Unintentional Historian (New London)

The Unintentional Historian column ran biweekly in New London Patch between December 2010 and January 2011. Patch.com has since removed columns (and other old content) from their sites, so I have tried to compile all of my New London columns here.

Addicted to History

Even when I’m not particularly looking for traces of the past, I notice them. I can’t help it. When I lived in New York, I would frequently walk past a building on 3^rd Avenue with a plaque on it marking the spot where Nathan Hale was hanged. No one else rushing along the sidewalk ever seemed to care, but it always amused me to think that Hale, good Connecticut preppy to the last, may have died at a site that is now a large Banana Republic.

When I am actively seeking out history, it often has unexpected consequences. Once I drove cross-country following Lewis and Clark’s route and ended up semi-impulsively moving to Missouri. People in St. Louis generally had one of two reactions to a newcomer relocating to their city alone with no local friends and with no job. The first was, “Hmm.” The other was, “Did you move here because of a guy?” One day, driving along I-70 and smiling to myself at the sight of a Lewis and Clark Trail marker that seemed to point the way to my apartment, I was forced to admit that yes, in a way I had. (Two guys, technically. And about 30 other people. And a dog.)

It was Lewis and Clark and their search for the Northwest Passage that brought me, indirectly, to New London. One book on 19^th century travelers has a way of leading to another, and at some point in this book-buying spree I encountered John Ledyard, of Groton, an early Northwest Passage dreamer and the first US citizen to reach North America’s west coast. It was reading about Ledyard that made me decide, on a visit back East, to check out New London. I hadn’t been here since my parents took me to Block Island on the ferry as a child, and my only memory from that visit is of being chased across a hotel parking lot by an angry goose. This time, though, there were no ornery waterfowl and the city – of which I’d had no expectations – was a visual shock. I remember seeing the Greek Revival houses of Whale Oil Row, and sensing how grand this place must have been in its heyday. I remember thinking that the library, which reminded me of the imposing train stations of the Midwest, looked fabulously out of place in New England. Later, I read that there was a reason New London looked different from other Colonial-era cities, and that it had to do with war and treason and fire. So I was pretty much sold.

When I eventually moved here, it was for several reasons, mostly quite practical. But one of them, I think, was because there was so much history, layers of it, slapped over one another like hundreds of coats of paint. The kind of history you can search for, but mainly the kind you find, unexpectedly, tucked into alleyways and forgotten on the upper floors of old buildings and written in faded letters on the wall. 

Falling In a Hole

How New London Got Its Name

Recently I've been Googling a lot of New London-related things. The results? New things. In London. Once you eliminate the English sites, you still have to weed through New London OH, WI, TX, and NH (which seems to have very nice walking trails; I wondered why I’d never noticed them until I realized they were in New Hampshire.) It’s enough to make you forget what you were searching for in the first place and start pondering unimaginative Colonial nomenclature instead.

I decided to look up the history of New London's name. I turned first to the charming and useful New London Gazette, which states that “the early settlement went by various Indian names, such as Pequot or Nameaug” and that inhabitants wanted to name their town London, but were rebuffed by the General Court, which preferred Fair Harbour. This was rejected and New London was adapted in 1658. The Gazette points out that it “took more than a decade of effort by the settlers to get the Legislature to agree to naming the plantation New London.” (You may insert your own joke about the City Council here.) 

The Gazette cites Francis Manwaring Caulkins’s History of New London, which I found not only informative but hilarious. For example, on approaching the city in the age of steamboat travel: “A passenger, standing by the captain on deck, as the boat came up the harbor, exclaimed with energy, ‘If only I had the money!’ ‘What would you do?’ inquired the commander. ‘Buy that town and burn it’ he quickly replied.”

I realized I was in danger of what I think of as falling into a hole on the Internet. One minute you’re just walking down the metaphorical street, hours later you look up and realize you’ve fallen into a big old hole. I attempted to claw myself out by looking up Nameaug. It was easy to find that the name was first used by the Pequot, and I eventually found The Composition of Indian Geographical Names by J. Hammond Trumbull, which explains that Nameaug means “the fishing place.” (Maybe the Indians were just as unoriginal as the Colonists, if more descriptive.) 

I already knew that Connecticut means “on the long tidal river.” But Trumbull also has this amusing factoid: “The c in the second syllable of the modern name has no business there, and it is difficult to find a reason for its intrusion.” Which is presumably what the Indians thought about the Europeans.

I went back to my Caulkins tab and read about the Thames. Unsurprisingly, it was not always called the Thames. Its original name seems to be lost, but early settlers called it the Mohegan, the Pequot, the Little Fresh River, the Great River, and the Frisius. Wait, the what? Why? 

Well, there was a 16^th c. Dutch mathematician and cartographer named Gemma Frisius, and Dutch explorers were the first to map this area. (Adriaen Block, for example, whence Block Island.) So perhaps another Dutch cartographer named the river for him. The name Frisius comes from Frisia, which sounds like a kingdom from the Princess Bride but is actually a historical place, home of the Frisians, who spoke Frisian, and lived on the North Sea since (if Wikipedia can be believed) 500 BC. In fact it’s still a place - really three places - one of which is a province of the Netherlands called Friesland or Fryslân. People there speak West Frisian. And the province contains a city called Sneek. Which, though fabulous, has nothing at all to do with New London. 

It’s official: the Internet hole won.

The Pequot Colony

Sometimes it’s the tiniest of differences that most strongly evoke a distant way of life. In this case, it was a hyphen. The title of the New York Times article, dateline July 15, 1893, read “New-London’s Pretty Resorts.” New-London, somehow, seemed an entirely different place than New London. The article begins, “Dullness has largely prevailed among New-London’s Summer people so far this season, the desire seemingly being for quietness rather than gayety.” It goes on to the gossip - who’s staying where - and the intrigue: a “mysterious sloop yacht” has been found abandoned, and traced to a wealthy businessman and his son, a Yale student who’s gone missing. There are also tales of “informal dancing in the hotel parlors,” games of lawn tennis, growing in popularity this year, and baseball, a favorite of the “New-London young men” in the Pequot colony.

The Pequot Colony. Perhaps even more than that hyphen, the name brings to mind a different world. I’d heard it since I first moved here, but, embarrassingly, never knew exactly what it was. I gathered it was a part of town from the past, but whether that meant a 1600s settlement or an 1800s neighborhood, still extant or long-gone, I had no idea. 

Then I stumbled on the piece in the Times Archive. I started reading other tidbits about the Pequot Colony, where the well-to-do of the mid-19^th century came to escape the city heat in hotels, like the Pequot House, and surrounding “cottages” by the water. At first I thought it must have been torn down and built over, because why had I never seen it? Then I read some advice for tourists that suggested “folks can browse the neighborhood's intriguing homes.” I decided it must be an area of the city I’d never been to - something hidden behind a gate, maybe. Though New London is small, there are places that manage to hide themselves away. (It took me years to discover Alewife Cove.) Finally I realized that not only was the Pequot Colony still around, it was a bone fide local attraction, a Historic District, and more embarrassingly, a place I must have driven or walked through a hundred times without realizing where I was. 

So I went to look around. Dullness largely prevailed when I was there too, not the still of a quiet summer but that of the semi-holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The recent snowfall added to the hush. The most obvious evidence of the Colony, hidden in plain sight, was the Pequot Chapel on Montauk Avenue, built in 1872. Small and Gothic, painted dark gray-green and white like something from a children’s book, it is set back modestly from the sidewalk as if to say “Oh, don’t look at me.” Until now, I hadn’t. 

Between the chapel and the water, the streets curve surprisingly where you’d expect them to form right angles. The district is simultaneously part of the larger neighborhood and tucked away inside it. If you think of its past, there’s a vague sense of fallen greatness about the area. But taken on its own, it just looks like a pleasant place to live. Houses of varying styles and colors, from different centuries, are packed close together. Cars and trucks are parked in the driveways of homes dating to long before the automobile. It all seems to coexist peacefully, as if previous developers had had exactly this in mind.  

The Pequot House burned to the ground in May 1908. The hyphen went too; the New York Times article about the fire is titled “Famous Old Hotel at New London Completely Destroyed.” The whole scene wound down around the 1930s, and the area filled with year-round residents. In reality, modern New London is more my style. I would have had nothing in common with the society people of the Pequot Colony. But I like imagining them, those Summer People and New-London young men, gossiping about their scandals in their hotels, sailing their yachts, walking home to their cottages in the dark on their unexpectedly winding roads.

The More Things Change

New London has changed a lot recently. But then again, it hasn’t.

It happens everywhere, to some degree. You spend a few years in a place, then you leave for a while, and when you come back everything feels a little different. In New London, everything feels a lot different. When I moved back this summer, I felt like I’d missed out on some crucial yet mysterious step in New London's development. Suddenly there were more people, and more buildings, and there was a giant whale tail sticking up out of the sidewalk, and the Blob was gone, and there were all kinds of other small things that added up to make the place feel altered in some fundamental way. One detail that I missed the first few times I saw it was that the Post Office had, during my absence, acquired bright new ugly lights, and apparently a lot of people were very offended by it.

The Post Office is one of those grand buildings, all out of proportion to the New London of today, that bring to mind the significance the city once had. Most of this comes from its cavernous interior and the way its edifice dominates the street. But partly it’s the subtle things: the way the light shines through the P.O. Boxes, or the paintings of men toiling on whaling ships below the crown molding. There's a very American quality to the paintings. They’re strong and uncomplicated in faded primary colors, not so much about New London’s 19^th century whaling heyday as they are about a sort of timeless and region-less America. In their dress and bearing, the men could be tilling a field, or raising a barn. The murals combine a quintessential New London activity with a type of art I expect to find on an Ohio flood wall or the side of a store on a Montana main street. Of course New London has its whale mural and abundant street art, but those are of a different character - cooler, perhaps, quirkier, more individualistic. Not as civic-minded as the earnest representations of the past in the Post Office. It can feel, sometimes, as if Connecticut isn’t connected to the other 49 states at all; these Federally sanctioned murals of old New London life are reassuring, like proof that we do, in fact, belong in the realm of Americana.

People usually call them WPA (Works Progress Administration) murals, but they were funded by the Section of Fine Arts, called the Section, part of the Treasury Department. There were four such New Deal art programs. One article about them describes how at the time “the federal government searched for solutions to provide work for all Americans, including artists.” I'm just going to stop and say that again with my own italics and punctuation, because “the federal government (!) searched for solutions (!) to provide work for all Americans (!), including artists (!)” There aren’t too many things that make me wish I lived in the 1930s, but that would be one. 

New London's New Deal art was painted by Thomas LaFarge, who was uniquely suited to depict the demanding routines of whaling life. He was a sailor; the Coast Guard later called him “an experienced seaman, well qualified to command.” Like other artists employed by the program, LaFarge was selected not by financial need but by ability. Several years after completing the murals, he traveled, as many New London whalers of yore would have done, to Arctic waters. The cutter he commanded foundered in stormy weather off the eastern Canadian coast. The Coast Guard lists it in a catalogue of doomed ships: Natsek; 17 December 1942; Lost (Unknown.)

In a way, New London seems to have changed more in that year I was gone than it has in the decades since the Depression, or the centuries since the whalers stopped plying their hazardous trade. The sea and its dangers are here still, as are the struggles of poverty and the redemption of art. The new lights distracted me when I looked at the paintings again recently, but they were very clearly a temporary feature. Looking past them, the real, permanent things still remained.

