America³

The Herreshoff Marine Museumis a maritime museum in Bristol, Rhode Island dedicated to the history of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company, yachting, and America's Cup. The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company (1878–1945) was most notable for producing sailing yachts, including eight America's Cup defenders, and steam-powered vessels. The museum, situated near Narragansett Bay on the grounds where the manufacturing company once stood, has a collection of over sixty boats including Nathanael Greene Herreshoff's Clara, built in 1887, Harold Vanderbilt's Trivia, and the 1992 IACC yacht, Defiant. The Nathanael Greene Herreshoff Model Room contains over 500 yacht and steam yacht models and the Rebecca Chase Herreshoff Library holds a collection of books and manuscripts related to the company, the Herreshoff family, and yachting. The museum also hosts symposia related to yacht design and operates a sailing school.

The Bristol County Courthouse (or Bristol Statehouse) is an historic courthouse on High Street in Bristol, Rhode Island, USA built in 1816. It was originally one of five locations in Rhode Island which hosted the state legislature on a rotating basis, and served as the county courthouse through the 1980s. Currently the building is used for educational and community programs, meetings, and events.

Bristol Customshouse and Post Office is a historic two-story rectangular Italian palazzo style brick building that was used as a post office and customshouse in Bristol, Rhode Island, United States. The land for the site was acquired for $4,400. The building was designed by Ammi B. Young and completed in 1858 for a cost of $22,135.75. The building roughly measures 46 feet (14 m) by 32 feet (9.8 m) and is constructed of deep red brick and has three arched openings on each of its sides and stories that are lined with sandstone moldings. The archways protrude from the side of the building and the center archway serves as the first floor with the adjacent archways housing large windows that are barred with iron. As it typical of the style, the second floor is more elaborate with a shallow balcony of iron supported by iron brackets and the paneling of the upper facade's surmounting entablature is elaborately decorative. The sides and rear are similar to the front facade, but include blind recesses and the molding is of a browner sandstone. The building was abandoned in 1962 and acquired by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in 1964. The YMCA has an adjacent structure and used the building as an ante-space until 1990. Currently, the building is used as offices. The Bristol Customshouse and Post Office is historically significant as it is an example of the Italian palazzo mode of architecture. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

The Bristol Waterfront Historic District is a historic district encompassing the original heart of Bristol, Rhode Island, which was laid out in 1680 by the town's original proprietors. It stretches from Bristol Harbor to the east side of Wood St., as far north as Washington Street, and south to Walker Cove. The district's principal areas of importance are the waterfront area on the west side, and the Town Common, part of the original layout, which forms the civic heart of the town. It is one of the few planned communities in the state, and the only one of such great age. The district features residential, civic, and commercial architecture encompassing most of its more than three centuries of existence. Its 19th-century architecture is particularly strong in examples of the work of native son Russell Warren.The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Major buildings in the district which are separately listed on the National Register include the Bristol County Jail, Bristol County Courthouse, and the Bristol Customshouse and Post Office.

Bristol County Jail is a historic jail at 48 Court Street in Bristol, Rhode Island, and home to the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society. The jail was built on the site of a previous jail house dating to 1792 and salvaged materials were used extensively in the new construction. The present Bristol County Jail consists of a 36.5-foot-wide (11.1 m) by 46.4-foot-long (14.1 m) center hallway in a 2+1⁄2-story stone structure topped with a gable roof. The jail accommodated both the inmates and the jailer's family. The first floor is believed to have been the family's parlor, dining room and kitchen on the west side and the east side the jailer's reception room, office and storage room. The second floor housed the family's bedrooms and the inmates' cells, with low, medium and maximum security cells. The maximum security cells in the southeast portion of the jail had no heat, light or sanitary facilities and were enclosed by 2-foot (0.61 m) exterior stone walls and built atop thick floor timbers supported by 2-foot-thick (0.61 m) solid brick wall and further supported by a fieldstone wall from the cellar. In 1859, a rectangular 20-foot-wide (6.1 m) by 43.2-foot-long (13.2 m) two-story rear addition was added to common southeast wall of the jail. Made of cut granite blocks and topped with a flat roof, the addition added five cells on each of its two levels. The jail was discontinued by the State of Rhode Island in June 1957 and the Bristol Historical Society (later the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society) leased the property following a fire at the Rogers Free Library. The Bristol Historical Society removed partitions in the first floor and added new access points as part of its renovations, including the removal of the internal east chimney. However, the building retains much of its unaltered interior features, and the jail cells are used by the Society as a public exhibit. The Bristol County Jail was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and currently serves as the Historical Society headquarters.

Musée Patamécanique is a private museum located in the Historical District of Bristol, Rhode Island. Founded in 2006 by Neil Barden Salley, it is open by appointment only to friends, colleagues, and occasionally to outside observers. Presented as a hybrid of an automaton theater and a cabinet of curiosities, it contains works representing the field of Patamechanics, an artistic practice and area of study chiefly inspired by Pataphysics.

