Providence was built on 7 hills, now there are only 6. What happened?

Like Rome, Providence was built on seven hills.

But it didn’t stay that way.

In a recent What and Why RI about how Federal Hill got its name, the article mentioned the seven hills of Providence that were all still standing during the Confederation Era of American History. This little nod caused a few people to write in.

“You created another question,” one reader wrote. “I only know of six hills.”

It's easy to know of only six hills because that's how many there have been for the last 100 years or so. Here's what happened to the missing hill.

What are the seven hills of Providence?

The seven hills of Providence are not names you hear every day. In fact, in 1914, The Providence Journal published an article lamenting that the latest maps had stopped putting the names of hills on them, and carefully recording the history of each. These are the seven hills and a bit about them:

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• Federal Hill is on the west side of town, along Atwells Avenue. It’s best known as an Italian neighborhood, but the name comes from an incident in which Federalists wanted to celebrate other states' ratifying the Constitution, but the dominant political party of the day in Rhode Island did not.

• College Hill, also called Prospect Hill, is home to Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. The nomenclature comes from Brown.

• Constitution Hill is a tiny one at the intersection of North Main Street and Mill Street, and was described by The Journal in 1892 as “nothing more than a slope of Prospect [Hill].” Its name comes from the Revolutionary War.

• Tockwotten Hill is in the Fox Point neighborhood. Tockwotten was a Narragansett name for the hill, according to the 1914 article, and it was used as an overlook of the harbor. One of the earliest histories of the city called the highest point “Foxes Hill” which is likely how the neighborhood was named. (A quick aside: this hill was also briefly called Corkey Hill during a period when it was a neighborhood with “little homes of characteristic squatter type and no end of pig pens.” Once the city passed a referendum to clean it up in the 1870s, they rebranded and went back to the Native name.)

• Smith Hill was named after one of Roger William’s companions, a miller named John Smith. It’s the hill that the State House was built on, hence its other name, Capitol Hill.

• Christian Hill is at Hoyle Square, where Westminster Street and Cranston Street intersect. It is believed to be named after the churches that were built there, though not all of the churches exist today.

• Weybosset Hill is the one that disappeared. It used to be at the lower end of Weybosset Street in downtown. It was described as a “small mound of land.”

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Why was Weybosset Hill leveled in Providence?

The small mound was leveled in the late 1800s to make way for road improvements and the Turks Head Building.

The Turks Head Building, built by the Brown Land Company, opened in 1913 and was the tallest building in Providence at that time.

How did the Turks Head Building get its name?

To avoid leaving you with another question, the Turks Head Building was named in honor of the “original” Turks Head in Providence.

In the early days of the city, there was a blacksmith named Jacob Whitman. It’s not exactly clear why Whitman mounted a ship’s figurehead of an Ottoman warrior and set it out in front of his store as a navigational marking, though there is a theory it had to do with his trading with Turk Island Salt. Whatever the case, soon everyone called the corner by his shop “The Turks Head.”

In 1815, the figurehead came down in a storm, but people were still talking about it nearly 100 years later. Whitman's house was where the Turks Head Building now stands.

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When it came time to build the tallest building in the city, the folks doing that decided the city should have “a real Turks Head in the city once more.” They carved one out of granite, put it on the building, and it works as a navigational point just as well today as it did in the 1800s.

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 for her to add to her growing spreadsheet.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Providence's 7 hills: Why one was flattened for Turks Head Building