It’s the Anniversary of the War. No, Not That War.

New London’s Civil War monuments: first, they exist, and second, there may be more of them than you thought.

"Have you noticed,” I asked a friend who does not live in Connecticut, “ever since the New Year everything is suddenly all about the War of 1812? I know the 200th anniversary is going to be a big deal and everyone has to start preparing, but still, it's like all 1812 all the time."

“No,” she replied, “I’ve just seen a lot about this year being the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.” (She didn't really say that, she said "150^th,” but I wanted to use the word sesquicentennial.)

And I thought, that’s right, it is! It occurred to me that I hadn't seen much Civil War remembrance around New London, except for the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Then I remembered that other marker, the one I used to pass and wonder what it was until I finally stopped to read it. And then I double-checked, and learned that New London, in fact, has three memorials of the Civil War.

The obvious one is the stately obelisk that you have to stare at every time you’re stuck at that red light on Bank Street. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument, bane of those who worry about where to place their apostrophes, honors veterans of the Civil War as well as the Revolution, and, yes, the War of 1812. A figure of Peace stands at the top, holding what I assumed was an olive branch, but which the Connecticut Historical Society says is a palm leaf. It doesn’t look much like either; perhaps its creator had never left the frozen tundra of New England and had therefore never seen either.

The less obvious one, also a granite obelisk, is in Williams Memorial Park. (Which - this may have been clear to everyone except me - is not the same as Williams Park, across the street, where the Nathan Hale statue is.) The monument itself is very visible, but you have to walk up on the grass (or through the foot of snow, as the case may be) to find out what it is for. It was erected in 1898 by the State to honor the 21st Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, which fought mostly in Virginia and which “lost during service 5 Officers and 55 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 1 Officer and 114 Enlisted men by disease.”

And then there’s the one that surprised me. It’s called the Comrades Monument (again with the lack of apostrophe!) and it’s located in Cedar Grove Cemetery, right near the entrance on Broad Street. In a section of veterans’ graves, surrounded by small American flags, stands a stone base, intricately decorated and surmounted by a pensive-looking soldier leaning on his rifle. When I visited he was wearing, like other local statues, a little dollop of snow on top of his cap. The marker was erected by the GAR, or Grand Army of the Republic, a group made up of Union “veterans of the late unpleasantness.” The GAR post responsible for the monument was named after New Londoner William W. Perkins, who was killed fighting in North Carolina.

After my little tour of Civil War memorials, I felt like I’d done something virtuous, pausing to actively remember a war which can be, because of our geography and victory, strangely overlooked. I was reminded that 2011 is not just the year before the year that’s 200 years after 1812, it’s also the year that’s 150 years later than 1861. Afraid I was missing something else, I did some quick research and found that it’s also the 300^th anniversary of both the Tuscarora War and the Cary Rebellion. Those, like William W. Perkins’s last battle, took place in North Carolina. But they have no New London connection, and therefore – thankfully- I don’t think I need to worry about them.

Next Stop…Restaurant?

Many New London businesses have come and gone, but this one happened to stay in my family’s memory. 

I’ve never been one of those people who spend a lot of time researching their own family history. I’m intrigued by it, but it seems like such a huge undertaking: so many migrations to track, revolutions and wars to study, multiple surnames imposed by others or changed for reasons that have become murky over time. And so many photos, boxes of photos, their backs covered with a mishmash of Hebrew characters, Yiddish words, and curlicues of Cyrillic to decipher. I look at them and I think, Someday. 

But last week I came across a very short paragraph in a brief chapter of my family history, that was also a bit of New London history. That was something I could think about - and write about, even - right now. 

I don’t know why it came up, but I was surprised to hear my parents claim that long ago, in the stone-washed and shoulder-padded days of the early ‘80s, they (and I) ate at a restaurant in the New London train station while waiting for the Block Island Ferry. They described the restaurant, which they remembered being either in the station itself or in a building that was once a train station. It was not far from the ferry terminal, and had a view of the train tracks, which they thought were right outside the window.

This seemed unlikely to me. The train station has been where it is since 1889, and it was hard to picture a restaurant inside it. Though there was talk of demolishing it in the 1970s, and several renovations have been carried out since, it seemed unlikely to me that anyone would rip up the inside of the last Henry Hobson Richardson-designed railroad station enough to install a proper restaurant kitchen. I could imagine there having been some kind of snack bar at some point, but the mystery restaurant had table service.

The historic building across from the station, 2 State Street, was my next guess; though my memory of a restaurant in that space only goes as far back as Zavala. For that matter, any of the buildings on Bank Street with decks overlooking Water Street and the tracks could fit this hazy recollection of a place that was dark inside, and possibly sunken, with a historic feel and photographs on the wall. But those restaurants are farther from the ferry terminal, and this place had no deck.

As it turns out, my guesses were wrong, and their memories were right. “In 1976,” according to a Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation article about New London Union Station, “the northern portion of the original lobby had been partitioned off to create a restaurant with a mezzanine overlooking the waiting area.” In an effort to restore the building to its original state and reverse such modern additions as the restaurant and the “large hole …in the floor of the remaining lobby” that was dug to create a “basement-level waiting area,” renovators studied the initial design of the terminal and replaced most of the features that had been changed.

It would be silly or pretentious - or both - to make too much of a restaurant that I went to once, as the world’s dorkiest 6 year old, and can’t even remember now. But so much of what we think of as “history” is just someone’s foggy memory, passed down through the generations and later countered by someone else’s well-reasoned common sense. I knew, but it’s always worth learning again, that sometimes the sense and reason are wrong, and the old story – even if it’s about something that seems peculiar, like putting a restaurant in a historic train station and then removing it - contains the truth.

Antient New London

The history at Ye Towne’s Antientest Buriall Ground may be buried and frequently forgotten, but it is not gone.

I’d read about the (no, Ye) Towne’s Antientist Buriall Ground before I saw it. Without knowing exactly where or even what it was, I thought it sounded exotic, or at least intriguing. Just the spelling of “antient,” plus the designation as a “burial ground” instead of a mundane “cemetery” or even an old-fashioned but common “graveyard,” suggested this site would be something unusual.

The Burial Ground (or Buriall Place) was where I first saw table tombs, those strange stone slabs on legs amidst the headstones. I have since seen them in other Connecticut cemeteries. I’m not one of those people who hangs out in graveyards for fun, but now when I drive past a collection of tombstones I scan it for tables, and approve of it when I see them. I recall the odd sense I got that first time, an image of relatives bringing silverware and wine glasses to the cemetery for a solemn picnic amongst the dead.

There, too, I first noticed soul effigies, those cartoon-ish faces with wings, like children’s drawings, carved on headstones. They looked so foreign, primitive almost, and they made me reassess the people I thought I “knew” in New England’s past. You think you understand what Ancient Greeks are about until you learn that all those pure white buildings and statues used to be painted in bright colors; in the same way, the Antient Connecticutians were less rational, less familiar but more recognizable to me after seeing those little faces.

Then there was the grand weeping tree (some kind of beech, maybe, but not knowing about trees made it all the more impressive), shading the green grass from the heat of the sun. (I first visited in spring.) And the view of the city from the hill, where Benedict Arnold is said to have stood to watch the Battle of Fort Griswold across the river.

But it turns out there was something even more extraordinary in that place, something I missed at first. One of the graves in the Antientist Burial Ground - a small one, not a table - belongs to Flora Hercules, who died in 1749. She was the “wife of Hercules, Governor of the Negroes.”

The nice thing about being a person who’s read too many books, as opposed to an actual historian, is that you have license to make up in enthusiasm what you lack in expertise. Finding out that African Americans in Connecticut in the 18^th century had their own governors did make me feel a bit like I’d been living under a rock, but luckily I could just read on in amazement instead of being embarrassed I had never known.

Elections are known to date from the 1750s when slaves accompanying their masters to the election of the Colony’s governor in Hartford chose a parallel leader of their own. Historically, leaders had been selected in a similar manner in parts of Africa. In Connecticut, the tradition continued for about a century. There is evidence of black governors or kings (!) in other New England states as well.

It sounds at first like a sort of secret society, yet there was nothing hidden about it at the time. The black governors functioned as community leaders and representatives. The elections, held each May, were followed by parades, and the officials chosen were usually respected men, servants of prominent white residents. They appointed deputies and meted out punishments, yet often they were simultaneously governor and slave. 

This history is not hidden. The grave of Flora Hercules, for instance, is a stop on the Connecticut Freedom Trail, and the practice has been written about in, among other places, the Hartford Courant. Yet it is obscure; it seems unlikely to be discovered by people who aren’t looking for it. 

The names of the white governors of the Colony were preserved in books and street names, while those of their African American counterparts were obviously not. But luckily some memories of them were recorded, and luckily some of this evidence remains, carved in stone in the resting place overlooking the city, under the cascading tree.

The Stage Arrives At 7:00

And other tips for traveling to New London via guidebooks of yore.

This column was going to be about something else. But while I was researching that, I kept getting distracted by New London making random appearances in unexpected venues. One of them was a YouTube video entitled Nearly Killed in New London, CT! (description: “As an Amtrak Regional train approaches New London, CT for Boston Mass, all is normal. Until a man with a Chicken in a bag decides to take a nice stroll across the train tracks without a care in the world…”) 

But mostly, I was engrossed by mentions of New London in old guide books. There’s something strange and addictive about reading old guides to the place where you live; you want to know what they’re saying and yet you don’t. It’s like listening to people gossiping about you.

In Old Seaport Towns of New England, Hildegarde Hawthorne writes of sailing here from Long Island on a “little, top-heavy, important sort of a craft” and approaching the harbor, “full of enchantment,” and her impression of the town: “Little coves reach into the land, trees grow along the shores, the Groton Monument looms high on the opposite bank, and then the city with its crowded roofs and the long wharves that stand so close together, and are so lined with ships and schooners and sloops and barges and other passenger steamers.” Old Seaport Towns is not a guide in the strict sense. Hawthorne, granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a prolific writer of poetry, book reviews, newspaper articles, novels, children’s literature, and travel narratives, describes this book, written in 1917, as “more in the nature of an afternoon tea chat than any serious presentment of fact.” To go with the tea, there is New London’s “Civil War Monument, still looking like a long thin segment of layer-cake stood endwise.” 

Eighty-four years earlier, the Traveller’s Guide: through the middle and northern states, and the provinces of Canada treats New London primarily as a transit hub, noting the times of the steam-boat connections to the stage-coach, and therefore makes the typical mistake of modern drivers who see Connecticut as that stretch of I-95 between New York and Boston. The Traveller’s Guide reports that New London “contains a court house, two banks, five churches, and a population of between 3 and 4000,” and concludes, “Many of the houses…are handsome; but the general appearance of the place in uninteresting.”

The mid-late 1800s was a boom time for guide books, it seems. Their names are often wonderful in their lengthiness. The 1844 The Picturesque Tourist; Being A Guide Through The Northern And Eastern States And Canada: Giving An Accurate Description Of Cities and Villages, Celebrated Places Of Resort, Etc. With Maps And Illustrations also has a lot to say about steam-boat schedules. Insultingly, outside of transportation options, it mentions New London only because it is near Norwich, situated dramatically “on the steep declivity of a high hill, which causes the streets to rise above each other like terraces.”

