Historical road trip: How Thurbers Ave. got its name
If you’ve been on Interstate 95 heading through Providence, you’ve seen Thurbers Avenue.
It’s so visible from I-95 that the southern S-curve is called the Thurbers Avenue curve.
It’s “a name we might pass every day on the way to work or see every day on the local news,” wrote one What and Why RI reader, but the question is, “Who or what is a Thurbers and why is she, he, they or it worthy of an Avenue being named for she, he, they or it?”
How did Thurbers Avenue get its name?
To track down this answer, the Rhode Island Historical Society lent an assist, with one of their researchers putting a finger on the 1857 Providence Directory that very helpfully named the origins of city streets.
Thurbers Avenue was named for “the late Samuel Thurber, a worthy citizen of Providence, a papermaker by trade who died at an advanced age. He had a very retentive memory and was fond of conversing on the early history of the town.”
Who was Samuel Thurber?
Thurber was born in 1757 in Rhode Island. During the American Revolution, he served as a soldier and then a commissary officer, and afterward he established a paper mill with his family members, according to research compiled on him by the National Archives.
He’s in the National Archives because, being a rather ambitious man, he attempted correspondences with both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He wrote to them because he was looking to leave Rhode Island to establish a cotton manufacturing business in one of the more Southern states because the “prospects are better, and where the chance for a rappedly [sic] increasing Family is greater than here, To one where the opposers to the best Government in the World have less influence then they have in N England.”
Jefferson did respond, but ultimately Thurber decided to stay put as his business picked up.
Thurber was “justice of the peace during the 1790s and treasurer for nearly thirty years of the local mechanics’ and manufacturers’ association,” according to the National Archives.
Thurber, who died in 1839, is buried in the North Burial Ground in Providence.