(lively music) - [Narrator] Coming up next, we'll visit the Rhode Island State House, explore some of its architectural gems, and discover some of the many treasures that are accessible to all, including a special exhibit for one of our nation's most important documents.

Then later, a close look at some of the precious artifacts at the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society.

This is "Treasures Inside the Museum."

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) For more than a century, the white Georgian marble building sitting on top of Smith Hill in Providence has been home to Rhode Island's government.

We often hear and read about what goes on inside this magnificent structure, but seldom allow ourselves a moment to reflect or appreciate the majesty of the edifice itself.

In every direction there is architectural brilliance, both in the grand spaces and in the smallest details.

You can see it in the way the light splashes across the walls and gives definition to sculptural features.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) The House and Senate chambers are each unique and grandiose, but the grandest of all spaces is undoubtedly just inside the main entrance.

(gentle music continues) - The Rotunda is beautiful from the outside, as all Rhode Islanders know, even more beautiful on the inside.

And if you take a look at the fourth largest self-supporting dome in the world, you are taken in by it, and you're taken in by the artwork that surrounds the Rotunda, which basically tells the story of Rhode Island from Roger Williams first coming here, to the story of religious freedom in the colony, and then the state.

The pillars, the four pillars that hold this self-supporting dome, which represent justice, education, commerce, and literature.

And there's a woman painted to represent each of those, and it's actually the artist's wife, Victor Zucchi's wife.

And she looks the same, except for her eye color.

(gentle music continues) One of the most fascinating things about this building is the chandelier.

The chandelier is magnificent, 162 bulbs.

And when McKim, Mead & White built the building, it was one of the first public buildings in the country that had electricity.

And so that's why across the building you'll see that the light bulbs are exposed, and they're exposed to show off the fact that this is an electrified building.

And when Rhode Island built this magnificent structure, we were the wealthiest state in the nation, per capita.

So the gold leaf, which was hand-applied, is an example of that, as is the Italian marble and the Georgia marble.

- [Narrator] From east to west, you can look across the Rotunda and clearly see from the Senate Chamber directly into the House, and from north to south, a view from the library to the Governor's office.

- In 1901, this State House opened for the very first General Assembly session, and the library was open at the same time.

And the designers and architects, McKim, Mead & White, really gave the library a place of prominence within the building.

So we're on the second floor across from the Governor's State Room, and adjacent to the House and Senate chambers, with the idea that the prominent location of giving the public access to the work of government really symbolizes the role of citizen democracy.

- [Narrator] The Rhode Island State Library welcomes everyone to use the resources here.

The stunning aesthetic of the space is only matched by the depth of the collections waiting to be explored by researchers.

- We're totally open to the public.

Last year we got over 30,000 visitors, partly people who are coming through for the State House tours or coming to events at the library.

But generally, we are considered what's called a legislative library.

So we're supporting the work of government, and most people are coming here to do research into state legislative laws, public acts, resolves, regulations.

They wanna know about different state agencies, and that could be either historical or really contemporary.

We do work to support policy development, both for the public, for our citizen advocates, as well as people within the state government.

So they might say, "We wanna know what other states or the federal government have in policy related to certain topics, and how that relates to what Rhode Island has in place, or doesn't have in place."

And then, you know, we get lots of questions, I think, from the general public who don't know how to navigate state government.

And they know that the library is a friendly place to help them do that.

- [Narrator] The shelves include federal and state archives, government manuals and budgets, and Rhode Island acts and resolves dating back to colonial times.

- We are a special collections library, but open to the public.

So the materials just need to be used here.

And I've pulled a couple of our most historic items.

For example, this is our earliest item from the federal government.

It goes back to recording the 1789 congressional session, the very first session of U.S.

Congress.

For the state of Rhode Island, our oldest item is the 1750 Acts and Resolves of the General Assembly.

So prior to that, they were all handwritten in ledgers, and those are over at State Archives.

But we do have materials that we hold here, and they're very open and accessible to the public.

So we love to have people come and visit them.

Here's our very earliest printed volume.

It's the 1750 Acts and Resolves for the state of Rhode Island.

You can see it's in pretty good condition, given its age.

This was somebody's personal copy, we're not sure whose, but they have their hand annotations written, their notes from the item from that assembly.

And that was in Newport in May 1st, 1750.

And one of the things that I think is really neat about these volumes is that you can actually see history happening within them.

So for example, at the very end of the entry, they would close the session.

And in this case, because it's colonial government, you can see that they're closing it with the phrase "God save the King."

But if you look at our volume for July 1776, again, you can see how government is changing in the record itself.

