History & Architecture

PPS Office & Meeting Hall

The PPS offices are located in the 1769 Old Brick School House (24 Meeting Street), a significant site of Providence’s educational history that has existed in numerous iterations since its original construction in 1769. A two-story, brick building in the Georgian style, the school house stands on a site that traces its colonial history back to 1636, when the land was first granted to William Carpenter, one of the 12 original proprietors of Providence along with Roger Williams. The school house is located on the ancestral lands of the Narragansett and Wampanoag nations. 

While not the first school house built in Providence, it is the oldest one still in existence and one of the earliest surviving brick school houses in the country. Since its construction by a group of education-minded citizens who intended to establish a public school system for the children of Providence, the building has existed in many forms: as an arsenal during the Revolutionary War; a primary and grammar school; classroom space for Brown University (at that point known as Rhode Island College) during the construction of University Hall; the first school for African-American children fully supported by the City of Providence; a sewing and cooking school for recently arrived immigrants; an open-air school for tubercular children; the original home of the Meeting Street School of the Society for Crippled Children and Adults in Rhode Island, now located on Eddy Street; and, since 1959, the offices of the Providence Preservation Society.

In 2021-23, PPS undertook a clean energy renovation of the building that serves as a model for how to balance historic preservation with energy infrastructure retrofits.

Resources:

OBSH Historic Structure Report: a report completed by Myron O. Stachiw in 2014 (large file, 8.6 MG)

Rhode Tour: an excellent tour of Rhode Island’s Black Heritage with a stop describing the Brick School House’s role in educating Providence’s African American children.

February 1960 PPS newsletter article on the acquisition of the Brick School House.