Map of Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 2026

Pawtucket’s name comes from the Algonquian word for “river fall,” and its best known landmark, Old Slater Mill, stands on the banks of the Blackstone River. This map of Pawtucket prints Old Slater Mill with the Downtown Pawtucket Historic District and the Quality Hill Historic District, the Pitcher-Goff House and the Cape Verdean Museum, and the parks, Veterans Memorial Park and Wilkinson Park, from Darlington to Fairlawn.

Pawtucket is in Providence County, on the Blackstone River just north of Providence, with Seekonk and Attleboro, Massachusetts, on its eastern edge.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief around Veterans Memorial Park and Wilkinson Park comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data. The streets come from Census Bureau files, down to East Pawt Industrial Highway, and the Census Bureau puts the city at 9.0 square miles, 8.7 of them land. Old Slater Mill and the Pitcher-Goff House are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Pawtucket had 75,604 people at the 2020 census, the fourth-largest city in Rhode Island.

The falls

Native people caught salmon and smaller fish at the falls, and the town page says this was one of the most populous places in New England before Europeans came. Joseph Jenckes Jr., from Lynn, Massachusetts, bought about 60 acres near Pawtucket Falls in 1671 and set up a sawmill and forge. By 1775 the settlement was making muskets, linseed oil, potash and ships, and Oziel Wilkinson’s family ran an iron forge turning out anchors, nails, screws, farm tools and cannons. For a long time the river split the place in two: the land west of it belonged to North Providence, and the land east of it to Rehoboth, Massachusetts. The east side became a Massachusetts town in 1828, moved into Rhode Island on March 1, 1862, after a border dispute of some 225 years, took in the west side in 1874, and finally became one city in 1886.

Old Slater Mill

Samuel Slater learned the cotton business as an apprentice in Belper, England, and came to America, where Moses Brown of Providence hired him to build a working set of machines to spin cotton yarn by water power. The machines, the dam, the waterwheel and the mill were finished in 1793. Its page calls it the first water-powered cotton spinning mill in America to use Richard Arkwright’s system. Slater married Hannah Wilkinson, Oziel’s daughter, in 1791, and Hannah Slater, an inventor in her own right, is named by some sources as the first American woman to receive a patent. The mill and the area around it also saw women weavers walk out in May 1824, in what the town page calls the first factory strike in the United States; it ended in a compromise. Old Slater Mill became the very first property listed on the National Register in 1966, a National Historic Landmark the same day, and it opened as a museum in 1955 with the Wilkinson Mill of 1810 and 1811 and the Sylvanus Brown House beside it. It joined the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park in 2014, and the National Park Service acquired the mill in 2021. Pawtucket keeps a sister-town tie with Belper.

Downtown and Quality Hill

By the 1920s Pawtucket was a prosperous mill town with half a dozen movie theaters and two dozen hotels. The Downtown Pawtucket Historic District covers 50 buildings on 14 acres, most built between 1871 and 1930, when Pawtucket grew into the second-largest city in the state behind Providence. Among them are the Pawtucket Times Building, the Pawtucket Post Office and the Deborah Cook Sayles Public Library, and the district joined the National Register in 2007.

East of the river, Quality Hill grew as an upper-class neighborhood from the 1850s to the 1940s, with Walcott Street as its spine, and it holds the Pawtucket Congregational Church, Saint Raphael Academy and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church. The Quality Hill Historic District joined the National Register in 1984. The Pitcher-Goff House, at 58 Walcott Street, was built in 1840 for the cotton manufacturer Elias B. Pitcher, and the industrialist Lyman B. Goff later gave its interior Queen Anne woodwork in 1881. It’s since served the Red Cross and the Boy Scouts, and in 1970 it became the first home of the Rhode Island Children’s Museum; it joined the National Register in 1976.

Around Pawtucket

Slater Park, the city’s oldest and largest, covers 197 acres along the Ten Mile River in Darlington, with an original Looff carousel and the Daggett House of 1685, the oldest house in Pawtucket. Veterans Memorial Park, 20 acres in Fairlawn, has athletic fields, a playground and an outdoor pool. Many Pawtucket families came from across the old Portuguese world, among them a significant Cape Verdean community, and the city celebrates with a Greek Festival, Dragon Boat Races, a Colombian festival and a September arts festival. Hasbro has its headquarters here. And McCoy Stadium was the home of the Pawtucket Red Sox, who in 1981 played and won the longest game in professional baseball history, 33 innings against Rochester, with Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs on the field.

This map of Pawtucket is a good choice for an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of a mill city on the Blackstone. KNOWOL made it in 2026 for people who call Pawtucket home, from Darlington to Fairlawn, 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 Pawtucket map.

Sources

• Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Wikipedia
• Slater Mill, Wikipedia
• Hannah Slater, Wikipedia
• Downtown Pawtucket Historic District, Wikipedia
• Quality Hill Historic District (Pawtucket, Rhode Island), Wikipedia
• Pitcher-Goff House, Wikipedia
• Slater Park, Wikipedia
• Pawtucket Red Sox, Wikipedia