William Blackstone Monument

This sculpture, created by Peruko Ccopacatty, titled “Tolerance,” is an artistic resemblance of the Reverend William Blackstone. William Blackstone was an ordained Episcopal priest who, in 1623, agreed to serve as the clergyman for an expedition from England to America. They arrived in Weymouth, Massachusetts, but within two years, everyone else in the expedition had returned to England. William remained, living on the western edge of the Shawmut Peninsula, the land on which Boston was eventually built. He was there alone for five years before the Puritan migration to Massachusetts began. The Episcopalian Blackstone had a tenuous relationship with the Puritans, so in 1635 he moved 35 miles south to land that was called Pawtucket, in the Algonquian language, near the Great Tidal River named Kittacuck. The place where William made his home was then within the bounds of the Plymouth Colony, but is now in the town of Cumberland, Rhode Island. William was friendly with the Narragansett chiefs Miantonomi and Canonchet, and with the Wampanoag chiefs Massasoit and Metacomet until his death in 1675. More than three hundred years later Reverend Blackstone is memorialized by the river and its valley that now bear his name.