Even though I drive by it each morning on the way to work, I had never seen the memorial.

It wasn’t until I was out for a run the other day that I nearly tripped over the bronze plaque, which sits on a slab of granite in the middle of a traffic island where North Main Street meets Canal Street (just before the light at the bottom of the Smith Street hill, near the State House).

“The site of Hardscrabble Riot 1824,” the plaque reads. “The site of Addison Hollow where the first Nineteenth Century blacks purchased property and the site of the first major riot.”

Hardscrabble is the name of a former Providence neighborhood and a fitting description for the traffic island, which on Monday was littered with an empty soda bottle, an empty beer bottle and weeds. It’s safe to say the new George M. Cohan sculpture on Wickenden Street already has a higher profile.

But the Hardscrabble plaque highlights an important part of local history, marking one of two race riots that led to Providence’s incorporation as a city. (A memorial to the 1831 Snowtown riot is more prominent at the nearby Roger Williams National Memorial.)

A 1999 booklet by John Crouch described how, “In the Hardscrabble riot of 1824, and again at Olney’s Lane and Snow Town in 1831, white rioters tore down several houses in black settlements. A handful of the Hardscrabble rioters were prosecuted, and either were acquitted or got off lightly. Leading citizens congratulated them openly. Similar riots in 1831, however, ended with the militia killing four whites. Afterward, nearly all written opinion approved of suppressing the rioters to maintain order, and Providence voters swiftly approved a charter for a city government with strong police powers.”

A 2003 book by John Wood Sweet — Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730 to 1830 — said the Hardscrabble riot “reportedly began when a black man walking around town refused to give up the ‘inside walk’ to a group of whites coming the other direction.” Sweet writes, “The ‘insult’ inflamed a large portion of the white townspeople of Providence; the next day handbills were posted calling for a rally at the Great Bridge near Market Square. That evening, white citizens decided to wreak their revenge on a notorious black neighborhood in the northeastern part of town.”

Richard A. Lobban Jr., who teaches African studies at the Naval War College, in Newport, and is a board member of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, said the Hardscrabble marker is one of dozens of plaques that the Gorham company gave to the Black Heritage Society in 1976. While some of the plaques went up immediately, others sat in storage for years; the Hardscrabble monument went up about four years ago.

Lobban noted the site is less than ideal, saying, “Unless you are jogging or cutting the grass, which is one-tenth of 1 percent of Rhode Islanders, you wouldn’t see it.”

But Ray Rickman, a former state representative and deputy secretary of state who was once president of the Black Heritage Society, said he has spoken to Lobban about literally giving the memorial a higher profile. “We are going to put the plaque on a taller base so that the whole world sees it,” he said. And he plans to ask the state Department of Transportation, which owns the property, to plant ivy to make it look more like a memorial site.

Rickman, just back from a trip to Philadelphia, called for following that city’s example in highlighting history to promote tourism. “In general, we need to do better job promoting our history in Providence,” he said.

efitzpat@projo.com