Vintage 1950s-1960s Rhode Island State Patch ⚓ NOS Felt Souvenir Shield, Gold Anchor 13 Stars

Why Is There an Anchor on the Rhode Island Flag? ⚓ Vintage 1950s-1960s Rhode Island State Felt Patch, NOS, Gold Anchor

Size: 2 1/2" x 1 3/4"

If you're from Rhode Island, you know this one before you even read it: the gold anchor, the ribbon and the ring of thirteen stars right off the state flag. Little Rhody, the Ocean State, the smallest state in the union with the biggest stubborn streak, all on a shield you can sew on a jacket.

Put it on a denim jacket, a backpack or a beach bag, and anybody from home will spot it across a parking lot in Florida. It's a perfect little gift for the Rhode Islander who moved away, the one who's about to, the kid heading off to college, or anybody who ever spent a summer on the bay.

And the word that goes with that anchor on the flag is HOPE. Not a bad thing to carry around with you.

New old stock, never sewn.

⚓ What This Patch Shows

A shield-shaped souvenir patch, worked in gold embroidery on cream felt. A gold-bordered banner across the top reads RHODE ISLAND. At the center sits a plain gold anchor — no rope wound round the shank, just the anchor itself — with a solid navy ribbon behind it, left blank, and around the whole device a ring of thirteen gold stars linked by straight stitches.

The edge is cut, not overlocked: a satin-stitched gold border sits just inside the felt's own edge, with a sliver of cream felt showing past the stitching all the way round, down into the point at the bottom. The reverse is open plain-weave scrim, showing the mirrored bleed of every stitch on the front — no adhesive, no iron-on film, no paper backing. It was made to be sewn on, not stuck on.

🗺️ An Island That Mostly Isn't One

Nobody has ever proved which of two stories actually named this place. In 1524 the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed past an island at the mouth of Narragansett Bay — the one known today as Block Island — and described it as about the size of the Greek island of Rhodes. About a century later a Dutch account of Adriaen Block's voyages called an island here "een rodlich Eylandeken," a reddish islet; whether the color meant red clay or red autumn leaves, nobody knows. That reddish islet is where the familiar story comes from — Block and his Roodt Eylandt, "red island," named for its red clay — and a Dutch map of New Netherland published at Amsterdam in 1659 calls Aquidneck Roode Eylant, Red Island. By 1637 the colonists were already calling Aquidneck Island "Rhode Island," and an order of 13 March 1644 made it formal: "the ysland commonly called Aquethneck, shall be from henceforth called the Isle of Rhodes, or RHODE ISLAND." The name belonged only to that island at first — the mainland settlements were Providence Plantations.

⚓ The Anchor And HOPE

The anchor came before the word. At the first assembly of the united colony, at Portsmouth in May 1647, the colonists ordered "the Seale of the Province shall be an Anchor," and Secretary William Dyre sketched it into the margin of the record himself. Before that, in 1641, the Aquidneck settlements had used a sheaf of arrows for a seal, with the motto "Amor vincet omnia" — love conquers all.

HOPE came seventeen years later. At the General Assembly session that opened 4 May 1664, the record sets "the word Hope over the head of the Anker" as part of the seal. Nobody wrote down why. The explanation handed down points to Hebrews — "the hope we have as an anchor of the soul" — and it's a good enough story that Rhode Islanders still tell it. On this patch, that ribbon under the anchor is stitched in but left blank; the anchor made the trip, the word didn't.

📜 The Name, The Charter, The Vote

By 1663 the settlements had already been governing themselves for a generation under Roger Williams' parliamentary patent of March 1644. That year King Charles II granted a royal charter — obtained by the Rhode Islander John Clarke — that re-chartered the colony as "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" and guaranteed its settlers freedom of religion, Williams' own cause written into a king's document. The name held for 357 years.

It ended on 3 November 2020, when Rhode Islanders voted on Question 1 to drop "Providence Plantations" over its ties to slavery in a state that played a real part in that trade. The vote is closer than people remember: at the polls on Election Day, voters actually rejected the change, 97,400 to 75,727. It was the mail and emergency ballots that carried it, for a certified result of 53.12 percent in favor. The two words left standing are the two words on this patch.

🏴‍☠️ Rogue's Island

The colony took in the people nobody else in New England would have — Roger Williams among the first of them. Massachusetts Bay banished him for arguing that no magistrate had business policing a man's conscience, and that the land belonged to the Narragansett, not the crown. He slipped away in January 1636 and founded Providence that spring on land granted by the sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. In 1644 he wrote of "a hedge or wall of separation" between the church and the world — and Thomas Jefferson reached for the same image in 1802, writing of "a wall of separation between Church & State."

That stubborn streak never went away. American newspapers were calling it "Rogue Island" by 1781, and "the perverse sister" too, over its refusals of federal measures. It was also the first of the thirteen colonies to formally renounce King George III. On 4 May 1776 the General Assembly repealed the colony's act of allegiance to him, struck the King's name out of every commission and writ, and ruled that the courts were no longer the King's Courts — two months before the Continental Congress declared independence in Philadelphia. And it was the last of the thirteen to ratify the Constitution, on 29 May 1790, after the new federal government had spent months taxing its ships like a foreign country's. Part of what kept it out was that the Constitution never spelled out freedom of religion, the principle Roger Williams built the colony on, and when Rhode Island finally came in, 34 votes to 32, it brought a declaration of eighteen rights and twenty-one proposed amendments along with it. Williams' old argument, that a man's conscience is no business of the government's, is the one that ends up in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The thirteen stars on this patch, and on the flag it follows, stand for all thirteen — first out and last in among them.