We open up, and in the very first pages you see that they are signing on to the Declaration of Independence.

They're announcing that they're gonna read it in public in Newport the very next day, that they've asked for it to be printed and distributed around the state.

Within this General Assembly session, they're authorizing the Continental currency.

They are declaring that loyalists are traitors and will be imprisoned.

So you're seeing the acts of independence happening in the moment.

And then as they close the session, you can see it ends with "God save the United States" for the very first time.

So objects like this are in our State Library that anybody can access.

Come and see them, and engage with both the history of our state as well as contemporary government as well.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The halls of the State House are like a gallery.

There is contemporary art, traditional sculptures, and sacred records.

Every governor has an official portrait made, and those paintings collectively make for a sort of timeline of state leaders, familiar faces, and names from the past.

The State Room just outside of the Governor's office also features a series of important paintings, including one by a renowned artist displayed in a prominent position.

- Well, what we have here in our State Capitol is one of two monumental-sized portraits of our founding father and first president, George Washington.

On March 1st, 1800, the Rhode Island General Assembly commissioned that two portraits be created to recognize our founder and our first president.

So today what we have are the two original portraits, one at our State House here in Providence and the second at what we call the Old Colony House, the Newport state capitol building in Newport.

What's most important to recognize is that the painter, Gilbert Stuart, is a Rhode Island-born citizen.

He's born in what is today Kingston, Rhode Island.

His father operated a snuff-making business.

It failed, and then they relocated to Newport when he was a young boy.

In Newport, the family operated a retail business on the waterfront, but it also gave the young Gilbert Stuart an opportunity to learn the arts.

He was proficient in music, and he loved to draw.

One of the great folk tales that carries on to this day is the fact that at the time that Gilbert Stuart was living in pre-American Revolutionary War Newport, a significant percentage of the population were enslaved free Africans.

In fact, many of the Africans that were enslaved in Newport worked in trades.

And as a part of those trade skills, they had an intimate and extraordinarily important contribution to the economy.

One young enslaved man by the name of Neptune Thurston, who's enslaved in the household of Gardner Thurston, who's not only the pastor of the First Baptist Church, he's also a cooper or a barrel maker, and this young Neptune Thurston learns the art of not only making barrels, but carving onto those barrels images, images of parrots and hogs and different wildlife and animals.

So the folk story goes that a young Gilbert Stuart on the waterfront one day learned the art of caricatures and portraits from this Neptune Thurston that he would carry forward.

And by the end of the American Revolution, into the 18th century, he would become America's great portrait painter.

And his great contribution to Rhode Island are these two portraits of George Washington.

- [Narrator] Tucked away in a much less prominent location, inside the Secretary of State's office, is a smaller, less spectacular portrait, but whose place in our state's history is an important chapter worth recounting.

- This is a portrait of Reverend Mahlon Van Horne.

Mahlon Van Horne is the 30-year pastor of what is called the Union Colored Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island.

That church directly evolved from an African Union Society that was established in 1780, the first of its kind in America.

Today, that society, and later the church that it spawned, are part of the earliest free African organizations in America, here within Rhode Island at Newport.

Reverend Van Horne would go on to become a significant contributor to early civil rights, in not only Newport and Rhode Island, but across America.

In 1885, he was elected as the first person of color to the Rhode Island General Assembly.

The following year, he would help pass one of the earliest civil rights legislations in 1886.

Today, Reverend Van Horne is recognized as one of the most important political, religious, and civil rights leaders in 19th-century America.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The smallest of all the treasures at the State House is also one of the most unique.

It came as a gift from an American president, and marks an important milestone in our nation's list of accomplishments.

- This is Rhode Island's gift of the Goodwill lunar display, which was gifted by President Richard Nixon to each state and territory, as well as a number of countries, in 1970.

So following the Apollo 11 mission, which was the first manned mission to the moon, the display includes several small pieces of lunar regolith, which is essentially soil from the Sea of Tranquility, as well as a state flag which accompanied the astronauts on the voyage.

And it's considered sort of the rarest rock on Earth because it's not of Earth.

There's a very limited supply of moon rocks available.

And so this lunar regolith, while it's only 0.05 grams, is actually quite valuable in terms of research value as well as the provenance of these displays.

So we're really happy to have that in the library, as something that people can visit and get to see.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Perhaps the most impressive display of all is the Charter Room, a sort of museum within a museum.

The exhibit includes an early map, a compass, and timepiece that belonged to Roger Williams and, of most importance, a document that helped define who we are.

