Bristol is a town in Bristol County, Rhode Island, US as well as the historic county seat. It is a deep water seaport named after Bristol, England. The population of Bristol was 22,493 at the 2020 census. Major industries include boat building and related marine industries, manufacturing, and tourism. The town's school system is united with that of the neighboring town of Warren. Prominent communities include Portuguese-Americans, mostly Azoreans, and Italian-Americans. History Early colonization Before the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, the Pokanokets occupied much of Southern New England, including Plymouth. They had previously suffered from a series of plagues which killed off large segments of their population, and their leader, the Massasoit Osamequin, befriended the early settlers. King Philip's War was a conflict between the Plymouth settlers and the Pokanokets and allied tribes, and it began in the neighboring area of Swansea, Massachusetts. Metacomet made nearby Mount Hope (a corruption of the Pokanoket word Montaup) his base of operations; he died following an ambush by Captain Benjamin Church on August 12, 1676. "Massasoit's Seat" is a rocky ledge on the mountain which was a lookout site for enemy ships on Mount Hope Bay. After the war concluded, four Boston merchants—Stephen Burton, Nathaniel Byfield, Nathaniel Oliver, and John Walley—purchased a tract of land known as "Mount Hope Neck and Poppasquash Neck" as part of the Plymouth Colony. Other settlers included John Gorham and Richard Smith. A variant of the Indian name Metacomet is now the name of a main road in Bristol: Metacom Avenue (RI Route 136). Bristol was a town of Massachusetts until the Crown transferred it to the Rhode Island Colony in 1747. Slave trade and the DeWolf family The DeWolf family was among the earliest settlers of Bristol. Bristol and Rhode Island became a center of slave trading. James DeWolf, a leading slave trader, later became a United States Senator from Rhode Island. Beginning in 1769 and continuing until 1820 (over a decade after the slave trade was outlawed in the Atlantic), the DeWolf family trafficked people out of West Africa, enslaving them and bringing them to work on DeWolf-owned plantations, or selling them to be auctioned at ports in places such as Havana, Cuba and Charleston, South Carolina. In Cuba, sugar and molasses, harvested/created by enslaved Africans, was brought back to Rhode Island to DeWolf-owned distilleries. By the end of 1820, the DeWolf family had trafficked and