The Redwood Library and Athenaeum is America’s first purpose-built library and the oldest continuously operating in its original location.
As such, it is the only remaining secular public cultural institution in this country with an unbroken link to the colonial period and the Nation’s founding. Housed in the earliest public Neoclassic building in the U.S., and containing Rhode Island’s first art gallery (1875), it has functioned for nearly three-hundred years as Newport’s intellectual core, a humanities center and civic learning hub styled after ideals of ancient Athenian culture and philosophy.