Also in 1844, another book with a mouthful of a name - The Eastern Tourist; Being a Guide Through The States of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Also, A Dash Into Canada: Giving a Brief Description of Montreal, Quebec, etc.- has much to say about steamboat travel. In this one New London gets a more respectable treatment. “Its harbor, spacious and well sheltered, with 30 feet water, is one of the best in the Union.” The Eastern Tourist proclaims. “The largest Navy in the world can ride out any gale with perfect security in this capacious anchorage, and being the only harbor between Newport and New York, suitable for a naval force, as well as for the thousand transient vessels of the Sound; these facts give it an importance unsurpassed by any other on out coast.” I had taken the “uninteresting” assessment, and being passed over in favor of Norwich, rather too personally. So it was reassuring to know that at least one person in the 1800s thought New London important.

By the time the Federal Writers’ Project got to Connecticut in 1938, Americans had stopped travelling and started traveling instead. The WPA funded Federal Writers’ Project, which was created to “provide employment for historians, teachers, writers, librarians, and other white-collar workers,” produced Connecticut: A Guide to Its Roads, Lore, and People. In that book, part of “a series of sectional guide books under the name American Guide, focusing on the scenic, historical, cultural, and economic resources of the United States,” there are 99 references to New London. It is there in timelines, in history lessons, and in tour itineraries. But it is also there for things to do and sights to see. It is “a beautiful city” of “narrow crooked streets” on “rolling hills.” It is located, romantically, where a “drowned valley forms one of the deepest harbors on the Atlantic Coast,” and it produces “silk, machinery, printing presses and garments.” It is the same city I see out my window, and also a city that is lost.

Fun Facts About Ocean Beach

It may be too rainy and snowy and generally inclement to go to Ocean Beach this week. But you can have almost as much fun - well, sort of - by digging up interesting snippets about the Park’s history.

1. Crime-fighting life guards. The lifeguards who worked at the beach starting in the 1920s were all members of the Red Cross Volunteer Life Saving Corps. They were also “sworn in as special constables” to ensure that no city ordinances were broken at the summer resort.

2. Obvious v. Wrong. The undeveloped area that became Ocean Beach was originally called White Sands Beach. This was (obviously) because of the beach’s fine “sugar sand.” It’s debatable whether obvious is better than just plain incorrect: Ocean Beach is (obviously) not on the ocean.

3. Not exactly Work Out World.  In 1892, a year before the city purchased the land for $25,000, the buildings along what would be Ocean Beach’s waterfront consisted of just three cottages.

4. Electric Train. Trolleys along Montauk Avenue took beachgoers to and from the Park until 1932, when buses became the preferred mode of public transportation.

5. Heyday at the beach. Early Ocean Beach buildings included bath houses, bungalows with verandahs, a shore dinner hall called Wordell’s Pavilion, and a ballroom called Danceland.

6. Hurricane – 1, NL – 0. The hurricane of September 21, 1838 devastated New London and mostly swept Ocean Beach away. Photos show scenes of haphazard destruction that should be familiar from modern TV’s constant coverage of natural disasters, but are surprisingly riveting. Buildings are tilted at perilous angles or reduced to stacks of boards. Unharmed people standing uncertainly amid the chaos, looking remarkably sturdy in comparison.

7. Hurricane – 0, NL -1. After the storm, the city quickly started planning to rebuild the rubble into the Park we know today, with its wide beach and boardwalk. The City Council sought the advice of controversial urban planner Robert Moses (who, irrelevantly, was born in New Haven.) The rebuilt park opened on June 30, 1940. Over 12,000 people turned out to cheer the city’s resurgence.

8. New London-6500. Most of the major swing bands played at Ocean Beach throughout the 1940s, including the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1947.

9. Polkabration? Polkabration! The park grew to include amenities such as miniature golf and amusement park rides. At night there were concerts and fireworks. For many years the Park hosted Polkabration, a festival of polka bands from across the US. (This is one of those New London things which I assume are common knowledge, but I had no idea.)

10. Lies, damned lies, and boardwalks. According to the book Reinventing New London, the boardwalk was once often said to be a mile long, but is “actually about a third of a mile long.” The Park itself describes its wooden walkway as being one half mile long. Hmm.

This column started out with nine factoids but I figured, seeing as you already have to put up with a boardwalk that’s either one-half or two-thirds of a mile too short, you shouldn’t also have to read a list that ends with an odd number. 

Other Than That, Mr. Lincoln

New London has seen its share of famous visitors. Occasionally, it chooses to ignore them.

It was March 8, 1860. The train from New Haven had stopped at the New London station.¹ Julius W. Eggleston, the Republican Town Committee chairman, had been waiting eagerly for a certain passenger, but somehow he’d missed him. Eggleston was walking away from the station when he spotted a man walking up State Street. He was very tall and thin and had a distinctive pigeon-toed stride. His black clothes were “so much too small as to give the impression of a standing controversy between his trousers and his limbs.” Eggleston had found his passenger. The lawyer and former Representative from Illinois had lost a Senate race, but recently attained national recognition as an impressive, intelligent debater and opponent of expanding slavery. Now he was touring Connecticut on the heels of a celebrated speech at Cooper Union in New York City, and Eggleston wanted to get New London in on the action. Unfortunately, very few other people in the city cared. Eggleston hadn't had much notice of the visitor’s unexpected arrival - the telegraph had come just that morning – and he hadn’t been able to drum up anything approaching the crowds that had turned out in New Haven and Hartford. And no one on State Street that afternoon seemed to notice that Abraham Lincoln was walking in their midst.²

At the City Hotel³, Lincoln ate lunch while Eggleston attempted to corral the leaders of New London’s Republican Party. When Eggleston returned to the hotel, he was accompanied by the few Republicans he’d managed to convince of the significance of the moment. The others didn’t think the Western politician had much of a future here. “Who was Lincoln, anyway?” They said. And, “No, they hadn’t any time to meet him.”

Lincoln may have been glad to get a moment’s peace. His past few days in Connecticut had been non-stop train rides, speeches to packed halls, and conversations with prominent citizens, newspaper editors, and strangers in shops. In Hartford, “The hall was filled before the appointed time” and Lincoln was “greeted with applause which was almost deafening.” The next night, his speech inspired “the wildest scene of enthusiasm and excitement that has been seen in New Haven for years.” They'd had to run an extra train to Meriden to accommodate the thousands who wanted to see his address at Town Hall there. When he wasn’t speaking he was being escorted by “bands of music” and “marching clubs of ‘Wide-Awakes’ and ‘chapultapers,’ who made more noise than staid old Connecticut had heard since [Andrew] Jackson’s day.”⁴

Norwich still commemorates the speeches Lincoln gave there, at City Hall and the Wauregan House. In Bridgeport there is a plaque at the site where he spoke. But though New London can boast that George Washington slept here and Patrick Henry argued here, the city can only look back with embarrassment on those three hours when it was too cool for Abraham Lincoln.⁵

There’s a coda to the Lincoln in New London story, related by Percy Coe Eggleston, son of the Committee chairman who escorted Lincoln to the City Hotel. The next day or the day after that, Lincoln’s train passed through new London station again. While Lincoln waited there a “respected citizen of New London” appeared and proffered his daughter’s autograph book.  “In his goodhumored and clumsy way, Lincoln took the album, and securing a pen, laid the book against the side walls of the waiting room and, with his long legs stretched in an ungainly angle, and feet braced far apart on the floor, taking infinite pains that the book should not slip, he inscribed in now familiar characters the name ‘A. Lincoln.’”

¹ This was not the current station, which was built over 25 years after Lincoln’s visit, but the original one, which burned down in 1885.

² The USS Abraham Lincoln got more attention; two dependents’ cruises were held on the submarine during a month-long stop at the Naval Submarine Base New London in 1972.

³ The City Hotel was the place to be in the 1800s. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren had stayed there. It suffered three fires; the last, in 1891, destroyed it. The Cronin Building was constructed in 1892.

⁴ The Wide-Awakes were groups of young men who sometimes functioned in a paramilitary capacity but who in this case marched beside campaigning Republican politicians wearing capes and black glazed hats and carrying enormous torches. Chapultapers were sometimes called chapultepecs or chepultepecs, which makes me think they had something to do with the Mexican-American War, but I have no idea.

⁵ Lincoln does have his own New London Courthouse lore, however: they say that “Daniel Webster spoke in praise of the Constitution, General Lafayette paid a visit, and Horace Greeley campaigned for Abraham Lincoln” in the building.

A Fort Trumbull Tale

Wading through Civil War anniversary mania and finding New London. (And Mark Twain.)

I have a feeling this may not be acceptable to say in April of 2011, but (shhh, don’t tell anyone) I've never really been that into the Civil War. Yes, I’ve read a bit about it, and yes, I’ve seen Ken Burns’ documentary. I’ve been known to become slightly belligerent when encountering Confederate memorials while traveling in the South, and vow to go visit some Union monuments when I return to even things out. But given that the hostilities of 1861-1865 are such a huge, consuming passion to so many Americans (and bizarrely, Germans) I would have to rate myself fairly Civil War-challenged. I don't remember what happened at which battle, and I probably could not spell Antietam properly without looking it up. But now that it's the sesquicentennial, and the Civil War is everywhere, I'm trying, rather haphazardly, to catch up. 

This has led me down some highly entertaining but probably less than useful avenues. I became sidetracked by the neuroses of General McClellan. I pondered what on earth would compel 19^th century men to grow that ridiculous facial hair, and whether it has any relation to today’s ubiquitous hipster beards. I read way too much about Joshua Fry Speed. But somewhere in all the course of all of that, I came across a Mark Twain short story that takes place in - of all places - New London! Specifically, at Fort Trumbull, used at the time as an organizational center for Connecticut troops before they were sent off to war.

The current Fort Trumbull, and the one in the story, was built between 1839 and 1852 as part of the Third System of Defense, the effort to secure the coastlines of the United States against outside attackers. (Their efficacy was soon tested not by invaders from across the sea, but by the Navies of the North and South.) There had been two earlier fortifications on the site, though no remains of them survive. During the Civil War, Fort Trumbull was used as the headquarters for the 14^th Infantry Regiment, as well as for recruitment and training. This is the setting in which Twain’s “A Curious Experience” unfolds.

In the story, narrated by the commander of the Fort, a boy turns up asking to be enlisted, and impresses everyone with his behavior, both unusually charming and alarmingly odd. He leads the narrator into a mystery involving potential threats, Confederate spies and suspicions of secret plots. The drama plays out in several New London locations: the train station; an “old deserted stable in the town;” and the fictitious Eagle Hotel, a “wretched tavern down by the water,” hangout of “less reputable folk.”  One of Fort Trumbull’s guns provides a crucial plot twist, and - possibly - a receptacle for encrypted correspondence. It’s a quick and entertaining read, but it also paints a convincing picture of the city and the country at a time when distinguishing friends from enemies was nearly impossible.

Twain also wrote about his own wartime experience. Reading his words, I started to feel better about not being as enthralled as all those other people. Because as it happens, at the time of the actual conflict, Samuel Clemens wasn't that into the Civil War either. His service in the Missouri militia was decidedly lackluster. He and some friends formed a company when the breakout of war made his job as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi obsolete. But they quickly realized that “the war was a disappointment” and disbanded, half of them leaving “this avocation of sham soldier-ship” altogether. Their military career had lasted two weeks. 

Luckily Twain revisited the war years later, writing a number of other stories and non-fiction pieces concerning them. I suspect that this anniversary and corresponding outburst of interest has made me a bit more enthused about the whole thing too.

