1445 Wampanoag Trail, Suite 203, East Providence, RI 02915-1019 | (401) 433-0044 | info@riheritagehalloffame.com
More than anyone, Samuel Slater pioneered the making of modern Rhode Island. This so-called Father of the Factory System was the catalyst for the economic transformation that gave Rhode Island its salient characteristic – an industrial order that dominated the state’s economy from the early nineteenth century until the dawn of the present postindustrial era.
In 1856, the year that thirty-year-old Thomas Alexander Tefft embarked on an educational and architectural tour of Europe—from which he would not return alive—Massachusetts bard John Greenleaf Whittier published his famous poem “Maud Muller,” containing these memorable lines: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”