Our Mission
Sowams Heritage Area is dedicated to instilling a sense of stewardship and deep appreciation for the profound historical, cultural, and natural significance of the Sowams region on the northeastern watershed of Narragansett Bay. Here, the formation of the critical alliance between the Pokanoket Tribe and the Mayflower settlers, and the fracturing of that alliance that led to King Philip’s War, changed the course of history.
Through preservation, regional collaboration, community development, and experiential learning, we illuminate the pivotal events that happened on this landscape over centuries, providing a space for people to tell their own stories about the intricate interplay of people, land, and water that shaped our nation’s political, economic, and social heritage.
A Community-based Initiative
National Heritage Areas (NHAs) are designated by the U.S. Congress to recognize the region’s contribution to American history and culture. But that’s just the start. NHAs are grassroots, community-driven projects that leverage a region’s national significance to benefit all the communities in the region.
Sowams Heritage Area Project is led by a regional coalition of town planners, tourism entities, historical societies, environmentalists, Tribal leaders, and other volunteers from the nine towns and cities that today comprise the homeland of the Pokanoket Massasoit Ousamequin: Barrington, Bristol, East Providence, a portion of Providence, and Warren, RI, as well as Rehoboth, Seekonk, Somerset, and Swansea, MA.
Following the guidelines of the National Park Service, the Sowams Project team is currently conducting a comprehensive feasibility study for designation by Congress as a National Heritage Area. The draft report will be presented for public comment in the fall of 2024.
Sowams Stories: What happened here?
The Time and Place Where Two Worlds Met
From the time of the last glacial retreat, approximately 12,000 years ago, Sowams or “south country” has proven to be a bountiful resource for those making this area their home. The original Algonquian people were known as the Pokanoket, which refers to the “place of the cleared land,” and later as the Wampanoag, “people of the early light.”
The first European to meet the Pokanoket was Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1520-24. When European traders began arriving in North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, they brought devastating communicable diseases that wiped out more than 75% of New England’s entire Indigenous population by the early 1600s.
Though he had met briefly many times with European explorers and traders, the Pokanoket Massasoit (Chief) Ousamequin (Yellow Feather), first met the Pilgrims in what is now Plymouth, MA in 1621, which was 40 miles from his home on the northeastern watershed of Narragansett Bay. Weakened by the pandemic and threatened by the Narragansetts across the bay, Ousamequin entered into a non-aggression alliance with the Plymouth Colony in March of 1621.
The Causes and Consequences of King Philip’s War
During this 50-year peaceful relationship with the English, the Massasoit allowed Pokanoket land to be used for farming by colonists in exchange for money, tools, guns and other items that the English supplied. However, as more settlers encroached onto Sowams land, it became clear to both Ousamequin and his sons, Wamsutta (Alexander) and Metacom (Philip), that they were losing control of their land and culture.
Following the death of Massasoit Ousamequin in 1661, the Tribal alliance with the colonists unraveled disastrously. In June 1675 the King Philip’s War broke out in Sowams under the leadership of Ousamequin’s son Metacom, known to the English as King Philip.
For 14 months the fierce conflict raged across New England, encompassing nearly all the Tribes in the region against the allied English colonists. The war, which ended with the death of Philip in August 1676, resulted in the highest per-capita fatality rate in North American history.
After the war, the confiscation of Tribal lands and the removal or enslavement of the Pokanoket and other Tribes, set a dangerous precedent for the subjugation of Native Americans in the westward expansion across North America
Freedom of Conscience and the Birth of Rhode Island
As settlers moved westward fleeing communities that were governed by strict sectarian principles, Sowams played a role in establishing one of the pillars of democracy – religious toleration, the precursor to the separation of church and state.
Baptist leaders like Roger Williams and John Myles, and Quaker congregations in Somerset and Providence, championed religious toleration. Williams was the most visible architect of this concept, believing in “a true and absolute soul- freedom to all the people of the land impartially,” not distinguishing by gender, age, or race.
When expelled from the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1630s, Williams was saved from winter starvation by the Pokanoket Massasoit and then granted land by the Narragansett chief sachem, Canonicus. In turn, Williams championed Indigenous rights and attempted, and failed, at diplomacy in King Philip’s War, despite his participation in enslavement after the war.
Williams enshrined the concepts of freedom of conscience and separation of church and state in Rhode Island’s charter.
The Era of Enslavement and Slave Trading
The history of enslavement in Sowams flows from the story of cultural contact, colonial settlement, and global trade in New England. English settlers enslaved Indigenous and African people from 1619 through the legal abolition of slavery in 1781 in Massachusetts and 1842 in Rhode Island.
The transatlantic slave trade generated huge wealth for those who participated in it and tragedy and dislocation for those who were subjected to it. Traveling on ships that were built in Rhode Island, more than 100,000 enslaved Africans were forcibly removed from their homeland. People from the Pokanoket Tribe and other Tribes that fought the English were also sold into slavery, and most were shipped to the Caribbean to work on English sugar plantations.
Despite a fierce abolition movement that arose in response to the immorality and inhumanity of enslavement, the industries that were established to support and supply the slave trading ships– including shipwrights, food suppliers, rum distilleries, and more–buoyed the economy of the entire Sowams region for more than a hundred years.
The Interplay of Land and Water
This place where land meets water on the northeastern watershed of Narragansett Bay has defined the history, cultural identities and economic evolution of Sowams for millennia. Providing access to both fresh and salt water, its network of estuaries continues to support commercial and recreational shell-fishing. Rivers and streams powered the early grist mills for farming communities and the textile mills that spurred the Industrial Revolution.
Innovative maritime industries have galvanized the Sowams economy, driven by waves of immigrant communities from colonial English and Dutch merchants to Azorean and Portuguese craftsmen. Shipbuilding enterprises started on tributaries in the forests where timber was harvested and floated to the shipyards. Steam power brought laborers from the farms to the factories along deep-water ports where manufactured goods were shipped abroad. On the cusp of the 20th Century, the Herreshoff brothers in Bristol, R.I. designed state-of-the-art steam boats and innovated the mass-production of racing yachts, including eight America’s Cup winners.
The 21st Century maritime trades have spawned advanced composite manufacturing for aerospace, arts and architecture, and blue technologies.
Over the past decades, the citizens of Sowams have developed a conservation ethic to preserve and protect open space and watershed, which has become even more critical with climate change.