Start the Presses

Thomas Short, the Green family, and the danger of reading plaques.

I’m probably more likely to read plaques and signs and the bases of statues than most people, but sometimes I intentionally avoid them. Especially in places like New London, where pretty much everything is of at least some historical significance, if you stopped to examine every bit of information, you’d never make it down the street. Plus, there is always more. What if you read the plaque and it’s interesting, something you never knew before, and it makes you want to know the rest of the story, and that leads you somewhere else? Basically you can never get anything else done ever again. And so far that has been my attitude toward the metal squares in downtown new London’s sidewalks. Until, for some reason, I read one of them.

It said:

158 State Street

c. 1771

Oldest building on State Street.

Originally Timothy Green’s print shop,

which published one of the colony’s

earliest newspapers.

Now that I’d gone and read the thing, and looked up at the building - pale blue and indeed very old-looking, wedged between two much larger brick edifices which had diverted my attention away from it for years - it was too late.

Timothy Green came from a large family of printers - fifteen to twenty of them, depending on what source you read - who dominated the industry for years. This particular Timothy Green was the third man of that name from that family to run a printing press in New London. Because they did so much, and because their name is on everything, they get most of the attention. 

But I’m usually more interested in the guy who doesn’t get on the plaque, so I skipped over the Greens and started reading about New London’s, and Connecticut’s, first printer. His name was Thomas Short, and his shop was just a room in his house, location unknown. He was invited here in 1709, after Governor Gurdon Saltonstall and the General Assembly decided that what they had been doing - sending all the Colony’s printing to Boston - was no longer a convenient plan. The first documents Short printed were an act of the General Assembly authorizing the production of paper money to pay for a British attack on Quebec, and a broadside announcing a day of fasting and prayer for the success of that endeavor. But most of what he published sounds insufferably dull. One example, the first book ever printed in the colony of Connecticut, was called The Saybrook Platform of Church Discipline.

Aside from the lack of exciting new reading material, there was also a dearth of paper. There were no paper mills in America until 1691; until that time all paper was imported from England. Paper-making technology spread slowly through the Colonies, with Connecticut getting its first mill in 1766, but the British did not appreciate this competition, and limited both American production and imports. During the Revolutionary War, the importing of paper and cloth was banned.

Thomas Short did not live long enough to see paper mills or to begin publishing more entertaining things like the newspaper the second of the Timothy Greens started in 1725. He died at age 30 in 1712. His wife Elizabeth then ran the press for a little while. In 1714, Timothy Green (the first one) moved to New London to take over.

And, of course, there is more, a heap of those little scraps that bring history to life. For example, in that expedition to Canada, the only man to actually encounter the enemy was New Londoner William Crocker, though about 90 of Connecticut’s 350 soldiers died of illness during the campaign.  Also, one home on Green Street, possibly moved there from Green’s Alley, was said to belong to the mistress of Timothy Green. (Exactly which Timothy Green, I do not know.) And then there’s Elizabeth Short, who was remarried to Solomon Coit but died less than a year later. Her young children from her marriage to Thomas, named Katherine and Charles, returned to Boston. But when Charles grew up he became a mariner, and moved to New London once again.

The moral of this little story is, don’t read plaques. Unless you have time to follow where they lead.

Slumming Around New London’s Bradley Street

Bradley Street is gone now, but once it was a controversial and lively red-light district.

What used to be Bradley Street is no longer called Bradley, and it’s not much of a street. It curves from Eugene O’Neill Drive to the Parade, between parking garages and the backs of buildings. It looks like you’ve made a wrong turn, and if you’re on it you probably have.

But if it’s not noticed or remembered much now, at least it has been often recorded. I didn’t know this street used to be here, off of State, parallel to Eugene O’Neill, which itself used to be called Main Street. But I realized that I kept seeing its name in all sorts of unrelated places. For a street one oddly-configured block long, it left a considerable impression.

To the more affluent residents of the city it was a blight, a crime-breeding ghetto. Its denizens were Blacks and immigrants, mostly Jews, Russians, and Poles, according to “Reinventing New London,” one of those little picture books that you see in Borders and assume are not very useful but in fact contain all sorts of photographic windows into lost worlds. That book also quotes a Day editorial calling Bradley Street “a stench in the nostrils of citizens” of New London.

It also comes up in local Revolutionary War histories. Bradley Street was spared by Benedict Arnold's troops as they set much of the rest of New London on fire, because a loyalist and Arnold informant either lived there, or informed the Regulars that nothing on the street was worth burning. At that time it had about ten houses, and was known as “Widow’s Row.”

It turns up in literature too, though not by name. When Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night talks about Fat Violet, the piano-playing prostitute he takes pity on, the character is describing a real person, who playwright Eugene O'Neill knew or knew of from the years he spent at his family’s summer house on Pequot Avenue. In the play, madam Addie Burns of Bradley Street became Mamie Burns, who complains to Jamie about the state of her business. The Great God Brown also sets several scenes in a brothel parlor, described in detail in the stage directions, based on a real New London bawdy house.

There were brothels on other streets, but Bradley and the area around it, almost wholly made up of tenements and boardinghouses, often fronts for houses of ill repute, was their center. Like every Connecticut attraction since probably the 1600’s, it was said to be the most happening red-light district “between New York and Boston.”

Bradley Street is a part of New London’s law enforcement history, too, and not only because of its illegal activities. A police station was opened there in 1898, replacing an earlier, smaller building in a different location. The crime fighters existed there alongside the crime for years, until the area was cleaned up as part of the nationwide movement to eliminate vice districts after World War One.

Bradley Street was renamed North Bank in the 1920s, and then at some point during the urban renewal of the 1960s, it became Atlantic Street, a rather grand name for the non-entity of a road it is today. But now it is clean, relatively, and thoroughly lacking in either excitement or tragedy. If there is crime on Atlantic Street, it is not of the visible, colorful variety. But knowing the history of it makes driving along this concrete palimpsest almost entertaining, even now.

Ah, New London!

It took a while for me to recognize Eugene O’Neill’s impact on the city and the city’s impact on him.

The thing is, I never particularly liked Eugene O’Neill. I first encountered his plays in high school, and thought they were boring. High school theatre classes involved a lot of O’Neill plays, partly because you could carve so many scenes out of them and partly because our teacher felt he’d accomplished something by suggesting Important playwrights without explaining why they were Important. I avoided O’Neill – there was something silly, even in the context of high school drama class, about 16 year olds pretending to be drug-addicted mothers of alcoholic and consumptive young men. I preferred Chekhov (more fun) or Ibsen (also somewhat boring and beyond us, but foreign, and therefore marginally cooler) or Ionesco (so out there it was arguably impossible to get wrong.) 

In college there remained a touch of O’Neill, but Mamet, Molière, Euripides and many others took precedence. I spent most of my time as an acting major on Shakespeare, moving professionally and personally away from anything resembling moping around your house in Connecticut.

And so, my “discovery” of O’Neill’s life story had nothing to do with studying or attempting to work in theatre. It was living in New London and slowly noticing how his memory permeated the city that finally gave me some sense of connection to O’Neill. So many of his plots and characters were influenced by, or taken directly from, the summers he lived on Pequot Avenue in the early 20^th century.

The O’Neill family’s “cottage” on Pequot was technically a summer house, but it was the only permanent home they had. During the winter O’Neill’s father James, an actor, brought Eugene, his mother Ella, and his brother Jamie along on tour. Monte Cristo Cottage, a house that by today’s standards (wrap-around porch! water views!) would be desirable real estate if it were not maintained as a museum, was shabbily built, and Ella was ashamed of it. It was near the fashionable Pequot Colony but not of it. O’Neill wrote of attending a “hop” at the Pequot Hotel: “I was bored to death and said ‘never again...’”

Long Day’s Journey Into Night, among other plays, is set here. The Tyrones are barely veiled stand-ins for the O’Neill’s, and the family’s evasive discussions of drug addiction, drinking, and illness that bored me in high school could be a transcript of their lives. The play feels different when you read it knowing that the ominous moan of the foghorn is coming from the Thames. Similarly, finding that O’Neill was known for staring dreamily out at the water means more, once you know exactly which water it was.

He covered the news for the New London Telegraph, though his reporting read more like poetry. Luckily the Telegraph published poems, too. After being treated for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Wallingford, he lived for a time at a boarding house a short walk from his family’s cottage. While there he swam daily, as his doctor had ordered, even when the sand was covered with snow. And he wrote plays. 

He drank everywhere, but in New London he drank especially at the Dutch Tavern (which was then, before its Prohibition closing and re-opening, called the Oak.) He drank at the bar at the Crocker House, and presumably, like his father, toned down his drinking in front of the big-wigs at the Thames Club on State Street, where James O’Neill was a member.

The O’Neill family attended St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, although Eugene stopped going to Mass in his teens. He hung out with his friends at Ocean Beach. There is a photograph of them there, and in it – like in all the pictures I’ve seen – he looks unexceptional, betraying no hint of the innovation in his work or the turmoil in his private life.

Perhaps if I’d known in high school that O’Neill once lived in coastal Connecticut and was looked down on by the surrounding snobs and stared out at the Sound, feeling trapped – just like me! – I would have chosen him over Tennessee Williams. Though it’s possible I would have liked him even less. Art may be, as Picasso said, a lie that makes us realize the truth, but it’s more enjoyable when it’s not your truth. 

I will never read The Iceman Cometh for entertainment. But when I cross Eugene O’Neill Drive now, I remember it was once Main Street, where he and his bohemian friends gathered in an apartment above an office to socialize. When I see the statue of him by the City Pier, a small boy in a then-bustling seaport, his life makes sense to me in a way those stilted, stifling scenes never did. 

Ye Spanish Affair

Involving gold, silver, indigo, and the downfall of Roger Wolcott.

I came across this New London story, involving purloined treasure from an 18^th c. Spanish snow and attendant legal and political drama, while researching ships associated with Waterford. Back in 1752 there was no Waterford, but today, Bartlett’s Reef, where the snow foundered, belongs to the town. After that the action moves to New London, so I mentioned only that the ship was towed to shore, where the cargo was stolen and all hell broke loose.

But I couldn’t forget about this incident. Clearly at the time it was important and well - if confusingly - documented. It was crazy: international squabbles, angry mobs, buried treasure. And it went on for three years. I wondered why this episode wasn’t better known.

The story (not the whole story, because as I said, this thing was crazy) is as follows. The St. Joseph and St. Helena, or Santa Elena y Senor San Joseph, was damaged in stormy weather en route from Honduras to Spain. While attempting to dock at New London for repairs (why New London was chosen remains unclear, at least to me, simply from a “have they ever seen a map?” perspective) the ship ran aground on Bartlett’s Reef. Captain Richard Durfey arrived in a barge and relieved the snow of “thirty seven chests of dollars, and three of gold in doubloons, with other goods” that were taken to Gurdon Saltonstall, Jr’s basement and guarded by armed men. Joshua Hempstead was there, of course, “taking Evidences and acknowledgmnts.” The ship, and its “sundry chests, boxes, and kegs” of valuables, was towed in and the goods stored in a warehouse by the Town Wharf. New Londoners were “[thrown] into a ferment,” in the words of Frances Manwaring Caulkins, at the thought of so much money (about $3,800,000 today.)

