Fields Point

For the peninsula in South Carolina, see Fields Point, South Carolina.

Fields Point (also spelled Field's Point) is a historic park in the Washington Park neighbourhood of Providence, Rhode Island jutting into Narragansett Bay near the Providence River and Route 95.^[1]

Thomas Field's house, ca. 1690, on Fields Point, a vernacular stone-ender that is now demolished.

History

The point was named after William Field, a British colonist who settled in Providence with an acreage and house on what is now South Main Street. In the 19th century, Fields Point Farm, a 37-acre (150,000 m²) park, became the city's major recreational area until Roger Williams Park was created in 1871.^[2] Visitors came to the point to visit Colonel Atwell's Clam House, Edgewood Beach, The Washington Park Yacht Club, and Kerwin's Beach.^[2]

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US Maritime Commission selected Fields Point as a location for a shipyard as part of the Emergency Shipbuilding Program. Much of the existing structures were removed for wartime construction. The yard was eventually taken over by the Walsh-Kaiser Company. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, one of the piers of the former shipyard was used to house a US Naval Reserve center, with the submarine USS Lionfish berthed there as a training vessel from 1960 until circa 1970; it is now preserved a few miles away at Battleship Cove, Fall River, Massachusetts. The facility is now a (combined Army, Navy, Marine) Armed Forces Reserve Center.

In the 1950s, Providence started using Fields Point as a landfill, eventually connecting it with nearby Starve Goat Island.^[2] In the 1960s, entrepreneur Melvin Berry started "bar, marina, swim club, amusement park, bowling alley, drive-in theatre, indoor ice skating rink and a nightly Hawaiian dance show" in Fields Point.^[2] In the mid-to-late 1960s, Fields Point was also used as an operations base for high-speed testing between Westerly and Boston of the gas-turbine Turbo Train,^[3] and later served as a storage site for the trainsets after September 1976.^[4]

In 1973, Johnson & Wales University established a facility in Fields Point; by 2001, the university leased land to Save The Bay for an educational center.^[2] In late 2012, a three-turbine wind farm was installed at Fields Point to provide energy for the wastewater treatment plant.^[5]

See also

• Chemical Building, Fields Point Sewage Treatment Plant
• Return Sludge Pumping Station, Fields Point Sewage Treatment Plant