- The State Charter Museum on the first floor tells the story of the founding of Rhode Island, but the feature is the Charter itself, and it's in remarkable condition.

The Charter was attained by Roger Williams from King Charles II in 1663.

It is an unbelievable document.

So unbelievable that it served as our state constitution until 1842.

So all the other original colonies, after the Declaration of Independence, wrote their own constitution within 10 years.

And we did not do so until 1842, because this Charter was so groundbreaking.

It allowed for religious freedom, obviously.

It was the place where the wall of separation of church and state was erected in America.

But it also allowed for self-government, full self-government to elect not only the governor, but the members of the General Assembly.

It allowed for freedom of conscience, freedom of speech.

So it was really groundbreaking, not just here in America, but across the world.

And so that was replaced in 1842.

But Rhode Islanders and people from around the world, around the country, can visit that Charter, and take a look at the majesty really around that document.

(gentle music) (gentle music continue) I think Rhode Island is known as the birthplace of religious freedom in America.

This Charter charts that course, and we wanna make sure it's preserved correctly.

So the Charter Museum, because of its lighting, temperature control, the safety around the document itself, allows us to not only preserve the document, but make it accessible to the people.

- [Narrator] The Rhode Island State House, while serving its role as a government building, is also a sort of living museum, preserving and displaying historical artifacts, documents, and telling its story through architectural features.

(lively music) Just off the main road that passes through Bristol, Rhode Island, is an old stone building that is the current home to many of the town's historical artifacts and archives.

- The Bristol Historical and Preservation Society is a non-profit organization.

We were organized in 1936 to collect those things that pertains perpendicularly to Bristol and to promote the town's history.

- We seek to stimulate interest in the history of Bristol, Rhode Island through education and programming, And we're the memory keepers of Bristol.

We keep a collection of objects that speaks to the history that's been here in our town.

I think every town needs a memory keeper.

Every town needs to know where it's been in order to figure out where it's going in the future.

- [Narrator] The first thing visitors will notice here is the building itself.

- We are in the old jail.

Early on it was an 1828 jail.

There was actually one probably around the site beforehand.

But we were getting too big, and so we needed a new space.

And so they set up this one.

We actually ended up expanding at one point, so it started out with just the building back behind me.

And then in 1859, we had too many prisoners staying here and it needed to be expanded out into the space where it's right now.

And it ran until the '50s.

(gentle music) So we had a range of people who stayed here at the jail, and while there were definitely people who were debtors, we had people who were running into alcohol issues, we had some major cases that stayed here as well.

The most famous of them was Ephraim Avery.

He was minister that was working here in town, and he was accused of committing murder, killing a 30-year old woman, pregnant woman actually, that he had met a couple towns over.

He was never officially convicted of the actual crime itself.

But he was brought to trial at least twice.

And both times they did try to officially get him, and then he was chased out of every town he lived in in the area.

He ended up going and spending the rest of his life in Ohio.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Another part of this old jail was designed for a very different type of prisoner.

- We have two places that are called the dungeon cells.

They are more extreme cases.

And so they're more enclosed spaces, and they're not like this, you know, have any light or space kinda connected to them.

And that was for people who had hurt themselves or others while they were staying here, often kind of more extreme alcoholic issues, and things like that.

And we actually do have writing on the wall on a couple of them for people who were actually staying in them.

And we do have example of that.

It did have a space also at the bottom of it, might have had a kind of system for people who needed shackles or some way to contain themselves, again, from harming themselves or others.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] A curiosity cabinet here holds some unique fans and examples of mourning jewelry from the 19th century.

There is a legal ledger file cabinet, and a collection of oddities brought back to Bristol from around the world.

Other exhibits include rare firearms, some tiny books, and records from Rhode Island's building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Pieces like this can be easy to curate, but sometimes artifacts require unraveling a mystery.

- This artifact is a good example of how things come to us.

This is an artifact whose provenance we don't know.

The Historical Society has been in existence since 1936, and many people gave things to the Historical Society, and records were not always very well kept.

There was also a fire in our archives, which was originally at the Rogers Free Library, and the fire destroyed a number or our records.

So sometime when the origination did know where something came from, we don't any longer.

And that's something that we grapple with every day when we work with these artifacts.

So this object came to us as a scrap book.

Somebody had glued the articles on top of what turned out to be an old ship's log, and we found that out once we removed some of the articles.

But when we removed the articles, we discovered that what was underneath was a ship's log dating to 1837.

And the ship was out on a whaling voyage.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) So on this particular page we see two whales, which would have marked two specific different killings on the voyage.

