The apple tree root that ate Roger Williams
It is an odd-looking item that the fifth-graders at
the Aldrich House now look at. With puzzlement they ponder thin
pieces of wood that resemble tree branches wound together and
attached to a box in the shape of a coffin.
Parade Magazine in 1982 called these pieces of wood "The Apple Tree That Ate Roger Williams".
Roger Williams lived a long and vigorous life, 80 years or
so, before he died, sometime between January and March
of 1683. As was the custom, he was buried on the land behind
his house, though at the time he and Mary were living with
their son Daniel. His funeral was modest considering the
stature he would achieve in later years. There was a volley
of gunfire, a salute to his having been a military officer
during King Philip's War.
It would be a century before anyone would take serious action
to build a monument to Williams, and then the Revolutionary
War thwarted the effort and another century elapsed before
another effort was made.
On March 22, 1860, a Williams descendant, Stephen Randall,
and some of his friends dug up the grave said to be Williams's.
They found an empty tomb, save for a few nails, perhaps some
remnant of bone (depending on whom you believe) and the root
of an apple tree.
Another descendant at the grave site, Zachariah Allen, wrote
that the apple tree's main root had pushed "towards the
precise spot occupied by Williams' skull."
There was no skull in the grave, and historians today, such
as Glenn LaFantasie, question whether it was Williams's grave
site at all.
Be that as it may, Allen wrote: "The root followed the
direction of the backbone to the hips. Here it divided
branches sending one along each leg to the heel, when both
turned upward to the toes. One of these roots formed a
slight crook at ... the knee ... producing an increased
resemblance to the outlines of the skeleton of Roger Williams
as if ... moulded by the powers of vegetable life."
The scrapings from the grave site eventually made their way into a steel box, which was kept for a time in a bank safe deposit box. They were then transferred into the granite base of a memorial to Williams when it was dedicated, in 1939, on Prospect Terrace. Here a 10-ton, 14-foot figure of Williams looks out over Providence. Cut into the memorial's base are the words, "Here reposes the dust from the grave of Roger Williams."
