Rhode Island

9 places with something worth saying about them.

• Foster, Rhode Island Foster's town hall was built in 1796 and the town still meets in it, making it the oldest government meeting house of its kind in the country.
• Marble House Alva Vanderbilt got this fifty-room marble palace as a birthday present, and later used its lawn for women's suffrage rallies.
• Mount Hope Bay raids A British ship named after the general who ordered the raid ran aground, then got shot to pieces by the townspeople it came to attack.
• Old Furnace State Park Horseshoes for George Washington's army came out of a furnace here, built from iron ore dug out of swamps.
• Providence College A fifteen-year-old Judy Garland sold her own autographs on a Providence sidewalk to help pay for a college dormitory.
• Scituate Reservoir Rhode Island's largest lake was made by drowning five villages and knocking down nearly twelve hundred buildings.
• Seekonk Speedway The same family has run this quarter-mile oval since 1946, and once flooded it for boat races.
• Statue of Christopher Columbus (Johnston, Rhode Island) This bronze Columbus is a copy of a statue once cast from thirty thousand ounces of sterling silver, which was later melted down.
• The Breakers The seventy-room Vanderbilt mansion was built with no wooden parts at all, and its boiler sits buried under the front lawn.