Roger Williams

Banished by the Puritans of Massachusetts for his then-seditious advocacy of separation of church and state and criticisms of New World leadership, Roger Williams headed south with a vision of a colony of religious tolerance. He paid Native Americans for land at the confluence of the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers in Narragansett Bay, establishing the town of Providence in 1636.

Williams's radical experiment proved quickly successful, and over roughly the next half century, the controversial theologian set up America's first (some say second) Baptist church, though he separated himself from the church shortly after founding it, and saw his backwater village grow into a prosperous Colonial shipping port.