The Colony of Connecticut and the New London customs house disagreed about where the cargo should be stored. A court decision led to a “violent altercation” between Saltonstall’s guard and a party armed with clubs and led by collector Joseph Hull, “flourishing a naked cutlass.” With a damaged ship and winter approaching, the Spaniards were forced to wait in New London. Relations with Spain were tense. Among other factors, New Londoners had recently taken part (some had lost their lives) when Britain fought Spain in the Caribbean. Now the crew of the beleaguered snow and the “low part of the populace with whom they associated” were getting into brawls. In addition to the internal disagreements the shipwreck had spawned, the kingdoms of Spain and England now got involved. England sent a war ship, just in case. And the treasure was slowly disappearing.

This was revealed when the Spanish supercargo, Don Joseph Miguel de San Juan, attempted to leave with his goods on another ship. Four of Saltonstall’s guards, who were said to have absconded with part of the loot, were arrested. One “turned about & become evidence for the King,” confessing that they had buried the gold and silver in “the Cedar Swamp in the rear of the town” and later hidden it again, in several secret locations. The warehouse may have been robbed too.

How what Hempstead called “ye Spanish affair” ended, we don’t really know. Governor Roger Wolcott, along with representatives of the Spanish and British courts, eventually settled the matter. The supercargo and his remaining cargo departed in 1755. And then everything was quiet. “Nations have sometimes plunged into war on slighter grounds” Caulkins writes, “yet it seems to have been overlooked and forgotten by the powers on the other side of the ocean.” It was forgotten here too, for the most part, after Governor Wolcott, blamed for his handling of the matter and suspected of conspiring with Saltonstall, became the first Connecticut Governor to be voted out of office.

But in a way it didn’t end. Spanish dollars surfaced later on Water Street, near the site of the old Town Wharf. “Two negro lads” found a pitcher of doubloons and purchased their freedom; then, like many modern lottery winners, they spent the rest “in dissipation.” There were tales of a peddler’s white horse stained blue from bags of stolen indigo. If a poor man bought a house, he was thought to have found a stash of Spanish coins.

Some of the cargo, it is said, remains buried, somewhere out there, to this day.

The Diary of Joshua Hempstead

Joshua Hempstead kept track of everything - everything - that happened to him and pretty much everyone else in New London. 

I saw him as a source, not a story unto himself. Yet there he is, always, part of almost every event in New London for almost 50 of its formative years. He is never the most important part, yet without him, our knowledge of this city in the 18^th century would be greatly diminished, and in some instances non-existent. 

Joshua Hempstead was born in September of 1678, in the house that is now a museum bearing his name. He was, as Frances Manwaring Caulkins, another invaluable New London chronicler, describes him, “at once farmer, surveyor, house and ship carpenter, attorney, stonecutter, sailor and trader. He generally held three or four town offices; was justice of the peace, judge of probate, executor of various wills, overseer to widows, guardian to orphans, member of all committees, everybody's helper and adviser, and cousin to half of the community.” He kept his Diary from September 1711 to November 1758, recording everything that transpired, careful not to give more weight to a military disaster than to the slaughter of a cow or the mending of a casement. He died in 1758, in December, his 80th New London winter.

He records those winters, and they sound exactly like our own: A very Cold Day, a Bitter Cold day, a windy Cold day, itt Snowed fast, Snow Squally, a very great Storm of Wind & much Rain all Day.

If you should ever want to know how much a bushel of corn cost in 1755, or who died on Monday, September 17, 1753, Hempstead is your man. (25 shillings; “Amos Beebe son of Stephen Bebe...a married man. I Suppose 5 or 6 & 20.”) The names of his neighbors and associates sound familiar, and you wonder why until you realize you are reading the index of a street map of New London County.

Hempstead walks a lot, or rides, or sails - in any case he rarely spends a whole day in any one location. Mostly his activities are not very exciting. But occasionally he reminds you that even mundane tasks in the 1700s could be almost mythic:  “wee went to hunt wolves in ye Great Swamp, but found none.” And fun: “I went with Benj Star & Samll fosdyck & our wifes & Samll Rogers to Jno Harris in Ebe dennis's Boat to drink Cydar & Recreate our Selves.”

He abbreviates and spells idiosyncratically. He renders doubloons, double loons; Rhode Island, Road Island; the, ye. His days are divided into forenoon and aftern. His appointments are at “3 clock” or “eight of ye clock in ye morning.” His distances come in miles and rods, and his butter is measured by the firkin. 

He stoically records his own sickness and injury (“I had a fitt of ye feaver & Ague”, “I bruised my Thumb with the head of the Ax”) and everyone’s births and deaths and illnesses. He sketches a Colonial New England full of funerals, baptisms, town meetings, sessions of various courts, and day-long church services. 

No one escapes notice. Everything requires collaboration: the building of homes and boats, the grazing of livestock, the burying of the dead. Hempstead is rarely alone, except sometimes when mending something or trekking to Norwich or Stonington. If you lived in this New London and were disinclined to attend church or stack hay with the others, life would have been very difficult indeed.

And yet into this small rigid community came exotic ships from far-off lands, and travelers who must have told fantastic tales. Out of it went adventurers, captains, and merchants. 

Between the lines of Diary World you can see glimpses of the real world. Sometimes there is a “sad accident” or “sad news.” In August 1716, Hempstead writes, “my Dear Wife Died about half an hour before Sunrise.” Searching the 750 pages of text online for buzzwords of humanity, I found two mentions of anger, referring to the sea and a cow. There were no uses of “happiness”, but there was one of “curiosity,” and four of “joy.”

John Winthrop, Jr.’s Surprisingly Fascinating Life

New London’s founder has more tricks up his prim Puritan sleeve than you might expect.

If there’s anything that makes a long-dead and somber-seeming figure from the past appear even longer-dead and more somber, it’s a Puritan hat. The statue of long-time Connecticut Governor John Winthrop, Jr. wears such a hat. But stop at Hempstead Street and Bulkeley Place and look at him close-up someday. His cape is tied at the neck with a little bow, and his shoes have rigid tongues that look very uncomfortable. He wears a determined expression and holds a rolled-up paper in his hand. Despite being made of bronze, he seems, suddenly, like a real person. Even the hat looks less comical, and more practical, shading his eyes as he looks towards the river.

I looked up Winthrop, wondering about this man who figures in almost every aspect of the first days of New London and who would have, even in the heat of a Connecticut summer, worn stockings, breeches gathered at the knees, and a bulky coat. Here are a few of the things I didn’t expect to find.

1. He got around. Born in England, Winthrop went to school in Ireland. He later traveled to France – as part of a military expedition – and then Holland, Italy, and Turkey. This was all before coming to the New World to join his father, John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Once he was here, he didn’t stay in one place either. He wrote what may be the earliest Connecticut guidebook, after a journey from Boston to Saybrook and then east along the coast to Providence in 1645.

2. He could be mysterious. Some letters between Winthrop and Martha Fones, his first wife, were written in code. And it was apparently a good code – no one cracked it until the 20^th century.

3. He made us official. In 1660, the Restoration left Puritan Connecticut, established without permission from the Crown, in legal limbo. So Winthrop traveled to England to secure a Charter from King Charles II. The document he brought back in 1662 outlined the Colony’s borders: “on the North by the Line of the Massachusetts-Plantation; and on the South by the Sea,” and from “Narraganset-Bay on the East, to the South Sea [i.e., Pacific Ocean] on the West Part.” It also incorporated the New Haven Colony into the Connecticut Colony, about which the New Haven Colony was none too happy. This is, by the way, the Charter that was hidden in the Oak when King James wanted it back 25 years later. (Though I’m not positive, I like to think this is what the Winthrop statue is holding. Or perhaps it’s something written in code.)

4. He was given Fisher’s Island as a present. The Massachusetts Bay Colony presented it to him, along with the land that became New London, after their victory in the Pequot War and conquest of the former Pequot lands. 

5. He was anti-Witch Hunting. Whenever he could, Winthrop fought to overturn witchcraft convictions and protect women he believed to be falsely accused. Due largely to Winthrop’s influence, Connecticut quickly went from an aggressive prosecutor of alleged witches to a Colony without witchcraft trials or executions. But it wasn’t because Winthrop thought the charges were cruel or ridiculous. It was more that he was so well-informed and practiced in all matters occult that he knew these so-called witches weren’t the real deal. And that’s because...

6. He originally intended New London to be Hogwarts. Well, sort of. Winthrop was seriously into alchemy. His early vision for a new version of London centered around the idea of alchemists from all over Europe gathering here to collaborate on experiments in medicine, metallurgy, agriculture, and the other varied disciplines that fell under the umbrella of alchemy at the time. Though that never happened, New London did become a sort of medical hot-spot, where Winthrop and his assistants treated the sick (for free) with powerful mineral-based cures believed to be divinely blessed.

And you thought he was just the guy who built the Old Mill and got his name on a street sign.

The Other Nathan Hale Schoolhouse

Before teaching in New London, our State Hero spent a few bored months in a much less bustling Connecticut town.

The little red Nathan Hale Schoolhouse is a unique fixture of New London. But there’s another diminutive school with the same claim to fame, in East Haddam on the Connecticut River. Hale taught here beginning in the fall of 1773, just after graduating from Yale, and the experience led directly to his to coming to New London. I went to see it one morning, looking for some connection between this school and the familiar one on the Parade.

Hale thought East Haddam, which was then also known as Moodus and which Hale called “East Haddam (alias Modos)” was an isolated wilderness. On the lonely drive up Route 9, I was inclined to agree. Coming not from New London but from the West, I had to cross the river on the venerable swing bridge that dominates the town. As I waited (and waited, and waited) in a long line of cars, I felt like I had entered a small realm with rules and customs all its own.

Finally the flashing gates lifted and we could cross. I drove past the splendid Goodspeed Opera House and the other buildings of Main Street, each pretty in its own unique way, none matching, but all somehow fitting together. I was glad I’d come early, because the Nathan Hale Schoolhouse wasn’t open yet. Here I should explain that I have a fear of costumed interpreters. This is both silly and inconvenient considering I write about history, and travel, and that I majored in Acting. Yet when I see someone coming towards me wearing a hoop skirt or holding a musket, my first instinct is to flee.

The Schoolhouse stands above the town; you can spot it in the distance from a church parking lot below. I climbed up a paved path which became a gravel track and then simply grass. I ducked under a chain between two gate-posts (you get used to doing things like that when you frequently evade the staff at historic sites.) There at the top of the hill, across the wide lawn, it stood, looking like one of those red Monopoly buildings. I crossed towards it, waving my arms around my head in an attempt to swat away the army of tiny persistent flies, looking like a lunatic or someone talking on a Bluetooth. 

From the Schoolhouse, you can look down on the top of the church and the cemetery beside it. In the other direction is the river. The building itself was simple, with a peaked roof and brick chimney. It struck me, like its New London counterpart, as both adorable and a terribly confined space to have to sit in all day learning math and grammar. I imagined Nathan Hale trying to control children, from very young to his own age (18) who would rather run on the grass or throw snowballs or gaze out at the water and the boats passing by. I pictured them all trudging up that path in feet of snow. But as it turns out, the school was not always on this hilltop. It was moved here in 1900, but in Hale’s day it was down on Main Street. At that spot now, there is bust of Hale on a column. It looks slightly alarming, like a disembodied head floating just above the traffic.

