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The One Minute Geographer: About Rhode Island
There’s an old Guy Lombardo big band song that’s called Poor, Little Rhode Island. Well, the little part is right. Rhode Island is our smallest state in territory. All of its 1,035 square miles of land area are tucked in the southeastern corner of New England, like an egg, with Connecticut and Massachusetts nestled over it as mother hens.
If Rhode Island were a square, it would be 33 miles on a side and you could drive through the state in half-an-hour! Many COUNTIES in western states are larger than the entire state of Rhode Island. How many Rhode Islands could fit into Maine? 33. (There’s that number again). It would take 550 Rhode Islands to fill up Alaska.
But what Rhode Island lacks in size, it makes up for in density. It is home to just about 1.1 million people, more than in many of the states out Big Sky way: Montana, Wyoming, both Dakotas and Alaska, as well as two states back east — Delaware and Vermont.
Rhode Island’s density of more than 1,000 people per square mile is not the most — New Jersey edges out Little Rhody with slightly more: 1,200 warm bodies packed into every square mile. But don’t get the idea that Rhode Island is…
