Catch a brass ring on the Crescent Park Carousel in Riverside and you’ve earned yourself a free ride. The Crescent Park Carousel is printed on this map of East Providence, along with Riverside and Rumford, the Rumford Historic District, the Phillipsdale Historic District, Squantum Woods Park, the Hunt House Museum, Bullocks Point and Bullocks Point Avenue.
East Providence is in Providence County, between the Providence and Seekonk rivers on the west and Seekonk, Massachusetts, on the east.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around the Crescent Park Carousel and Squantum Woods Park comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to Bullocks Point Avenue, and the Census Bureau puts the city at 16.6 square miles, 13.4 of them land. The Rumford Historic District and the Phillipsdale Historic District are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. East Providence had 47,139 people at the 2020 census, the fifth-largest city in Rhode Island.
Rumford
Rumford, the northern part of the city, has had its own identity since the Newman Congregational Church formed a separate parish there in 1643. It’s been part of three towns in two states, first Rehoboth and then Seekonk in Massachusetts, and since 1862 East Providence in Rhode Island. The name comes from baking powder. Eben Norton Horsford, a Harvard chemist who held the Rumford Chair of Physics, developed the first practical calcium phosphate baking powder and in 1859 co-founded the Rumford Chemical Works here, named for his benefactor, Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. Rumford Baking Powder was made at the works, and when the place got a post office it took the name. About 150 acres of the old center joined the National Register in 1980 as the Rumford Historic District, the historic heart of old Seekonk and the 19th-century center of East Providence. In Rumford, too, the Wannamoisett Country Club opened in 1898 on land rented from the chemical works and hosted the 1931 PGA Championship.
Phillipsdale
Phillipsdale is a mill village on the Seekonk River that grew up around the Richmond Paper Company mill, built from 1883 to 1887. The historic district keeps 75 units of worker housing, five houses older than the mill, the oldest from around 1750, Omega Pond, which was the mill pond, and the Omega Pond Railroad Bridge. Its page says Phillipsdale was the largest source of jobs in East Providence between 1893 and 1910. The district joined the National Register in 2011.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Places: Riverside, Rumford, Phillipsdale, Kent Heights, Squantum, Silver Spring, Armington Corner, Carpenters Corner and East Providence Center.
Streets and roads: Summit St, Forbes St, Rounds Ave, Merritt Rd, Cove St, Orlo Ave, Estrell Dr and Beverly Rd.
Riverside
Riverside, in the south end along Narragansett Bay, was called Cedar Grove until 1878, and it began as farming and fishing country; many streets south of Lincoln Avenue are named for trees. Riversiders harvested clams, quahogs and oysters from the beaches and nearby waters, and they were known as “clam-diggers.” In the late 1800s summer visitors came for the hotels, guest houses and shore dinner halls, and for Crescent Park, an amusement park its neighborhood page calls the “Coney Island of the East,” with shore dinners, the Alhambra Ballroom where big bands played, and a midway of roller coasters and games. The park closed in the late 1970s.
The carousel stayed. Charles I. D. Looff built it in 1895 and set it up at Crescent Park, and when he moved his factory there in 1905 he used it as a showpiece where customers picked out horses for their own rides; most of its figures were carved between 1905 and 1910. Its platform holds sixty-one horses, a camel, two coaches and two chariots, under a hand-carved bald eagle atop the center pole, and a German band organ plays the music. When the park closed, local groups pushed the city to keep the carousel from the auction block, and it still runs every summer. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1987, and the General Assembly proclaimed it “the State Jewel of American Folk Art.” Its page calls it one of the only carousels in America where riders can play the ring game.
Bullock Cove lies between East Providence and Barrington, and Riverside sits on its northern shore, with homes and three marinas on the water. In Little Neck Cemetery, set aside by Rehoboth in 1655 near the cove, lie Captain Thomas Willett, the first English mayor of New York City, and Elizabeth Tilley Howland, who came over on the Mayflower as a child. The old District 6 Schoolhouse on Willett Avenue, built around 1870 and now the Riverside Girl Scout House, is the oldest school still standing in East Providence. The East Bay Bike Path runs through Riverside on its way between Providence and Bristol.
Around East Providence
East Providence has large communities whose families came from mainland Portugal, the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde, and about 24 percent of residents report Portuguese ancestry. Bradley Hospital, founded here in 1931, was the nation’s first psychiatric hospital just for children, its city page says. Meredith Vieira, the television host, and Jennifer Lee, who wrote and co-directed Frozen, were born in East Providence, and so were the baseball player Davey Lopes and Arunah Shepherdson Abell, who published The Baltimore Sun. Squantum Woods Park and the Hunt House Museum are on the map as well.
This map of East Providence is a good choice for an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a bayside city with a famous carousel. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call East Providence home, from Riverside to Rumford, 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 East Providence map.
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