Fort Adams Story Retold at Children's Museum

NEWPORT, RI – Who was John Quigley and what's his connection to Newport? Visitors to the Providence Children's Museum will discover a new gallery about Quigley, said to be a "pre-famine Irish immigrant who moved to Newport, RI in 1831" and helped build Fort Adams.

The Fort Adams saga is the inspiration for a new gallery in the museum's "playfully re-imagined version" of its Coming to Rhode Island exhibit, which offers an interactive, time-traveling exploration of stories of the state’s history of immigration," according to Megan Fischer, museum spokeswoman.

"Stepping into an immersive environment with brick and stone walls and tunnels, kids will don period appropriate costumes and work on the Fort’s construction crew to build walls and arches, explore what home life was like at the Fort, and investigate tools and documents of the trade from the 1800s and about the Quigley family’s history," she said.

The opening is Friday, November 18, and museum admission costs $9.

The children "will embark on a time-traveling adventure through a transformed “time tunnel” to journey through the exhibit’s story galleries and learn about Rhode Island’s immigration history, Fischer said."

There's also a new “Story Center,” she said.

"For hundreds of years and continuing today, people have come from all over the world to what is now Rhode Island – whether voluntarily, coerced or forced – and everyone has stories about where their families are from and how and why they came," she said. "Coming to Rhode Island is designed to promote tolerance, diversity and inclusion by sharing actual stories of the history of immigration to RI – how people lived, what they left behind, the challenges they met, the solutions they found."

The Fort Adams Trust and Museum of Irish History collaborated on the exhibit.