Florence Newall

 Florence Newall Haslam (1888-1980)

Florence (Newall) Haslam, the first child of Samuel and Margaret Ellen (Broadley) Newall, was born on August 26, 1888, in Accrington, England. She was baptized at St. John the Evangelist (right) in Accrington the following October. It is the church where her parents were married in January 1888. Florence’s sister, Nellie, was born in 1891. At the time, the family was living at 43 Sultan Street. Other Broadleys also lived on that street.

In the spring of 1892, Samuel, Margaret and their daughters Florence and Nellie traveled to Liverpool to board the Scythia. On April 17, they arrived in Boston. Why they chose to settle in Providence, R.I., is unknown, but the busy mills in the area provided steady work for new arrivals with limited education and skills.

The family lived in the Olneyville section of Providence, a neighborhood that has been the first home of many waves of new immigrants. At the turn of the century those immigrants were primarily Irish, English and Polish. (Italians typically settled in nearby Federal Hill.) Today Olneyville is primarily Latino.

Although Samuel was a cabinetmaker in England, he worked in the mills after arriving in Rhode Island. In the record of her marriage and in an 1891 census in England, Margaret was listed as a “weaver,” but there’s no evidence she worked after immigrating to the United States.

Samuel and Margaret had their third child, Gertrude (Gertie) in 1894, and their fourth child, Frank, in 1896. Nellie and Gertie never married; they lived with their parents until the death of Margaret in 1958. After Florence was widowed in 1962, they moved in with her at 132 Everett Avenue, Providence.

Charles and Florence on honeymoon.

Florence Newall was 28 when she married Charles Raymond Haslam, also from Olneyville, on Oct. 18, 1916.  Charles had graduated from Brown University in 1902, and from Harvard University Law School in 1906.

After marriage, they moved to the East Side of Providence, a far more affluent neighborhood. They lived in an apartment at 95 Dana Street before buying a house at 132 Everett Avenue c 1923.

They had four daughters – Ruth, Dorothy, Betty and Nancy. In the 1920s, they bought a summerhouse on Hillside Avenue at Plum Beach in Saunderstown, R.I. Charles was an avid gardener and was known for his gladiolas in a large lot in front of the house (across the road), a piece of land they would sell in the ’50s.

Charles and Florence at their Plum Beach house, c1960.

Three generations made powerful memories at the Plum Beach house – getting drinking water from the well, climbing the rock, making applesauce from the apple tree, and hiding in the wicker buffet in the dining room. The first Jamestown Bridge hadn’t been built when Florence, Charles and their young children began spending summers there. The panoramic view of Narragansett Bay from what they always called the “piazza” was spectacular, even in the ‘50s. (Mature trees now block much of that view.) Florence drove Charles to the Wickford Junction every morning for the train that would take him to his work in downtown Providence.

After Charles’ death in 1962, Florence’s sisters, Nellie and Gertie, moved in with her on Everett Avenue and also spent their summers with her at Plum Beach. When maintaining the beach house became too much for them, Florence sold it in the early ‘70s.

Florence remained in the three-story Everett Avenue house until after she turned 90. Shortly after Nellie died in 1976, Florence and Gertie moved to an apartment in the Wayland Manor (Providence). Gertie died in 1979, and Florence began to fail. She went to stay with her daughter Betty in Asheville, North Carolina, and died in a nursing home there in 1980. She is buried with her husband (and his family), her parents and her sisters at Oak Knoll Cemetery in Rehoboth, Mass.