The voyage is November 1837, and here, "Monday, November, 13th," sometimes the handwriting is tricky, "at 6:00 PM, struck the beforementioned whale and got one boat stow struck him."

That's like one little harpoon.

It's usually attached to a rope.

This is the Nantucket sleigh ride, for those who follow whaling.

You wanna channel you inner "Moby Dick" here on this one.

"And so the boat stow struck him again and killed him at 4:00 PM."

It takes a while to kill a whale.

"Took him alongside the boat, and commenced cutting at 6:00.

Stopped cutting for the night."

Again, it's a ship log.

"So heading to the south west laying by north west."

Then we start to get in to some of the illegibility of the scrap book that was placed over it.

So the next thing is a little harder to read.

But essentially what happens next, right here you see, "boiling middle part."

So this is where they take the blubber and they're boiling it down.

"Calm, and boiling at 6:00 AM.

Commenced cutting the heads of the whales.

Still calm."

Still a ship's log.

"At meridian finished the day's cut by observation."

And then some latitudes and longitudes.

So that's really interesting what's going on under all of these news sprints.

And this is a good example over here of what they pasted over it, what the scrap book was about.

And you can see it's clippings from magazines like "Harper's Bazaar."

Probably a little bit of the "Bristol Phoenix."

There's some reference to a Bristol event over here, a robbery, specifically.

And this all would have been covered with it.

This is what we were able to get off.

And this is the condition now that we need professionals to help us with to see if we can get more of this off so we can read what was happening underneath.

- [Narrator] There is a group of cannonballs here that was collected after the 1775 bombing of Bristol Harbor by the British ship HMS Rose.

They are a reminder of the importance of the local community's role in the Revolution.

The Historical and Preservation Society is also the custodian of collections from several notable local families.

- We are standing next to several objects that came from the Burnside Collection.

General Burnside had a summer home here in Bristol.

He died here on September 13, 1881.

After his death, there was an auction held at his farm and many Bristolians at the time went and attended the auction and went home with mementos of the general's.

And over the years, we have sort of become the magnet.

Every once in a while, something of General Burnside's finds its way here to the Historical Society.

We have his field desk here, which went through the Civil War with him.

This is his cavalry sword, which he would have worn.

We're lucky to have this.

This was one of the objects obviously in the auction.

About 14 years ago, somebody came in and they offered us Burnside's field glasses from when he was a colonel.

And it's actually engraved on the cover, Colonel Burnside.

This chair was actually not carried with him through the war.

It was actually in his summer home.

Those goose-neck carvings on the back of the chair.

On this side there's a very fancy B carved in, and gilded, for Burnside.

The letter you see on the desk, was written in 1863.

He was in New Bern, North Carolina.

And he's writing home to his family, I believe his mother and father, and his siblings.

We have the photographs of the general.

That's a cabinet photograph.

Very popular during the Civil War.

Many of the generals posed for pictures that were reproduced and sold to the public.

And the photograph of Mrs.

Burnside, this photograph was actually in the field desk when we got it.

So it is thought that he may have carried this photograph of his wife through the war.

- [Narrator] Other prominent family collections, including documents and textiles, are carefully preserved and cataloged.

But on special occasions, researchers and others can get a peek into the past.

- We have number of family collections that come from some of Bristol's longstanding and largest families.

This box of clothing is the wedding ensemble worn by Clara Diman DeWolf when she married A. Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff.

This is her dress and her shoes, and then this is Sidney's wedding vest.

When they were married, this is what he wore.

And this a good example, actually, not just of some of the family collections that we have here.

At the Historical Society we have many, many objects that pertained to the DeWolf family.

We also have many objects that pertained to the Herreshoff family.

Here are those two families coming together and marrying.

This particular dress, very fashionable for her wedding.

And there was extra fabric, so she had extra sleeves made.

You could swap the sleeves out, and have a different style of sleeve for the dress, as opposed to what's currently attached here.

And it has a different cuff, different buttons, and then this fabulous little piping with the gathering at the elbows, so you could bend your elbow comfortably.

And it makes for a tight fit while you sleeve is around you elbow, you could still bend your elbow if you kind of like.

The shoes are pretty fabulous.

There isn't a right and a left, and they're really just sweet and teeny little slippers, very delicate.

The point of the collections is to speak not just to the lives of these particularly large and important families, but also to speak too a little bit about the everyday life in Bristol.

- [Narrator] Uncovering and rediscovering lost chapters of local history, preserving important artifacts, and sharing with the community is all part of the ongoing commitment by everyone involved at the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society.

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