Once home to the first U.S. Navy commander, here's the story of the house on Admiral St.

At the end of Admiral Street in Providence, next to some soccer fields and just up the street from a Dunkin', is a little yellow house that is clearly from another era.

The 2½-story gable house, with its surrounding maples and picket fence, has clearly resisted change (albeit not entirely; there’s an addition and a paved driveway) while the area around it has not.

It’s the type of curiosity that drew the attention of a What and Why RI reader who wrote to ask what we could find out about the house.

Who was Esek Hopkins? 

The house at 97 Admiral St. was built by hand in 1756 for none other than the first commander of the U.S. Navy, Esek Hopkins.

When he built the house, though, the American Revolution was still a ways off.

Hopkins was born on April 26, 1718, to a well-to-do family in Scituate. But at 20, he rather brashly set out for a life at sea on a ship bound for Suriname in South America. Two of his brothers set off with him on that first trip into sugar and slave trading, and both of them died onboard, but Hopkins decided this was the life for him.

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He married in 1741, and 10 years later, he moved his family from Newport to the 200-acre farm that the Esek Hopkins Homestead was once the heart of, according to the documentation when the house was submitted for the National Register of Historic Places. But the farm was largely unsuitable for farming, and Hopkins preferred the sea anyway.

In the Seven Years' War, Hopkins, known for having a rather aggressive nature, had a knack for plundering French vessels and thrived as a privateer, according to the New England Historical Society.

When the war ended and privateering stopped, Hopkins was commissioned by the Brown family to sail a slave ship, the Sally, to North Africa, as a component of plans to turn Providence into the political and commercial center of Rhode Island, over Newport. The voyage was a disaster. He bought 167 humans to sell as slaves, and by the time he returned to Rhode Island, 109 Africans had died.

When the American Revolutionary War broke out, Hopkins was tapped to defend the Colonies. He famously persuaded the British to not occupy Newport in 1774, and in 1775 was appointed commander in chief of the Continental Navy’s fleet and given a fleet of eight merchant ships that had been converted. The following year, he made an attack on a British colony in Nassau, where he captured two ships but failed to capture the third, the Glasgow. Because he didn't capture the Glasgow and for disobeying orders, he was censured by Congress and ultimately dismissed from the Navy.

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He served in the Rhode Island General Assembly through 1786 and died on his farm in 1802.

Just over 100 years later, the homestead, which had been passed down from family member to family member, was donated to the City of Providence in 1908, with the stipulation that it be used as a public park. At the point it was given to the city, it had already been listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

What happened with the Esek Hopkins Homestead after it was given to Providence?

The homestead, which has grown with additions, has had a few lives since its donation to the city. For a time it was a museum, then it was rented out, and then it was used for Providence's "Park-ists" in Residence program.

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From December 2019 to November 2022, the Haus of Glitter moved in after their artistic director, Matt Garza, secured the residencies. A dance company, performance lab and preservation society that centers on the experiences of queer people and people of color, Haus of Glitter asked questions about what it means to inhabit a space imbued with the history of the white supremacist slave trade.

"During this time, we worked to heal + transform the space to create work that investigates lineage; and restores the energetic center of its layered history towards Queer/Feminist BIPoC Wisdom, Healing, & Liberation. Everything we have created + will create here is a protest-demonstration against the system that tells us that Esek Hopkins’ home, a symbol of his legacy of white supremacy, is worth preserving," Haus of Glitter wrote on their website about their time in the house (emphasis theirs).

At the end of the grant, they created "The Historical Fantasy of Esek Hopkins," a dance opera that reimagined the story.

With the residency over, the house is about to move into its next chapter. The city has partnered with the Providence Preservation Society to turn the house into a learning laboratory for its Building Works program.

The preservation society has long been familiar with the Esek Hopkins Homestead, listing it as one of the city's Most Endangered Properties in 1995 and collaborating with the Haus of Glitter during its residency.

Considering how much work the building needs done, the house was a natural fit for the Building Works program, said Kelsey Mullen, the preservation society's director of education.

"We do a lot of training around workforce development in the preservation trades and also teaching people, just regular residents, how to be a little bit handier and more capable when it comes to caring for older properties," she said. "The idea of a project house kept coming up, having a building with some practical challenges that we could show people in real time."

The house needs a lot of work, so the relationship is "indefinite," Mullen said.

"We will continue to use the site for training and fix it up and maintain it as long as we can," she said.

What and Why RI is a weekly feature by The Providence Journal to explore our readers' curiosity. If you have a question about Rhode Island, big or small, email it to klandeck@gannett.com. She loves a good question.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: The history behind the old yellow house on Admiral St. in Providence