i am in front of the cottage of betsy williams the great great granddaughter of roger williams the founder of rhode island and this ground is a very interesting very old she built her carriage in 1773 year after rhode islanders burned gaspee the hated british british ship that was uh used to enforce taxation and what many believe that 1772 burning gaspee was the beginning of american revolution so a year later here betsy built her cottage so let's take a look so as we approach here to the grounds where betsy williams and her sister lived they lived here till 1871 uh in which here they betsy bequeathed the property of 102 acres and the cottage to the city of providence which became the foundation of roger williams park so it's very interesting place here let's take a closer look it's fully restored as you can see let's see what the plug says there we go yep 102 acres and then the actual park con consists of 430 acres but this was the foundation of the roger williams park 102 acres that betsy williams donated to the city of providence look at this enormous tree so it is on a hill which is interesting they had a nice view let's take a closer look let's see what's on the other side that's the other side of the cottage let's peek inside the windows let's see if we can see anything on the inside i don't know here's a closer look at this massive tree right next to betsy williams house
as you can see there is pretty nice view from that hill but right behind right next to the cow the cottage is roger williams himself let's take a closer look so there is several monuments of roger williams and my understanding is they never knew what he looked like so his face i know in one of the monuments i don't know if it's on this one is the face of ted williams the baseball the famous baseball slugger roger williams arrived in boston 11 years after the pilgrims landed at plymouth so he arrived on february 5th 1631 with his wife mary so he preached at first at salem then at plymouth he was a chaplain and he was fairly controversial figure because he thought the state and the church should be separated from each other he was controversial enough that the locals wanted to ship him back to england so he had to run away and he did run away to rhode island where he purchased the land from narragansett chiefs canonicals and mayan tsunami and named his settlement providence in thanks to god so he made actually two trips back to england during his lifetime the first one was in june or july 1643 was to obtain a charter for his colony to forestall the attempt of neighboring colonies to take over providence he returned to the providence plantations in narragansett bay which incorporated providence newport and portsmouth during this voyage he produced his best know non-literary work key into the languages of america published 1643.He returned to england um in order to have the charter confirmed so he had to he was basically defending rhode island from the neighboring massa