Note 395 — APPENDIX. (continued 2)

“Mr. Williams sold from his estate a lot, forty-eight feet wide on the street, to Mr. Gabriel Bernon, a very respectable French gentleman, of great property, and sincere religion, who came from Rochelle, France, where he had suffered much, and had been imprisoned two years, on account of his religion, which led Mr. Williams greatly to esteem and respect him. He was born at Rochelle, April 6, 1644; lived ten years at Newport and Narraganset, and died in Providence, February 1, 1736, in the ninety-second year of his age. He had ten children by his first wife, eight of whom, with herself, came with him to this State. He had four children by his second wife, Mary Harris. He was buried under the old Episcopal church, and was the ancestor of many respectable families, in various parts of the State, in which are great numbers of his posterity, connected with the names of Coddington, Helme, Whipple, Crawford, Jenckes, Allen, Tourtellot, &c.

“The lot thus sold to Mr. Bernon contained the famous spring where Mr. Williams landed, when he came to Providence in a canoe, with Thomas Angell, in 1636. Governor Hutchinson says: “The inhabitants have a veneration for a spring, which runs from the hill into the river, above the great bridge. The sight of this spring caused him to stop his canoe, and land there.” Mass. His. vol. ii, p. 41.

“This is the same lot where Mr. Nehemiah Dodge is now building a large brick house, near the stone Episcopal church, a few feet eastward of the spring, of which there is now no appearance, otherwise than at the bottom of his well, of a considerable depth, from which it finds a covered outlet to the river; an instance, among a thousand others, of the great alteration in the town, since its first settlement.”