WOONSOCKET  , a

city of Providence county, Rhode Island, U.S.A., on both banks of the Blackstone river, about 16 m . N. by W. of Providence . Pop . (1900) 28,204; (1905, state census) . 32,196 (13,734 foreign-born, including 8939 French Canadians and 1369 Irish); (1910) 38,125 . Woonsocket is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway and by an interurban electric line . Among its institutions are the Sacred Heart College and the Harris Institute Public Library, founded (1863) by Edward Harris, a local manufacturer . Woonsocket has ample water power from the Blackstone river and its tributaries, the Mill and the Peters rivers . The value of its factory products in 1905 was $19,260,537 . Worsted and woollen yarns are manufactured in Woonsocket by the French and Belgian processes . Other manufactures are cotton goods and yarns, rubber goods, clothes wringers, silks,bobbins and shuttles, and foundry products . The first settlement in the vicinity was made apparently about 1666 by Richard Arnold, who at about that time built a saw-mill on the bank of the Blackstone river .

Woonsocket was set off from

Cumberland and was incorporated as a township in 1867; was enlarged by the addition of a part of Smithfield in 1871, and was chartered as a city in 1888 .