Bristol Train of Artillery Museum is an armory museum in Bristol, Rhode Island, which is the meeting place of the Bristol Train of Artillery, a militia artillery unit of the Rhode Island Island State Militia and a member of the Rhode Island Independent Military Organizations. The Bristol Train of Artillery was chartered on February 12, 1776 and has been in uninterrupted existence since then. The current building, which houses the museum collection, dates to 1843. The Museum "collection includes photographs, scrapbooks, drawings, paintings of events. Some records from the American Civil War, but much has been lost. Some exhibits of guns, uniforms, flags, hats, helmets, swords and other militaria."The museum is open by appointment only.

Linden Place mansion is a Federal-style mansion located in Bristol, Rhode Island. It was built in 1810 by slave trader, merchant, privateer and ship owner General George DeWolf and was designed by architect, Russell Warren. The mansion now operates as a historic house museum. Built in the Robert Adam–inspired Federal style, popular in the early decades of the new American nation, Linden Place magnificently reflects the prosperity of the DeWolf slave trading merchant princes and the exquisite Adamesque Federal taste inspired by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Linden Place is one of the best examples of Federal architecture in New England, from the magnificent Palladian windows to the fluted Corinthian columns, which gracefully flank the front entrance to the mansion. Also of architectural significance are the later added Gothic conservatory and four-story spiral staircase. Tour highlights include tales of DeWolf family exploits, from their privateering and slave trading to their financial ruin and triumphant return to prosperity during Victorian times. Residents included family members Samuel Pomeroy Colt, founder of United States Rubber, now Uniroyal, his mother Theodora DeWolf Colt, who as Madam Colt ran Bristol Society from Linden Place as if she were Queen Victoria, and the great actress Ethel Barrymore who married in to this most prominent of American families. The mansion sits on 1.8 acres of sculpture-filled gardens where there are Greek bronzes and an 18th century gazebo. Today the estate is sponsored by the non-profit Friends of Linden Place, which was created in 1989, based on the urgent need to save the magnificent 1810 DeWolf mansion from destruction or development. Due to the formidable drive of the earliest volunteers, the “crown jewel” of Bristol’s historic waterfront district was saved and is today maintained through visitation, fundraisers, grants and memberships. The mansion was prominently featured in Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, a 2008 film documentary about the DeWolf family and the legacy of the slave trade in the North of the United States. It was used as a filming location for the 1974 movie The Great Gatsby. The Bristol Art Museum occupies the former carriage house at Linden Place, with its entrance located at 10 Wardwell Street, Bristol, RI.

The Blithewold Mansion, Gardens and Arboretum is an arboretum of 13 hectares (32 acres), located at 101 Ferry Road, Bristol, Rhode Island, midway between Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, on Bristol Harbor with views over Narragansett Bay. It includes a mansion, with a 4 hectares (9.9 acres) lawn and over 300 species of woody plants in its arboretum and gardens, including both native and exotic species. The Mansion and its grounds were established in the 1890s by Augustus and Bessie Van Wickle as their summer retreat. Augustus Van Wickle was from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, with a fortune in the coal-mining business and a donor of the Van Wickle Gates at Brown University.

Roger Williams University School of Law is the law school of Roger Williams University, a private university in Bristol, Rhode Island. It is the only law school in Rhode Island. It was the first graduate degree program established by the university, then Roger Williams College, in 1993. The School of Law has been accredited by the American Bar Association since 1997 and has been a member of the Association of American Law Schools since 2006. It is one of a handful of law schools within the United States that offer a focus in Maritime Law. Roger Williams University School of law offers guaranteed clinical hands-on experience. It is also the lowest priced ABA accredited private law school in the Northeast, at a tuition of $44,834 for the 2023-2034 year. RWU Law also offers a second experiential campus in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. There were 179 students enrolled as first-year students in 2022. According to Roger Williams's official 2017 ABA-required disclosures, 76.67% of the Class of 2017 obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after graduation. RWU Law, in 2020, had a Bar passage rate of 78.0%. Roger Williams University School of Law, ranks #10 in federal and state clerkships. RWU Law also consistently ranks as a top law school for “Faculty Accessibility”.

The William G. Low House was a seaside cottage at 3 Low Lane in Bristol, Rhode Island. It was designed and built in 1886–1887 by architect Charles McKim of the New York City firm, McKim, Mead & White. With its distinctive single 140-foot-long (43 m) gable it embodied many of the tenets of Shingle Style architecture—horizontality, simplified massing and geometry, minimal ornamentation, the blending of interior and exterior spaces. The architectural historian Vincent Scully saw it as "at once a climax and a kind of conclusion" for McKim, since its "prototypal form ... was almost immediately to be abandoned for the more conventionally conceived columns and pediments of McKim, Mead, and White's later buildings."Just before it was demolished in 1962, the house was documented with measured drawings and photographs by the Historic American Buildings Survey.Wrote architectural historian Leland Roth, "Although little known in its own time, the Low House has come to represent the high mark of the Shingle Style."

Roger Williams University (RWU) is a private university in Bristol, Rhode Island. Founded in 1956, it was named for theologian and Rhode Island cofounder Roger Williams. The school enrolls over 5,000 students and employs over 480 academic staff.