Despite the name, most of Rhode Island is on the mainland United States. The official name of the state, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, derives from the merger of two colonies. Rhode Island colony was founded near present-day Newport, on what is now commonly called Aquidneck Island, the largest of several islands in Narragansett Bay. Providence Plantations was the name of the colony founded by Roger Williams in the area now known as the City of Providence.[9]
It is unclear how Aquidneck Island came to be known as Rhode Island, although there are two popular theories.
The explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, in 1524 noted the presence of an island near the mouth of Narragansett Bay, which he likened to the Greek island of Rhodes. However, subsequent European explorers were unable to precisely identify the island that Verrazzano had named. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims who later colonized the area assumed that Verrazzano's "Rhodes" was Aquidneck.
A second theory concerns the fact that Adriaen Block, during his expeditions in the 1610s, passed by Aquidneck, described in a 1625 account of his travels as "an island of reddish appearance" (in 17th-century Dutch, "een rodlich Eylande"
.[10] Historians have theorized that this "reddish appearance" resulted from either red autumn foliage or red clay on portions of the shore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island#Origin_of_the_name
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