Rhode Island License Plates

Rhode Island, like most of the New England States began issuing license plates early in automotive history in the year 1904. Some of the slogans used over the years are 300th year which was issued in 1936. Discover and Ocean State were also used. The state of Rhode Island has perhaps the least colorful license plates of any of the fifty states, about all of the older years were black and white or variations thereof. Porcelain was used on the tags from 1904 thru 1917 and all of these were undated, the first metal plate came out in 1918 and this was also the first dated license plate. Rhode Island tags are fairly expensive to collect, the first several issued are over a couple thousand dollars each, but this is probably due to the low registrations of the state because of its small size. As late as 1920 only around 41,000 vehicles were registered to run on the state's highways.