Though his other schoolmaster friends were scattered in small towns across the state, East Haddam was apparently considered a particularly dire placement. One friend wrote Hale, “I am at a loss to determine whether you are yet in this land of the living, or removed to some far distant and to us unknown region; but this much I am certain of, that if you departed this life at Modos, you stood but a narrow chance for gaining a better.” Alexander Rose, in his book Washington’s Spies, jokes that “East Haddam’s night life consisted of sitting on chairs.” By winter Hale had had enough, and applied to New London’s Union School. He was teaching there by the spring of 1774.

I drove away from that “far distant” place, back towards New London, perhaps taking the route Nathan Hale would have traveled. I later looked at the Schoolhouse on the Parade, and saw it fresh: not tiny and old-fashioned, but an entrance to a larger world, full of opportunities and ideas and dangers.

Weathering the Storm

Photos of the hurricane of 1938 show a very different, and very resilient, New London.

New London looks good in the rain. I don’t think I’ve ever said that about any other place, because I hate (hate hate HATE) the rain. I would say that I should move to the desert, except I’ve lived in the desert, and it rains there too. But New London gets pleasingly grey in bad weather, gloomy and atmospheric. It seems, aesthetically anyway, as if the city was built with a chance of rain in mind. Practically, however, there are limits.

The other day I left my apartment near Downtown in a faint drizzle; by the time I reached Jefferson Avenue it could have been renamed Jefferson Pond, and after I dashed from the supermarket back to the car a few feet away, I was quite literally soaked. Looking for a place to wipe my rain-spotted glasses, I found that not an inch of my clothing was dry. The rain had had enough of making New London look pretty, and now seemed intent on destroying it.

Of course that was nothing at all compared to the rain that fell in September of 1938.  It was, at first, simply rain. It started on Saturday, the 17^th, and did not stop. Roads flooded, and transportation became difficult if not impossible. It continued to fall until the 21^st, Wednesday, when a hurricane blew up from the south. It was almost a complete surprise, but there it was, and winds over 100 mph (with gusts measured up to 186 mph) began slamming the city. Shortly after, a fire broke out near the river, and was carried along on the winds despite the rain. Now the city was simultaneously drowning and burning. The flames continued - defying the efforts of fire-fighters, military personnel, and civilians - through the night.

Not everything was leveled. Photographs show the stone Nathan Hale in Williams Park looking saddened by the massive trees snapped and strewn around him, and the Harbor Light standing unperturbed in a mess of rocks and crumbled pavement. But the community surrounding Ocean Beach was gone, its light cottages smashed to pieces or blown to distant neighborhoods. The Civil War monument was dashed into several pieces, and the pier was splintered. And then there were the many ships deposited awkwardly on shore, the train tracks bent, the houses and shops burned down, the docks rendered unusable.

Accounts of the storm describe situations almost unimaginable today. The area from Putnam to New London was under martial law for days. Train and bus service had stopped when the rain began, later electricity and phone service was cut off too. Thousands of elms and maples crashed to the ground, blocking roads, and were cleared by CCC and WPA workers. Firemen were forced to swim away from burning buildings. Glass windows melted. But no one died.

Usually, with history, it is words or artifacts that grab me. The hurricane got my attention through pictures. In photos taken in familiar settings, 1938 New Londoners seem like strangers, homogenous and formally dressed. They drive through flooded roadways in their boxy, elaborately designed cars, and stand on sidewalks staring at damaged buildings in prim suits and laced leather shoes. Men in hats and overcoats wander along blackened, rubble-strewn streets that resemble scenes from the war-torn European cities in which, unbeknownst to them, they will soon be called to fight.

After the storm they cleaned up, refloated the boats dumped on the tracks, rebuilt what they could and demolished what could not be saved. As I know we would too. But looking at the pictures, it’s a wonder they didn’t just give up, get in their damaged boxy cars and drive inland until they reached a place where hurricanes could not reach.

The Intentional Sightseer

In which I take the rare opportunity to see the inside of the Old Town Mill.

There’s a reason the word “unintentional” is up above this column. Most of what intrigues me, historically, is the unexpected line in a book or the unusual find by the side of the road. I do go to museums and historic sites on purpose sometimes, probably more than most people even, but honestly I’m not very good at it. I am, you could say, a bad tourist. I don’t want to follow the guide; I read the signs in the wrong order; I fixate on either the obvious or the silly, I fail to see the gravity of the place until I can think about it later.

I went to the Old Town Mill last weekend very intentionally, because it was the last of the few days each summer that the 1650 grist mill is opened to the public. And I was indeed a rather inept visitor. Walking inside, I noticed at first only the smell - not musty, exactly, but wonderfully old. I imagined it must always have smelled exactly like this, though of course it couldn’t have. Then I perceived that everything was small: the doorways, the windows, the stairs. I thought of New London founder and Mill owner John Winthrop Jr., and all the other men who had climbed those little staircases and labored under those low ceilings, removing their buckled hats and stooping at the front door.

Standing on the top floor, where the widely spaced wooden planks allowed slivers of light to shoot up from below my feet, I looked around the space that used to be the corn crib. The corn was hoisted up into the building, and I realized I’d seen pictures of the outside half of that process, but never imagined the people who stood here in the semi-darkness under the exposed rafters and hauled the corn in.

It is easy to grasp the basics, that the grain traveled down to the great turning millstones, and was crushed between them into meal, which eventually flowed out of the small chute by the front door. But the technology that made it work was far more complicated than I’d expected, although of course, as a useless museum-goer, I hadn’t really thought of what to expect. Looking around at the several levels of baffling parts and interlocking gears was like standing inside a massive wrist watch. Though there is something cartoonishly primitive about a millstone, there was nothing simple about the knowledge of those sometimes distant-seeming 17^th century immigrants who turned corn to meal in these sharp, spinning, cramped rooms.

I went outside and asked obvious questions, such as whether the little stream of water running by the mill had a name. It is Mill Brook, of course, and there was once a Mill Pond, though now it is filled in and paved over. The original wheel would have been slightly larger than the one at the Mill today; as it turned, it would have touched the water below. I considered myself at least somewhat competent for learning a new word, the name of the wooden channel which carried the water to the wheel: a flume.

My main fault as a sight-seer is that physically being in a place can make me entirely forget or hopelessly muddle facts which I once knew with certainty. The Old Town Mill retains, along with its antique smell, an air of determined survival. In a location where you’d think anything old would have been torn down long ago, vulnerable beneath the rumbling vehicles on the highway bridge above, the Mill somehow seems so permanent that I managed to forget it had nearly been destroyed. There are a few buildings in New London that were spared Benedict Arnold’s wrath, and for a minute, in the warm afternoon sun, I thought this had been one of them. It hadn’t, of course: I’d even written about that for the Mill’s Patch listing. It was rebuilt shortly after Arnold’s 1781 raid, and was burned again later, and rebuilt again after that. It has hung on so well for over 350 years that it seemed to me, in my typical visitor haze, almost indestructible.

And then I left and vowed to reform myself, become a better historic-site-goer in future. But I don’t know if I will follow through, because when I walk through places like the Old Town Mill, even as a bad tourist, I always have such a nice time.

Burned Into Memory

230 years after the burning of New London, reminders of that day are everywhere, if you’re inclined to look.

I once took a writing class as part of a study abroad program. I remember little about it now, except for one comment by another student, a stereotypical slacking rich boy sent away by desperate parents in a last-ditch attempt to correct his unpromising behavior. After reading an assignment of mine, which contained the sentence “I keep thinking about the Peloponnesian War,” he remarked that people who thought about history were doing so to avoid thinking of more important things, or were losers. I thought that was peculiar. Partly because everyone should think about the Peloponnesian War on occasion, but mostly because I didn’t see how could anyone could go through life without sometimes being reminded of history.

Recently, I keep thinking about Benedict Arnold. It’s not just the date; so many things seem to relate to his devastating September 6, 1781 raid on New London and Groton. Of course there is the fact that this anniversary coincides with that of another, more recent attack on America. As I watch the 9/11 coverage and commemoration, I think that while the two events were not alike, both involved surprise, confusion, and resolve. Both, too, employed the deadly combination of an onslaught from without with knowledge of vulnerabilities gained from within.

It isn’t only acts of war that recall the terror of that day so long ago. In Texas, as enormous wildfires spread, the stories of homes burned to the ground evoke our own 18^th century destruction and homelessness. The current news reports show aftermath, but the old accounts describe anticipation: New London families escaping into the countryside, women and children becoming separated in the rush, some carrying hastily gathered valuables in sacks, some holding a piece of bread.

There are other small details that stick. The scattered stores of coffee and sugar, the burning rum and butter running through the streets. The laconic command of a woman to her farmer husband as he rode off to answer the alarm: “John! Don’t get shot in the back!” (There’s the Peloponnesian War again!) The thought that Arnold, consummate traitor, used his familiarity with the alarm guns of his home turf to trick and delay the local militia, and that he had lunch with a friend in his Bank Street house before setting the building on fire. The split-second instances of enemy kindness or cruelty and local resourcefulness. I will always remember that you can douse your burning dwelling with soap, or vinegar.

The map of the paths of destruction Arnold’s British, Hessian, and Loyalist troops blazed through New London reinforces just how small this city is and how overwhelmed it must have been by around 1,000 troops, well-trained and visible everywhere with their red coats and shining weapons. I drove part of the route of the invaders the other day, but if I’d had more time I could easily have walked. Reading current street names on the old map, little New London suddenly seemed vulnerable again. 

Today New London’s heights become important only when it snows, but throughout the accounts of that day people look down from high vantage points or fight while running from hill to hill. To read them is to lay a transparent sheet of battle over today’s streets. So many places still bear the sometimes invisible mark of September 6^th. Ye Antientest Burial Ground, where Arnold stood and watched his men wreaking havoc below. The lighthouse, near where the British began their march to the town. The small cannon on Manwaring Street, representing the earlier field-piece with which a few determined locals attempted to repel the attackers. Williams Street, nearby, where several British soldiers were buried.

Every building with a story here retains as part of that story whether it was spared the torch, rebuilt, or constructed later to replace what was destroyed. When I first moved to New London I was taken with its unique look, half old New England port and half later, more westerly city. This, of course, is due to Benedict Arnold’s torches. I suppose, whenever I admire the endurance of one building and the improbability of its neighbor, I am unconsciously thinking of him still. 

Do You Want To Be Slave Or Free?

153 years ago this month, a simple question in a New London court - and the even simpler response - made history. 

If the first half of September brings to mind a devastating anniversary for New London, the end of the month recalls another, much quieter, more gratifying event.

On September 30, 1858, nineteen years after the more familiar Amistad incident, a fugitive slave was brought to the New London Customs House. He had come from North Carolina, a stowaway on the schooner of Captain Josephus Potter, who had just brought a cargo of lumber up from the South. The slave, who was called “stowaway Joe” but whose name was Benjamin Jones, had been discovered during the voyage. He’d managed to slip away after the ship docked, evading Captain Potter, whose Southern business connections would not take kindly to Potter’s inadvertent theft of their property. But the Captain caught up with Jones in a store, grabbed him, and hauled him in to the Federal officials who could enforce the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Under this law runaway slaves must be returned to their masters, regardless of where they’d been found. The Customs Collector, John Perkins Cushing Mather, duly took Jones in.

But Connecticut had a law of its own, prohibiting slavery in the State. And that is what Police Court Judge Augustus Brandegee was thinking of as he hurried to the Customs House. It is unclear exactly who asked the question, but after determining that Mather did not, or might not, have the legal authority to hold Jones, one of the men asked him, “Do you want to be slave or free?” “Free,” Jones said, and so free he was.

