Voters axed Plantations from RI's name in 2020. Now, it will vanish from the State House.
It's taken nearly four years of study and deliberation, but Rhode Island now has a plan to physically remove the phrase "Providence Plantations" from most, although not all, places where it is inscribed at the State House.
The phrase, which was deemed antiquated or offensive by 53% of voters in 2020, has already been covered up with decals on plaques and signs throughout the 124-year-old building.
By early next year, Gov. Dan McKee's administration also hopes to make it disappear from:
The seal at the center of the marble State House rotunda
The granite seal in the State House's basement entrance used by employees, from top politicians to maintenance staff
The brass doors in the State House elevators
The wool rug in the State Room, the space where the governor holds big events and news conferences beneath Gilbert Stewart's famous portrait of George Washington
Brass plates in the lobby of the primary Smith Street entrance
How did Rhode Island get its border? It's a story with hundreds of years of bickering
How to remove the phrase has been a challenge
McKee took office four months after passage of the name change referendum and inherited the job of deciding what to do in places where the offending phrase could not be removed with a few taps on a keyboard, the stroke of a pen or a coat of paint.
Should the words be chiseled out of century-old stone, at significant cost, with no way to maintain the overall appearance of the historic structure it was on?
The ballot question that faced voters didn't address those details.
And so the McKee administration studied the issue. And studied it some more.
Finally, over the course of the last year, a working group that included state building managers and historic preservationists settled on a list of removal jobs that could get rid of the old phrase without excessive cost or collateral damage.
Their guiding principle: "do no harm to the building."
"This is important because we are one Rhode Island family and there are members of the Rhode Island family, when Providence Plantations is mentioned, it invokes past memories and hurts," Chris Abhulime, deputy chief of staff to McKee, said Tuesday. "We want to be sensitive to that."
Where will the phrase not be removed?
Chiseling Providence Plantations off the the marble façade above the State House's Smith Street entrance, or finding some way to cover it up, was deemed a bridge too far.
Although a final decision has not been made about sites away from the State House, the façade of the Department of Transportation building on the other side of Smith Street is also almost certainly not going to be changed to get rid of Providence Plantations there.
Despite all the time dedicated to studying the matter, the McKee administration was not able to provide a comprehensive list of all the places on state property where the phrase Providence Plantations appears.
And it appears that's partly because the removal work is going to stop at the State House.
"We came up with the State House because it is the people's house, a lot of visitors come there, so we zeroed in on it as a priority," Abhulime said. "We do not intend to scour the entire state looking for Providence Plantations to erase it for the same way we are not erasing history."
Will the rotunda be torn up?
Not if everything goes according to plan, said McKee spokeswoman Laura Hart.
The old name, including Providence Plantations, encircles the seal and plans call for a new marble ring – with brass letters just like the current version – to be placed on top of the old name. This design will result in the perimeter of the seal being raised up slightly from the brass and marble in the center.
(Recently the seal was covered with a rug depicting a fictional seal for an unnamed state used as the setting for the film "Ella McCay.")
The state is going to go out to bid for a rotunda seal contractor this year, possibly as soon as the summer, Hart said Tuesday.
The plan for getting Providence Plantations off the State Room rug is more straightforward: buy a new rug from Stark Carpet of Boston.
The multiple seals on the doors of the 10 elevators in the State House will be removed, put in storage and not replaced, Hart said. Medallions inside the elevator cabs are also going away, but have been covered up by moving blankets for years and likely won't be noticed.
The granite seal at the basement employee entrance will be replaced with a new seal re-carved from the same chunk of stone.
How much will this cost?
The fact that work was beginning on Plantations removal only emerged when General Assembly leaders trimmed McKee's $2.5-million request for unspecified State House work in the year ending June 30 down to $500,000.
The cost of the work the administration finally settled on turned out not to be as expensive as initially anticipated and some of the work was pushed into the next fiscal year that starts in July.
Not counting the yet-unknown cost of changing the rotunda seal, the state has committed $219,000 to State House plantations removal so far, according to Department of Administration spokesman Derek Gomes, including $127,000 for elevator work, $83,000 on rugs and $8,000 for design of the rotunda seal.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: 'Providence Plantations' will be removed from parts of RI's State House soon
