"Some of supposed ashes of Roger Williams. Monday Morning, February 22, 1909."
At the John Brown House Museum in Providence, RI
August 2021
It is not every day you get to photograph the "supposed remains" of the one and only Roger Williams' "greasy earth". The story goes that when they dug in the spot where Roger Williams was buried, the found the "Williams Tree Root" that "ate" Mr. Williams they also found indications of "Greasy Earth" which was thought to be a sign of a decaying remains. They actually collected a sample and kept it.
While I like the Tree Root story, I like this legend as well as not many people get to see it. Is it actually Williams? Probably not but it is one heck of a New England Legend.
The Tree Root will be posted later today.
I did find this write-up with the full write up in the comments:
"Two years after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, an event almost befitting a horror novel took place – a committee composed of descendants of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, decided to unearth his body from its quiet, discreet resting place behind his old house for a more honorable location. They and the Works Progress Administration constructed the arch and statue in Prospect Terrace Park for this express purpose. A statue of Williams was to look out over his city and his body was to rest underneath it in a white tomb.
During the attempt to exhume the 250-year-old body, all that was discovered were bits of “greasy earth” and a curiously-shaped root from a nearby apple tree. The root seemed to have arms, a torso, legs, and even upturned “toes.” Evidently the root had "eaten" Roger Williams, growing through the coffin and using the nutrients of his decomposing body to grow. The committee moved what remains they could find across the street to the tomb. I looked for some form of commemorative plaque around the giant white structure, yet found no official documentation within the park apart from the WPA seal at the northern entrance. In fact, the park had been far more “documented upon” informally by local graffiti artists than the Roger Williams Family Association or the City of Providence. It struck me as a social gathering space and recreational facility as much as (if not more so than) a memorial. I found it to be lacking ties with local history and collective memory that I had expected from my pre-journey research.
The “Williams Root” has recently been taken out of storage and exhibited in the John Brown House on 52 Power Street. Volunteer workers claim that it has become the most popular part of the House tour – some visitors have even traveled significant distances to see the root exclusively. Although scientifically it is well known that apple tree roots seek out carbon in surrounding soil (and it thus follows that this root could have “followed” the path of a human body) this anthropomorphized root maybe is just a root from an apple tree that happened to grow on a bit of land that he once lived on.
I wonder why it is that this bizarre humanoid plant root draws far more attention than Williams’ actual remains. Although Prospect Terrace clearly commemorates something, perhaps the absence of a description for the white statue and tomb confound this sense for the visitor. What results is a disconnect between perceived, expected meaning and actual usage in the mind. Perhaps it is due to the sheer passage of time that the root is a crisper image in the collective memory than Williams’ tomb – the root’s exhibition opened quite recently, although technically these two memories do begin in 1939. Clearly the novelty of the myth adds an intrigue that only the most zealous of historians would likewise feel about the tomb. Perhaps in moving Roger Williams’ remains from their original context, which had established historical as well as a more personal meaning, his memory was also moved, changed, and fractured. The arbitrarily located memorial has no connection to Williams or, from what we can tell, to his personal life other than that it is in “his” city. Although he lived nearby, Williams cannot have had direct interaction with this exact space, as he died 200 years before it became a park in 1867. He cannot have enjoyed the park as Lovecraft or the Valentine’s couples did, for the space was not the same space with the same character in any of these times."
Source:
www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/arc... 