Brandegee, a New London native, was a highly respected lawyer and politician who held many offices, from Judge to State Representative to Congressman. He was an active Union supporter and abolitionist. Mather’s credentials look quite similar, though he was a Democrat not a Republican. Before being appointed Customs Collector, he served as Secretary of State. Both men were Mayors of New London for a time, Brandegee somewhat unwillingly. The little incident of emancipation in 1858 is not generally mentioned in the long, impressive resumes of either of them.

The details of Benjamin Jones’s life in North Carolina, and how he managed to sneak himself onto the Eliza Potter, are not known. Reports of what he did, or where he went, after his short captivity in New London are also frustratingly scant. The Norwich Courier says he was spotted north of the city in Salem, on his way to Canada, where the Hartford Daily Courant also mentions he ended up. But that’s all. Perhaps a man accustomed to a life of hiding and running wouldn’t want us to know anyway. Maybe he only wished to live without others constantly monitoring his actions, and maybe when he left New London, he finally achieved it. Someday some other record of him might turn up, until then he will be remembered for the day a Judge used a state law to beat a federal one, and a soon-to-be-free man made his first legally free choice.

Today there is a plaque commemorating this event on the front of the Custom House. Once I walked past it with a friend who stopped, read it, and remarked, “Well, ask a silly question...” But though the answer is obvious to us now, and must also have been to Brandegee and other abolitionists back then, I wonder how often anyone actually thought to ask it.

The Best Laid Plans

New London before “urban renewal” seems more urban, and less in need of renewing, than New London today.

In the office of preservation organization New London Landmarks, I flipped through a binder of newspaper clippings about changes that have been made in New London over the years. Most of them covered the period of massive urban renewal in the 1960s and ‘70s, but the debates started long before that.

One article, missing its date but accompanied by an 1888 photo of a liberty pole on the Parade, discussed what to do with downtown, and decided that there should be a park, at the foot of the Parade by the river, a “peaceful oasis for downtowners and visitors.” The designers, it stated, should “keep macadam out of it.”

In 1956 there was much excitement over a new parking lot between Golden and Pearl Streets, the city’s first public off-street parking area. “Meters have been set so you can shop for TWO FULL HOURS.” It appears New London has always been slow to stir in the mornings: “The first car parked at 9:20 a.m.,” and by 11:00, “the 100-car lot was more than half full.”

Buildings had been demolished to create the lot, and more would be torn down for other lots to come. “No, that’s not hurricane damage,” said the caption of a photo of a heap of rubble and one sad-looking tree.

There had been lots of meetings and quibbling over whether or not the parking lots should have restrooms. They were eventually deemed illegal.

There are a lot of studies mentioned in the clippings, and plans, and plans to make plans and studies about studies. In 1958 the Chamber of Commerce asked the State Development Commission to start a study to determine “How Big is N.L. area?” The “area” in question was the “New London-Groton Planning Region,” which included eleven area towns - 327.4 square miles - and a population estimated at 103,110.

There were notions about highways leading to Ocean Beach, and people wondered - as they still do - whether or not New London could ever be Portsmouth. 

In all of the talk of “slum clearance and redevelopment,” the emphasis appears, at least today, to have been less about raising something new than burying everything old. Comparisons were made, afterwards, to Benedict Arnold and the 1938 hurricane.

Some historically significant buildings were saved. “Historical districts,” a concept so new it needed quotes, began to pop up. “What is an Historic District?” asked one article from 1961.

But a 1989 story lists some of what was lost. Downtown once had “barber shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, bars, factories, furniture stores, hardware stores, grocers, meat markets and drug stores.” More than 100 houses and 45 businesses were torn down in all the improvement, and whole streets erased.

The text beside and beneath the clipped articles hinted at a New London less concerned with local tearing down and building up. Parking lots were paved, but in the margins people died; people sold their cars; “an upsurge in N. Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks...pushed past the half-million mark the total of enemy troops reported killed since the United States entered the Vietnam War”; the Celtics played; the region saw a “snow free winter.” 

It is easy to look back, as someone who wasn’t there, and wonder “Why did they do that?!” Or more to the point, “Why did they do it in that particular (destructive) way?” It is easy to be sure it would have turned out better if they’d left it alone. What is perhaps harder is to imagine that we’ve learned enough from the past to make all - or any - of the modern-day plans for New London turn out any better.

Whale Watching

Looking into the history that earned a few New London buildings their plaques.

My building has one. Many near downtown New London do, as well as some along the water, and a few scattered in other parts of the city. I remember noticing them when I first came here, white painted rectangles with dates and names and whale silhouettes in pale blue. “This house is authentic,” they seemed to proclaim. “This house really belongs here.” To go through them all would take years, so I picked three.

81 Hempstead Street, an unassuming little brown home with two squat windows like eyes beneath its sloping roof, was probably built in 1842, the year the house (or the land) was sold by Jonathan Coit to Savillion Haley. The records compiled by New London Landmarks, which distributes the plaques, say only that Haley was white, and worked as a painter. In 1845 the house was purchased by Andrew Spencer, a “black laborer” who lived to be 100. Spencer left the house, which at the time was worth $800, to his daughter Mary. From 1876, when Mary Spencer inherited the property, to 2004, the most recent date in the records, the house has changed hands 18 times. In addition to individuals, sellers include the City of New London, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and a California bank. Transactions listed include deeds, quitclaims, and foreclosures. 

The dainty wooden building at 181 Bank Street dates from 1790, though records of the sale and purchase of the property go back to 1759. Zoned for commercial use now (it’s currently a beauty salon), it began its life as a private house. When owner Jonathan Starr died at 95 around 1839, he left the property, on the “west side of Bank Street on which stands the dwelling house which I now occupy,” to his son, also named Jonathan. The Starr family name comes up again and again in the background of 181 Bank, until 1883, when Tates and Williamses take over. Then like a mini-history of New England, immigrants with ethnic names appear: Hendel, Kosakow, Scher, Elfenbein. Then comes the James family and a corporation, the James Drug Co. The record stops with the Pearl-Bank Co. Inc. in 1979.

The ubiquitous Starrs reappear in the story of the third house I picked, located on Starr Street. As it happened, I chose probably the most atypical structure on that picture-book block. The only brick house of the bunch, Queen Anne-style #20 was built around 1862 by Charles Bishop. The records list “a lot of land” sold to Cynthia Bishop by Cortland Starr, executor of the estate of Margaret Watson, who had bought the lot from Jonathan Starr in 1845 for $650. The red-brick house, with its little porch and bright detailing around the upper windows, looks slightly out of place, as if colored in by a rebellious child after her more conventional friend had filled in all its pastel neighbors. But that’s only once you look for it; before I picked it out of a list of addresses by chance, I had passed it unaware many times, noticing only the prettiness of the street as a whole.

Attempts to neatly organize New London’s past can get a bit out of control; New London Landmarks does not know exactly how many plaques they have handed out. And the city’s history can be an unwieldy thing. Land and water records fill in many blanks, but not all of them. Reading about these buildings, it seemed that for every answer I found, another question opened up. But it also seemed right that, with all that has happened here, some details have been lost along the way, and others remain uncovered.

New London History, Hiding

Williams Memorial Park Historic District is small, but many stories are contained within its boundaries.

Some Historic Districts announce themselves with decorative signs; some are so obvious they don’t need to. Occasionally they are so big that they make up whole downtowns, and passing through them is like having your own personal time machine. And then there are the Historic Districts that aren’t large, or marked, or self-evident. They don’t look particularly historic at first (or fifth) glance, and they don’t really seem like districts so much as hodge-podges of random buildings. 

The first kind, of course, can transport you to another time with no effort on your part. But the other kind have their own perverse appeal. Their history is a bit of a secret, reserved for those obsessed or bored enough to bother looking up lists of Historic Districts. 

Williams Memorial Park Historic District is one of these. Even the descriptive marker, the first hint this isn’t just another bit of green space, refers to the Hempstead Historic District. Sneaky!

The park itself is recognizable for its granite obelisk, located near the corner of Broad and Hempstead, which commemorates Connecticut soldiers who fought in the Civil War. But the record of this land is much older - and richer - than that. Starting in 1793 it was the city’s Second Burial Ground. It was then at the far edge of town, where no buildings had been constructed. Later, it simultaneously served as a quarry. 

In 1885 New London mayor Charles Augustus Williams had the idea to turn the four-acre graveyard into a park. The land was surveyed (by Frederick Law Olmsted!) and plans were made to close the quarry and move the bodies to Cedar Grove Cemetery.

But the district did not begin with the creation of the park. Development there began decades earlier, in the 1830s and 40s. The people who lived in the first houses that began to spring up there included “a sailmaker, blacksmiths, a boat-builder, a printer, and a machinist” along with those working in trades such as “ostler, waiter, and seaman.” (What the heck was an ostler, you ask? Someone who worked in a stable.) But not all the residents of the district were regular 19^th century Joes.

The aforementioned Mayor Charles Augustus Williams was the son of Thomas W. Williams, to whom New London’s success as a whaling port is largely attributed. The elder Williams trained and went into business with Henry P. Haven, who in turn did the same for Richard Chappell. The families of these three men were connected both professionally and personally, and the vast sums their whaling and other enterprises brought in created a lasting presence all over the city, not least in the neighborhood around Hempstead and Broad. 

The grand homes they built there were joined in 1870 by the imposing Gothic Revival Second Congregational Church, which replaced an earlier building that had burned down. All three families were closely associated with the church. The spire of the massive stone building, which reaches high above the park and surrounding houses, was a gift from the firm of Williams and Haven. 

The houses along the park are mostly offices today, but you can see - if you squint and imagine - how spectacular they must have been when inhabited by single families. Architecturally they range from the expected Greek Revival and Italianate to square towers with mansard roofs, Gothic Revival windows, and features I don’t think I’d heard of before I read about this neighborhood, like Stick-style porches. There are also copper gargoyles, which I have never noticed but now intend to seek out, and the only remaining brick Queen Anne home in New London.

The Williams Memorial Park Historic District covers just eight acres. But if someone who knew nothing of the New London could see only this small area, and could pause a minute there, imagining, they would see that this was once a prosperous, prominent city, and that the legacy of that era is not forgotten.

Walking On Water

The map of an older, and very different, New London lies buried beneath our streets.

I cannot claim to have an excellent sense of direction. I’ve never yet been so lost that I haven’t managed to extricate myself, but I’m not one of those people who seem to have a compass implanted in their head. (There were a few hours once when I thought I would have to live out my entire life driving in circles through a certain part of Baltimore, but I managed to escape.)

I mostly rely on foolproof tricks, one of them being that in coastal Connecticut, if you’re heading towards the shore, you are going South. Except - alas - in New London, because of course New London’s waterfront is not Long Island Sound, but the Thames. And therefore the city faces East.

I say “of course” because I know this on a logical, map-reading level. Yet I can’t seem to remember it when I’m actually going anywhere. I know that when I’m in New London, looking out at the water, I’m facing East, not South. Yet when I’m walking or driving in any given direction I become incapable of naming which direction that is.

I thought that was why New London’s streets, and their relation to the water, seemed slightly “off” to me. But there’s another reason too. It’s because some of those streets used to be water, and others were built around a shoreline that’s now lost.

