, became the setting for many botanical experiments and the formulation of several…
Ebenezer Knight Dexter - Ebenezer Knight Dexter, 1773-1824, prominent Providence merchant and a United States marshal who became Providence's greatest philanthropist. In his will he bequeathed nearly 2.3 million square feet of land to Providence for aid to the poor and other civic purposes including the training of militia. His most notable gifts were the Dexter Asylum and the…
Felix De Weldon - Felix De Weldon, 1907-2003, formerly of Newport and Dana Point, California, was a famed sculptor and painter whose bronze statue of the Marine Corps raising the flag of the United States on Iwo Jima during World War II was dedicated as the Marine Corps War Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. He created more than 2,000 different…
Gov. Bruce G. Sundlun - Two-term governor of Rhode Island, Bruce Sundlun was a complex, forthright servant of the people. Federal prosecutor, B-17 bomber pilot, CEO of the Outlet Company, to name just a few of his many accomplishments, Governor Sundlun was the quintessential Renaissance man. Bruce Sundlun was born on January 19, 1920, the first child of Jan Zelda…
Harry M. Callahan - The late Harry M. Callahan, 1912-1999, formerly of Atlanta, Georgia and Providence, was generally regarded as one of America's greatest photographers and photo essayists of the 20th-century, who was one of the most celebrated educators of his time, teaching for fifteen years at the Rhode Island School of Design, and whose influence on his profession…
Henry Wheaton - Henry Wheaton, 1785-1848, persevered, despite Rhode Island's disapproval of the War of 1812, to be one of Rhode Island's most persuasive legal defenders during that time. He stands alongside the foremost naval hero of the War of 1812, Oliver Hazard Perry, and Rhode Island's most successful privateer, James D'Wolf. This jurist, diplomat, and expounder of…
James Burrill Jr. - James Burrill, Jr., 1772-1820, was chief justice, attorney general (1797-1813), speaker of the house (1814-1816), U.S. Senator (1817-1820), leader of the Federalist Party, brilliant lawyer and orator. The town of Burillville (established 1806) was named for him.
John Carter - John Carter (1745-1814) was born in Philadelphia in 1745, the son of Elizabeth Spriggs, and John Carter, a naval officer of Irish ancestry killed in battle two months before his son’s birth. During the late 1750s, Carter was apprenticed in the print shop of Benjamin Franklin and David Hall. In 1767, Carter moved to Providence,…
John Howland - Without hyperbole, John Howland can well be called "the father of free public education in Rhode Island." He was born in Newport on October 31, 1757, the fourth of eight children in the family of Joseph and Sarah (Barber) Howland. He was the namesake and fifth-generation descendant of a Mayflower passenger who had come to…
Lawrence N. Spitz - Lawrence Spitz of Sun City, Arizona, formerly of Providence and Woonsocket was a pioneer labor leader who was a strong advocate for the workingman. He became one of the State's most effective iconoclasts, drafting its first labor relations act, and helping to gain major legislation for fair housing and worker representation at Blue Cross.
Louis A. Cimini - Louis A. Cimini, a former resident of North Providence, legendary La Salle Academy coach and teacher, he also served as a football and baseball official as well as the Director of Recreation for North Providence. Cimini was an outstanding athlete in his own right and was inducted into six Halls of Fame and received a…
Nicholas Brown II - Nicholas Brown II, 1769-1841, Providence businessman and philanthropist, was the son and heir of of Nicholas Brown, one of the five famous Brown brothers of late eighteenth-century Providence. In 1796 he formed the highly successful mercantile-industrial partnership Brown & Ives, which made a fortune in the China trade. When the name of Rhode Island College…
Theodore Foster - Theodore Foster (1752-1828) was born in Brookfield, Massachusetts, in 1752, the son of Judge Jedediah Foster and Dorothy Dwight of Dedham, a descendant of William Pynchon, an original incorporator of the Massachusetts Bay Company and a founder of Springfield, Massachusetts. As a young man, Foster came to Providence to study at Rhode Island College (now…
Tristam Burges - Tristam Burges, 1770-1853, was chief justice, leading member of the bar, U.S. Congressman (1825-1835), leader of the Whig Party and professor of oratory at Brown University. After a distinguished career in law, politics, and education, Burges retired to his estate "Watchemoket Farm," then in Seekonk, Massachusetts, but since 1862 within the bounds of East Providence.
