Note: This originally appeared in the Providence Post, PPS’s weekly newsletter.
This edition of the Providence Post is devoted to the history and life of Shakespeare’s Head, one of Providence’s oldest surviving colonial buildings, which the Providence Preservation Society owned from 2015 to 2025 (the building’s sale to the Civis Foundation was finalized last week). It includes a timeline of the site’s history, beginning with Narragansett stewardship and inhabitation of this land prior to colonial settlement in the 1630s and a chronology of the free and enslaved people, businesses, and civic organizations that made homes in the building from its 1772 construction through the present.
This issue includes a few of the key building histories that have shaped public understanding of this site and what it represents, and documentation written by the landscape architect Lalla Searle during the 20+ years of her devoted stewardship of the garden, which began in the 1990s. It also includes photographs and paintings shared by some of the artists who had studio space in Shakespeare’s Head over the last decade and reflections on the building shared by people who worked in it or worked on it over the last 40 years.
As you will see, this is a building that has been loved and that has held deep meaning for so many in the city across generations. You will also see that this is a building with a history as complicated and challenging as Providence’s own history – and that some parts of its history have been elevated while other parts and other people have been obscured and omitted. Making history is an ongoing process that is never completed because historians bring their own interests, assumptions, and biases into the work of uncovering and interpreting the past. As these interests, assumptions, and biases change, the stories we tell about the past change as well. Preservation is part of this cycle because preservation relies upon research – research informs our thinking about which places are valuable enough to warrant our attention and resources, why they are valuable, and for whom.
Shakespeare’s Head has been documented and interpreted by many generations of scholars over the last one hundred years, including the noted Providence architectural and social historians John Hutchins Cady (1881-1967) and William H. Jordy (1917-1997). The property was documented as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey in the 1930s (HABS is understood to be the country’s first federally directed preservation program) and it is included in the Society of Architectural Historians’ national encyclopedia of significant works of American architecture.
The HABS documents include a basement floor plan that labels two separate areas as a “probable slave pit,” but other than this reference, which remains ambiguous, none of these sources note the fact that Shakespeare’s Head was home to enslaved people. Two women were enslaved by John and Amey Carter at Shakespeare’s Head named Ingow and Fanny (a mother and daughter) for nearly twenty years, and Primus King, a man enslaved by Newport-based Benjamin King, worked on the building’s printing press. These stories were uncovered by the historian Traci Picard in 2024 in the report that is published in this issue of the Providence Post.
Looking back, we can start to see how generations before us ascribed different meaning to this place over time, and how these shifts in meaning have shaped the property’s use and the social groups who have worked hard to preserve it. Members of the Shakespeare’s Head Association (SHA) who came together to save the building from demolition in 1937 were participating in one of the first modern waves of preservation activity in the United States, when colonial homes and sites in particular were the focus of civic organizing and advocacy (the restoration of colonial Williamsburg was begun in 1926 and it opened to the public in 1935). This impulse guided the SHA’s restoration efforts inside the building and its vision for the exterior landscape, which was transformed into a Colonial Revival garden in 1939.
To many historians and community members today, the building’s entanglement with slavery and its connection to Providence’s industrial, labor and immigration histories in the 19th century open up a new way to understand the building’s significance, meaning and relevance. At some point in the future, historians may become interested in preservation theories and methods under the SHA and later, PPS, in the 20th and 21st centuries as they were articulated through the work that was carried out in this building.
The Civis Foundation’s Center for Reflective History becomes only the sixth owner of Shakespeare’s Head. The building will be renovated over the next two years and is slated to open to the public in 2027 with programs that bring together social history, civic engagement, and site-based storytelling. An easement held by Preserve Rhode Island protects elements of the building’s interior and historic landscape, and its location in the College Hill Historic District ensures the preservation of the building’s front-facing façade.
This issue of the Providence Post is a tribute to the people who lived and labored in Shakespeare’s Head – some of whom have been documented prolifically and others whose lives are only just starting to come into focus. This is a place that has many stories left to tell.
Marisa Brown / PPS Executive Director / mbrown@ppsri.org