The Forests & River of the East Side

• I highly recommend you drive down River road on your way to the next location.

A dark and ancient forest & riverbank lies in the depths of Providence’s East Side. This is where a young H.P. Lovecraft grows up, and experiences the forests of New England, For the first time. The mysterious depths of Arkham’s Forests have their roots here. Only Blocks from Lovecraft’s childhood homes. This Park is all that remains of the forests and ravines of Lovecraft’s childhood Providence.

• If you’d like to fully enjoy the forests you can drive up the hill a block to find the best entrance. (notes below)

”The house where I was born & grew up was near the edge of the built-up streets when I was very small, & it was only a stone’s throw to the rolling, stone-walled meadows, trim white farmhouses, rambling barns & byres, gnarled old orchards, dim twilight woods, & ravine-pierced river bluff of primitive colonial New-England.”

"I used to row considerably on the Seekonk, which you'll find on your city map ... and also on general maps of R. I. Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me -Lovecraft letter to Rimel, April 1934.

I never knew what it was to play on a city street; for from the age of three my mother always took me walking in the fields & ravines, & along the high wooded riverbank… I knew the old New England country as well as if I had been a farmer’s boy…

Nature, too, keenly touched my sense of the fantastic. My home was near what was then the edge of the settled residence district, so that I was just as used to the rolling fields, stone walls, giant elms, squat farmhouses, deep woods, and sinister hollows of rural New England as to the archaic urban scene. This brooding, primitive land-scape seemed to me to hold some vast but unknown significance’’