The Establishment of West Warwick

By Dr. Patrick T. Conley

On March 14, 1913, West Warwick became Rhode Island’s thirty-ninth and final town when the General Assembly set it off from the parent town of Warwick. The prime mover in creating that separation was attorney Patrick Henry Quinn. The Heritage Harbor Foundation, established in 2015 to fund, observe, and celebrate various aspects of Rhode Island’s history, decided to mark the creation of West Warwick as part of its statewide historical plaque program. The dedication of that permanent plaque, a project selected by Foundation director J. Michael Levesque, West Warwick’s first elected mayor, took place on December 17, 2024, a date nearly coinciding with Quinn’s 155th birthday. Speakers at the brief ceremony were Levesque, Dr. Patrick T. Conley, founding president of the Heritage Harbor Foundation and Rhode Island Historian Laureate, and Judge Bruce Morin, Quinn’s great-grand-nephew. Morin outlined Quinn’s distinguished career and Conley described the political culture of late 19th and early 20th century Rhode Island to explain the reasons for this municipal division.

Patrick Henry Quinn was born on December 16, 1869, in the Warwick mill village of Phenix. His parents, Peter and Margaret (Callahan) Quinn, displayed their patriotism for America and its traditions by naming their son for the fiery Virginia Revolutionary War patriot famous for his defiant statement, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Patrick Henry Quinn followed the successful path of many ambitious Irish-Catholics by interlacing labor union activity with legal training and Democratic Party activism within the even larger framework of his ethnicity and religion. He was a masterful speaker and belonged to most of the civic clubs and organizations of his day.

Quinn, with a grade school education, entered the Clyde Print Works as a finisher and remained there for nine years. He spent his childhood, like so many others in the state, as a child laborer. But like the proverbial cream that rises to the top, Quinn studied life through observation and by reading books at the end of the workday. He found his initial success as a member of the Gilded Age’s most powerful labor union, the Knights of Labor, which had a meteoric rise in Rhode Island. Quinn achieved the union’s highest state ranking, District Master Workman, just as the Order began to decline in the 1890s.

In his early twenties Quinn secured a job as bookkeeper and salesman at the printing house of William R. Brown and Company and studied law under his mentor Edward L. Gannon. He formed a partnership with Willard Tanner and Gannon after his entrance to the bar in August 1895. In November 1897, this young lawyer wed Agnes Healey of Providence who died in February 1997 after only ten years of marriage. Patrick took a second wife, Margaret M. Conners of Providence, on July 22, 1909, by whom he had one son, Thomas Henry.

Quinn helped to create the state’s thirty-ninth municipality, the densely populated industrial town of West Warwick. When it peeled away from Warwick in 1913, Quinn served as first president of the new town’s council. Quinn remained a solo practitioner for many years prior to forming a partnership with Charles H. Keenan. He was an excellent trial attorney known both for his legal acumen and oratorical skills. Patrick Henry was the consummate politician. His litany of political positions in Warwick and West Warwick was unmatched. In 1893, he began his decades-long participation in the state convention of the Democratic Party. Ten years later he became a senior aide to the Democratic reform Governor Lucius Garvin, who conferred upon Quinn his cherished title of colonel.

In 1900, Patrick became a delegate to his first of many Democratic National Conventions and, in 1914, he was the unsuccessful standard bearer of his party in the race for governor. Clearly future Governor Robert Emmet could not have chosen a more influential trailblazer for his own career in politics than when he became his uncle’s law partner. In 2013, the centennial of the town of West Warwick, I nominated and inducted Patrick Henry Quinn into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame where he joined his illustrious nephew, a 1966 inductee.

The creation of the new town of West Warwick was not a unique process. Rhode Island began s legal existence in the 1640s with only four towns. Warwick, established by Samuel Gorton in 1643, was one of these original towns. After the defeat of Thomas Dorr and his popular uprising in 1842 by the so-called Law and Order establishment, the victors drafted a basic law, the Constitution of 1843, designed to perpetuate their power. Such provisions included a real estate requirement for naturalized citizens to vote, a cumbersome amendment procedure, and a legislative apportionment that gave each town one senator – – and one only – – regardless of population. This last obstacle is at the root of the West Warwick sag. The all-powerful General Assembly, then controlled by the Republican Party, used the Senate as its safeguard. At that time, urban industrialists bolstered by rural, old-stock Rhode Islanders dominated state politics. Democrats, supported by an urban workforce and Irish Catholics, were in the minority. The Republican-controlled General Assembly endowed its rural-based Senate with power over state finances and appointments and it was a check upon the House. The governor lacked constitutional power.

Rhode Island’s constitutional system made G.O.P. control of the Senate a necessity for Republican ascendancy. Therefore, from 1862 through 1919, Rhode Island experienced what is called “political mitosis” – the alteration of town boundaries to insure rural, Republican control of the Senate. As large immigrant workforces gathered in industrial villages along major waterways such as the Blackstone, the Woonasquatucket, the Pocasset, and the Pawtuxet, they threatened rural political ascendancy, especially after 1888 when the real estate requirement for naturalized citizens in state elections was removed by the Bourn Amendment. Accordingly, the political power of these industrial populations needed to be neutralized by boundary changes. Providence furnishes the most conspicuous example. From 1868 through 1919 the General Assembly caused Providence to experience eight re-annexations of land it had given to Cranston (1754) Johnston (1759) and North Providence (1765). These re­ accessions included South Providence, Washington Park, Elmwood, the West End, Olneyville, Manton, Mount Pleasant, Wanskuck, and the North End. Such adjustments kept Cranston, Johnston, and North Providence mostly rural and Republican.

By the federal census of 1920 these additions raised the population of Providence to 237,595, but it still had only one senator. At that date West Greenwich (population 367), Charlestown (759), Foster (905), and Narragansett (993) also had one senator each. Irish Democratic Congressman  George O’Shaunessy described the Senate as “a malign influence exerted by the abandoned farms of Rhode Island.”

The Providence mitosis differed from those of Central Falls and West Warwick where new towns were created. In 1895, Central Falls was set off from Lincoln and made not a town but a city because under Rhode Island law one had to pay taxes on real estate in order to vote for the powerful city council wherein municipal patronage and control was lodged. By the census of 1900 Lincoln with 19.36 square miles had a population 8,937 and tiny (1.32 square miles) industrial Central Falls had 18,167 residents.

In Kent County, immigrants from Catholic Ireland, French Canada, Italy, Portugal, and Poland congregated along the Pawtuxet River and came to outnumber the Protestant, Republican rural folk in eastern Warwick. The differences were ethno-cultural and socio-economic. As a result of Colonel Quinn’s initiative, the General Assembly approved the division of Warwick in order to safeguard Republican ascendancy in that influential original town. In return, Quinn got a vote in the Senate for his ethnic work without its restriction (as in the city of Central Falls) on the voting requirement for the town council, a body over which Quinn became the first president. After the division, Warwick, with 36.26 square miles, had a population of 13,481 with West Warwick registering a total of 15,461 in the federal census of 1920.

In 1956, the year of Patrick Quinn’s death at age eighty-six, Warwick was experiencing the phenomenon of suburbanization that changed its rural character. By the census of 2020, the City of Warwick outnumbered its offspring 82,823 to 31,113. In the presidential election of November 2024 several weeks prior to the plaque dedication, Warwick voted Democrat (Harris) while West Warwick voted Republican (Trump). To cite the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “There is nothing permanent except change.”

Dr. Patrick T. Conley is the President of the Heritage Harbor Foundation and Historian Laureate of Rhode Island.

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