Think of Coit Street, the way it strangely curves. I never knew, until a few months ago, that it was once called Cove Street, for it was built around the erstwhile Bream Cove. At first this body of water, center of New London’s early ship-building, was crossed by “a foot-bridge, with a draw.” Later, this route became Blinman Street, referred to as “the highway to the water.” Frances Manwaring Caulkins writes that in the early days of settlement: “Bank St. was laid out on the very brink of the upland, above the sandy shore, and a spur (now Coit St.) was carried around the head of Bream Cove to Truman St...No names were given to any of the streets for at least a century after the settlement; save that Main St. was uniformly called the Town St. and Bank St. the Bank.” 

It seems easier to orient oneself in that version of New London, where “the cove at the north was Mill Cove; the two coves at the south, Bream and Close. Water St. was the Beach, and the head of it at the entrance of Mill Cove, was Sandy Point.” Though it’s disconcerting to imagine water reaching almost to the Hempstead Houses, and those hundred years of nameless roads.

The rectangle made by Coit, Washington, Blinman, and Brewer Streets is designated as the Coit Street Historic District. Preserved there are examples of 18^th and 19^th century architecture as well as the memory of those who bought lots there beginning in 1647. The eponymous John Coit was a shipwright, as were other original settlers in the neighborhood; the coves were deep enough for the pinnaces, shallops, and barques they built. Later, as the water was filled in to make more land for development, the inhabitants of the neighborhood practiced trades related to the water – rigger, captain, ship’s carpenter – but not immediately dependent on it. The eventual lack of waterfront did not diminish property values; in the 1800s, nearness to downtown became the selling point. 

And so here we are, traveling our roads that insist on their now unnecessary paths, still driving around Bream Cove and Close Cove, even if we don’t know it. I prefer to think that this, and not my own lack of navigational ability, is why New London often seems to twist and turn in confusion. We walk on solid ground in the footsteps of those who took bridges. Our map is predicated on realities that no longer exist, and places we can no longer go. 

Oil Money

Whale Oil Row, and trying to see things again for the first time.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be one of those people who are content to spend all or most of their lives in one place. They don’t move unless they have to, and in that case they’re not happy about it. They might go on vacation occasionally or even regularly, but they don’t particularly love to travel. The best part of traveling, to them, is coming home. I think about them because they are my polar opposite and almost incomprehensible. I wonder why they don’t all go insane. I think it must be that they have the ability to see the same things again and again without ceasing to see them altogether. 

The first time I came to New London - as a cognizant adult, that is, childhood visits don’t count - one of the foremost sights that caught my eye was Whale Oil Row, the four white Greek Revival houses on Huntington Street near the intersection with State. I remember summer flowers in baskets on the street lamps, and some kind of outdoor event that lent the city an uncharacteristically bustling appearance, and old churches, and those four splendid white buildings with columns all in a row. They were the sort of buildings that make you sit up and take notice of a place. Except now that I’ve lived near them for two years, plus another, separate year, I no longer truly see them.

Which is unfortunate, because they are widely considered worth seeing. Search for “Whale Oil Row” online and you’ll find multiple guidebooks, all listing this short strip of Huntington Street as a noteworthy New London attraction. They will tell you that the homes were built between 1835 and 1845, though most will say they were built by whaling tycoons, which isn’t strictly true. In fact they were built on spec by Ezra Chappell, who must have known that the grand properties would quickly be bought up. And they were, by whale-ship owners Thomas W. Williams and Enoch Stoddard, doctor Elisha North, and merchant William Chapman.

The appellation “Whale Oil Row” was not an official street name but one provided by New London residents of yore who saw the block as a clear representation of the heights to which money earned in that dangerous sea-faring trade had elevated the city.

And the first time I looked at them, I saw that too. I did not yet know anything of the houses’ past. I had not seen old photographs of them shaded by a protective line of trees. But I recognized at once the momentary grandeur of the world that created them.

Now, though, when I drive by on my way home, I don’t see relics of former wealth and taste, but only office buildings on a rather drab and familiar stretch of road. Nice office buildings, yes, historic ones even. But still. The sight of those sixteen Ionic columns has been impressed on my mind so often that they are background now, nothing to get all excited about. Whatever those houses promised on that first trip has either been fulfilled or failed to materialize. As far as buildings go, I have moved on to the next, and the next, and the one after that.

Recently I looked at the Whale Oil Row houses again, through a glaring beam of autumn sunlight, and tried to recreate my first impression. I had never examined them so closely. I noticed slight differences in their fan-shaped windows and in their front doors, which are currently painted blue, black, deep purple, and a sort of maroon. I spotted their Whale Oil Row addresses, One through Four, stamped above those doors; before I’d seen only the Huntington Street addresses, listed less picturesquely nearby.

But though I saw them more clearly than I ever had before, I also saw the car dealership across the street, the road construction signs, and the sidewalk being shoved rudely upwards by tree roots. I still appreciate the history and style of the Whale Oil Row houses, but I will have to leave seeing them for what they were – and what they really are - to newcomers. And to those unfathomable people who are content to see the same sights again and again.

Over There

They’re tied together by history, and connected by one short trip. But New London and Fishers Island seem very far apart.

If you happen to be in New London when you get the urge to run away, your options are obvious. There’s any place on any road a car can navigate. There’s any destination where the buses and trains stop. There are the ferries to Block Island and Orient Point. And near them, just a little off to the side, there’s the other ferry. You could easily mistake its pleasant red-brick terminal for a non-functioning memento of an earlier age, when ferry travel was classier, or at least appeared that way. That ferry goes to Fishers Island.

I don’t know anyone who’s been to Fishers Island, but someone must be going there: the boats leave New London, and return to it, several times a day. Once I’d been reminded of its existence, I of course wanted to go there too. I wanted to know what was out there, just a few miles offshore. Instead, as the approaching winter cold makes the thought of a ferry ride unappealing and the price of said ferry ride makes it impossible, I decided to run away by reading about it instead. 

It was frequented by Indians and named Fishers Island by Adrian Block. Its connection to New London starts before the city’s founding, with John Winthrop, Jr. He lived there before moving to the mainland, just across the water so that, as Frances Manwaring Caulkins writes, “the owner of these two noble domains could look over Fisher’s Island Sound, from either side, and rest his eye on his own fair possessions.”  

The ubiquitous Joshua Hempstead sailed to Fishers Island many times, mostly to deal with livestock and paperwork, but sometimes unintentionally; the area was, and is, prone to strong storms. Like New London, it was hit hard by the 1938 hurricane. It barely survived a 48-hour storm in 1815. (Also like New London, it was raided and burned during the Revolutionary War.)

Though the Winthrop family owned the profitable island for generations, its jurisdiction was often contested. It bounced between Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, and for a short time it was officially controlled by no entity but Winthrop himself. In 1879 New York won out, though the island is closer to Connecticut and retains, among other Connecticut-ish things, a zip code starting with 06.

A hilarious New York Magazine article from 1985 paints a picture of an idiosyncratic, insular community, devoted to family, tradition, and enjoying your extreme wealth away from the curious eyes of the grubby masses. (I instantly recalled a day last summer, when I passed some time in front of New London’s train station watching a group of pastel-clad preppies who seemed to have walked straight out of a Vampire Weekend video. Where did they wash up from, I wondered? And now I knew.) The article mentions the difficulty in reserving a place on the ferry, then only possible on the island side. Modern technology has done away with that restriction, but I wondered if the police still meet the ferry to send outsiders back over. 

It was intriguing to think of a land with its own strange culture lurking there just beyond my own shore, even if that land was only one mile wide and nine miles long. I checked to see what more practical, travel-related sources said about it.

TripAdvisor had one listing, for a restaurant, which had not been reviewed.

The island’s one hotel was reviewed on several sites, but the reviews were very mixed, almost suspiciously so - what better way to keep people out than claims of high prices for bad food and service?

Fishers was too forlorn even for Lonely Planet, which responded, when I searched, ‘Sorry, we couldn't find anything about: “fishers island”.’ 

But for all that, when I walked nosily by the terminal, nothing about the scene looked exclusive at all. A ferry was docked, preparing to depart for that near-far place. I didn’t see any passengers, but perhaps the boat was taking supplies, or the people were below, hiding from the damp chill. Whatever it would meet when it docked on the other side (and someday I will find out, I told myself), it would soon turn around and head back, continuing the loop between island and mainland that began hundreds of years ago.

Casual Encounters With New London

A few examples from a growing collection of stories about people whose travels once deposited them in New London.

I’ve been writing this column for over a year now, and during that time I’ve encountered numerous passing mentions of New London buried within stories that mostly aren’t about New London at all. Not substantial enough to write about on their own, but too interesting to ignore, I’ve saved them away or jotted down little notes on them. Now, as happens eventually with all haphazardly done filing, they have accumulated to a point where something must be done about them.

Many names on the list, as one would expect, are those of politicians. In addition to up and coming orator Abraham Lincoln, New London has been host to Presidents James Madison (who stayed at a house, no longer extant, on Church Street) and Andrew Jackson. Jackson stayed at the City Hotel on State Street in 1833, and presumably it was far less exciting than his 1813 visit to another City Hotel, in Nashville, when at the culmination of a convoluted and long-simmering conflict, he was shot by the brother of Thomas Hart Benton, who Jackson had promised to horse-whip.

Martin Van Buren also stayed at the City Hotel before becoming president, though the main connection between him and the city is that the Amistad incident took place during his administration. Chester A. Arthur spent the last summer of his life here, the year after his presidency ended. I won’t go into the famously itinerant sleeping habits of George Washington.

One of the most incongruous places I’ve seen New London pop up is the book Edie: American Girl, in which iconic ‘60s party girl Edie Sedgwick’s friend John Anthony Walker recalls inviting Sedgwick to Fishers Island for the weekend. After arriving in New London, Sedgwick characteristically missed the ferry. “New London’s a strange town to be caught in if you’ve missed the ferry.” Walker said. “A railroad town; a harbor stop. In the old days what I would have done was spend the night at the Mohican Hotel...the Mohican was big and old and very nice, but it was not the sort of hotel Edie would be caught spending a night in.” Walker instructed Sedgwick to catch a plane from Groton, but “O’Neill’s foghorn was blowing wildly” and the pilot would not land in such bad weather. Walker fretted, but Sedgwick made it across the Thames in style, on a yacht belonging to multi-millionaire businessman, ambassador, sportsman, publisher - I could go on -Jock Whitney.

But perhaps my favorite tidbit is the following. In 1898 a man named George Hibbard went missing from his Ithaca, NY home. New York police searched everywhere, but turned up nothing, and six months later it was assumed Hibbard had died. They were unaware that shortly after Hibbard disappeared, New London police came across a man “wandering about the streets” who could not recall his name or where he’d come from. He was taken to the almshouse, where he remained – he was “a model inmate” – until one day he asked to write a letter to Ithaca, soliciting funds. He signed the wrong name, but the letter reached his family nonetheless. His sister soon appeared in New London to claim him, saying that Hibbard had “a wife and son living in Ithaca, from which place he disappeared while laboring under a mental strain.” Hibbard seemed to be improving as he left on the boat for New York, but, the New York Times reported, he “has given no explanation as to how he came to New London.”

Reading about George Hibbard, I thought: with the possible exception of those descended from native Indian tribes or early Puritan settlers to the area, does anyone really know how they got here? I know some came for jobs or other identifiable reasons. But I can’t be the only one who just sort of showed up. That’s the thing about this and all port cities, all “railroad towns and harbor stops.” They are crossroads, required pauses on larger journeys, and they don’t care if you’re important or obscure. They only require that you land, however briefly, on your way to somewhere else.