Touro Park (Newport, Rhode Island)

 park, place with historical importance

Touro Park is a small park in Newport, Rhode Island. It's best known as the site of the Newport Tower.

Touro Park on Mill St. just off of Bellevue, is named in memory of Judah Touro who gave the city $10,000 to buy and improve the grounds and land around the Old Stone Mill. Judah Touro (1775-1854) was the second son of Rabbi Touro who came to Newport about 1760 and was the first regular rabbi of the congregation of Jeshuat Israel, he had lived and made a fortune in New Orleans, and served under General Jackson in the defense of that city in the War of 1812. When he died he bequeathed approximately $500,000 to churches and other institutions of many faiths in the United States, and to others in Europe.

On the north side of the park is the roofless Old Stone Mill, a circular stone tower with open arches below; the supporting pillars are composed of flat, irregularly shaped stones, carefully laid with mortar joints. The old structure has been the subject of sporadic controversy for over a hundred years, many persons choosing to believe it a relic of the Norsemen; but it is now generally accepted as being the ruin of a windmill built by Benedict
Arnold, Governor of the Colony (1663-66, 1669-72). James Fenimore
Cooper in his ' Red Rover ' referred to it as the remains of a windmill, but when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard of a skeleton's being dug up at Fall River, clad in broken and corroded armor, he connected it with this tower in his poem 'The Skeleton in Armor.'

On the east side of the park is a bronze Statue of Matthew C. Perry, who negotiated the Japanese treaty of 1854. At the west end is a bronze Statue of William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), the divine and scholar who was born in Newport and became known as the apostle of Unitarianism. He was the son of William Channing, who was appointed a United States Attorney by Washington in 1791, and of Lucy, daughter of William Ellery, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

During the Civil War, the midshipmen from the United States Naval
Academy trained in this park.

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