The URI Kingston Campus is the 1,200-acre flagship campus of the University of Rhode Island (URI), located in the rural town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The first of several campuses, the original 140 acres of farmland was purchased in 1888 for the newly chartered Agricultural Experiment Station and Agricultural School of Rhode Island. In 1894, the Boston-based landscape architecture firm Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot began to plan the development and organization of the campus, which provided for the base presence of botanically interesting and historically significant trees.
Over the years, several efforts at tree inventory have been initiated, with varying levels of success. In 1989 a former professor and college dean created endowments to support the development and maintenance of the University’s arboretum. A walking tour pamphlet was created that contains information about each significant tree and some of the campus history. In 2004 and 2009, non-digital collections of tree information were developed that help keep track of diagnosed diseases and the history of maintenance applications. The identification tags for the arboretum are different from the tags associated with the ‘04-‘09 inventory data, in that the arboretum tags provide the botanical name, common name, family, and country of origin, as well as the tree number. The ‘04-‘09 inventory tags only indicate the tree identification number.