Cranston stretches from Pawtuxet and Edgewood on the water to Meshanticut State Park on its western side. This map prints all of those names, along with the Edgewood Historic District, the Oak Lawn Village Historic District, the Governor William Sprague Mansion, Itri Park, Scary Acres and Phenix Avenue.
Cranston is in Providence County, just south of the city of Providence.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Meshanticut State Park and Itri Park comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Phenix Avenue, and the Census Bureau puts the city at 29.9 square miles, 1.4 of them water. The Edgewood Historic District and the Oak Lawn Village Historic District are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Cranston had 82,934 people at the 2020 census, which makes it the second-largest city in Rhode Island, and the state’s center of population falls inside it.
Pawtuxet
Pawtuxet means “Little Falls” in the Narragansett language, and the Sononoce Pawtuxet band lived here first. In 1638 Roger Williams bought the land from Providence south to the Pawtuxet River from the Narragansett, and William Arnold, William Harris, William Carpenter and Zachariah Rhodes settled along the river meadows. Stephen Arnold built a gristmill at the Pawtuxet Falls and laid out the Arnold Road, now Broad Street, to meet the Pequot Trail toward Connecticut, and Benedict Arnold, of the same family, became the first governor of Rhode Island under the charter of 1663. For decades the settlers couldn’t agree on a name for a town of their own, and in 1754 the General Assembly made the Town of Cranston out of the part of Providence north of the river. Historians debate whether it was named for Governor Samuel Cranston or his grandson Thomas, then speaker of the Rhode Island House. Cranston lost much of its land to its neighbors in the 1800s and became a city on March 10, 1910.
Pawtuxet Village, split between Cranston and Warwick where the Pawtuxet River meets the Providence River, grew in the 18th century into a busy harbor with mills on the falls and shipyards for the coastal and West Indies trade. In 1772 Rhode Island patriots attacked and burned the British revenue schooner Gaspee there, an act the village page calls “the first organized military action towards independence.” Cranston and Warwick have celebrated it every June since 1965 with Gaspee Days, a parade on the second Saturday and a reenactment of the burning at Pawtuxet Park. In the 1800s the textile firm of Christopher and William Rhodes dominated the village, and it changed from a shipping port into a mill village with mills at both ends of the falls. Later the Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet dance hall and canoe center drew crowds from Providence by trolley.
Edgewood
Just north of Pawtuxet, Edgewood is a neighborhood of broad, tree-lined streets and big Victorian houses on the Providence line, with the Edgewood Yacht Club on the Providence River. The Edgewood Historic District-Taft Estate Plat runs between Windsor Road, Narragansett Bay, Circuit Drive and Broad Street. It was the last piece of the country estate of the industrialist Orray Taft to be divided, laid out in 1904 and built up mostly between 1905 and 1930, and some of its houses were designed by Norman Isham. It joined the National Register in 2003 and grew in 2014 to take in part of the Stillhouse Cove Reservation.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Places: Edgewood, Howard, Oaklawn, Knightsville, Meshanticut, Garden City, Eden Park and Stillhouse Cove.
Streets and roads: Niantic Ave, Field Ave, Laten Knight Rd, Hope Rd, Park Ave, Curtis St, Wellington Ave, Elmwood Ave and Silo Dr.
The Spragues and the Fenners
The Governor William Sprague Mansion, at 1351 Cranston Street, was built around 1790, and three generations of Spragues lived there. Two Rhode Island governors were born in the house, William Sprague III and his nephew William Sprague IV. The family started the Sprague Print Works in 1808, later the Cranston Print Works, which the mansion’s page calls the only continuously operating textile printing company in America. William Sprague IV fought at the First Battle of Bull Run while he was the sitting governor. Amasa Sprague enlarged the house in 1864 with a wide hall and a winding staircase for entertaining, and it’s been on the National Register since 1971. The Cranston Historical Society runs it as a museum today, and two Civil War cannons from the governor’s regiment sit in its carriage house.
The Thomas Fenner House, a stone-ender farmhouse, was built in 1677 by Captain Arthur Fenner for his son Thomas. Its page calls it the oldest surviving house in the Providence Plantations part of the state.
Oak Lawn and Meshanticut
Oak Lawn, in southwest Cranston, was Searle’s Corner until it took its new name in 1872, and the Edward Searle House there dates to 1677. Its page says the New England May Breakfast tradition began here in 1865, when members of the Oak Lawn Baptist Church raised money for local Civil War veterans. Herman Melville’s 1855 novel Israel Potter is based on the life of a Revolutionary War soldier who grew up on a farm near Oak Lawn, and in the 1950s archaeologists found soapstone bowls here that are more than 10,000 years old. The stretch along Wilbur Avenue from Natick Road to Exchange Street joined the National Register in 1977 as the Oak Lawn Historic District.
Meshanticut, on the city’s western side, takes its name from a Narragansett word meaning “place of woods.” Meshanticut State Park surrounds Meshanticut Lake, where people fish in summer and skate in winter, and a road around the lake is a favorite walking loop. John Dean gave the land to the Metropolitan Parks Commission in 1910; his family had owned that part of Cranston since the 1870s. Itri Park and Scary Acres are printed on the map as well.
Around Cranston
Many Italian American families in Cranston descend from people who came from Itri, Italy, in the early 1900s and settled mostly in Knightsville. St. Mary’s Feast, inspired by the Feast of the Madonna della Civita in Itri, has been held every July since 1905, and in 2000 Cranston and Itri became sister cities. The first Del’s Lemonade stand opened in Cranston in 1948. Allan Fung, mayor from 2009 to 2021, was the state’s first Asian American mayor.
This map of Cranston would suit an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a city that runs from the Gaspee’s harbor to the woods of Meshanticut. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Cranston home, from Pawtuxet to Edgewood, and it shows the city as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Cranston map.
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