Unintentional Historian (Waterford)

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

Hello Waterford! Nice To Finally Meet You

I’m sure there’s a lot of history to be found in Waterford’s 33 square miles. And I’m looking forward to stumbling across it.

When I was asked to write a local Waterford history column like the one I've been writing about New London, my first thought was, of course! Only later did it occur to me to ask myself, is there enough history in Waterford to sustain hundreds of words about it per week? I realized I didn't know very much about the town.

It’s not like I don’t go to Waterford all the time. Like many people who live in New London, I would guess, I often go there at least once a day. It would be hard to avoid it: Waterford envelops new London, wrapped around it on three sides like a suburban Snuggie. I go to Waterford for all sorts of things that New London doesn't have, but should -  a bookstore, for instance - and for some that it does have, but for some inexplicable reason I prefer the Waterford locations - drugstore, bank branch, oil change place. One of my favorite attractions in the entire state is in Waterford. Harkness Memorial State Park, which I’m sure I'll write more about another time, is one of the few places I love to visit in all seasons. It’s as beautiful in winter as it is in summer, perhaps more so. It even manages to look lovely in those cold wet gray months that pass for spring.

But you can go somewhere frequently and still not know very much about it at all. I'd seen some books on Waterford and knew there was a lot of interesting background there. I'd driven through the distinct areas of town, the little almost-self-contained villages, and figured there were stories behind how they came to be. I'd wondered about some of the rural roads that seem to turn off of the main streets and lead into another time period, and become intrigued by some promisingly historic-looking sites I’d glimpsed while driving along Route 1. Still, I wasn't sure that it would be as easy to just trip over historical references in a sprawling town as it is in a very small urban area.

And then it was New Years Eve, and I was doing something - I don't remember what, I’m sure it involved wine - and a radio was playing somewhere in the house. And out of the droning background noise I was suddenly aware of a clear voice saying, as if directly to me, “...in Times Square where the ball, made up of 2,688 triangles of Waterford Crystal, will drop at midnight...”

And then I knew it would be fine. I already had some internal Waterford antennae that would pick things up, and I'd find all sorts of curiosities of the past that I could investigate, from all sorts of unexpected sources. Now, I’m looking forward to learning about a place that I have no preconceived notions of, simply by paying attention and letting those hidden vestiges of the past, which probably are not really hidden at all, show through.

There is a connection between Waterford, Connecticut, and Waterford Crystal, by the way. I looked it up, and spent probably an inordinate amount of time reading about it. It's both obvious and slightly odd. If you don't know what it is, and you want to, you'll have to come back next week.

About That Chandelier

On malls, crystals, town names, taking time to look up, and recent history.

Hanging unobtrusively from the ceiling in a rather random location in the Crystal Mall is what may be the world’s largest Waterford Crystal chandelier. I say “may be” because while there are several books and websites that state this as a fact, I can’t prove it – it’s almost as if Waterford, the famous Irish manufacturer of luxury glass items, wants to ensure its name will never be included in the same sentence as Wet Seal.

The Mall seems to have been named after the Irish crystal, though whether the chandelier was made before or after the name was chosen is not clear. (Ha.) Nor is the decision to situate the glittery bauble in a place where most shoppers will be distracted by a kiosk, looking out for a particular store, or carefully navigating stairs while they pass it. If you owned something like that, you would probably place it in a vantage point so obvious that no one walking by could miss it. Simon Malls doesn’t think this way, apparently. When I first saw it I thought, “That can’t be the Waterford chandelier!” Then I wondered if it was fake. At least one photo caption on Flickr identifies it as “faux” Waterford, but all other evidence suggests it’s real. I bet most people, if they happen to notice it in the first place, don’t believe it.

The Mall’s name, and the chandelier, seem to be the only connection between Waterford, Ireland, and Waterford, CT. Wikipedia claims that the town was named for the Irish city, but there’s a reason Wikipedia gives people fits. The name seems to have been simply an allusion to the town’s location on the coast, and was probably suggested to the Connecticut General Assembly by Isaac Rogers when Waterford split from New London in 1801.

But back to the Mall. I don’t like to admit this, but I’m sort of a mall connoisseur. This is not my fault; I blame my childhood. I grew up in Fairfield County, where shopping was both a competitive sport and a survival activity. I couldn’t play any other competitive sports, as that involved cool kids throwing soft balls and dodge balls and kick balls at my face, but I did pretty well at shopping. Also, it allowed me to buy the camouflage that let me slip relatively unnoticed through the halls at school. I was made fun of, but it would have been much worse had I not been dressed head to toe in Express and Gap. So although I dislike shopping, malls are familiar to me, and I’ve been known to go to them when I don’t have to. (Once I was caught in a horrible rain storm in downtown Indianapolis, and instead of a museum or some other dignified option, I hid out for hours in a mall. I’d never been to Indianapolis before, but there among the H & M and the Auntie Anne’s, I felt oddly at home.)  

So it is with no insult to Waterford that I say that the Crystal Mall is not exactly the Westchester or the Natick Collection. But, as I discovered when trying to find out about the chandelier, the Mall is a significant piece of Waterford history, and my previous snobbish dismissals of it had failed to acknowledge the impact its construction had on the town. Before it was built, in 1984, Waterford was a sleepy sort of place. After, it became a regional shopping destination, its many stores drawing consumers from surrounding towns and even tourists from farther afield. It is hard for me now to picture Waterford without its shopping centers and the lines of cars pouring in and out of their lots.

Absorbing all this Mall-related information has ensured that I will never walk down that hallway again without noticing the chandelier. It’s also made me think of “history” as edging much closer to the present than I usually envision it. The character of Waterford changed so much in the 1980s, and because of developments that I think of as mundane and unremarkable. When I look at a mall, I forget that this will someday be someone’s distant past. Maybe the glass front of the old Filene’s will be considered quaint, or the notion of food courts hilariously antiquated. Maybe the chandelier will have disappeared in the vicissitudes of time, and the question then will not be whether it is the largest, or whether it’s real, but whether it existed at all. Maybe someone will find a photograph of it, and wonder what those strange people of the 21^st century were thinking of, driving for miles to buildings full of shops, and standing on staircases to turn their cameras on ornaments of shiny glass.

A Summer House In Winter

Eolia was made for warm days and summer vacations. But it has another, colder, possibly better side.

It was built in 1906 and purchased by Edward Harkness in 1907 with the fortune his father had made investing in oil. It sits on over 200 acres, including several gardens and what was once a working farm. It was the Harkness family’s summer home. It was named Eolia, for the floating island dwelling of Aiolos, keeper of the winds in Greek myth.

It’s lovely in the summer, though it’s crowded and there’s a fee to get in, as the mansion and grounds are now Harkness Memorial State Park. In summer you can imagine waking up in that house and walking down the gentle slope of the lawn to look out at the water.

In spring and fall it’s less crowded and you really notice the leaves, newly growing or changing color, and how they mirror the man-made leaves on the delicately crafted gates.

In winter, though, with snow covering the grass and laying incongruously on the sand, the place is almost deserted. There will be a determined runner, perhaps, or a writer in wholly inadequate gloves snapping pictures and imagining how this place looked 100 years ago.

I don’t know if the Harknesses ever came to Eolia in the off-season. There’s something cold about the house – in summer that translates as refreshingly cool and calm, with nice stone benches to sit on and those mythical winds rushing up the lawn from the Sound. But in winter there’s a harshness to the place - it looks bigger, and tougher, more solid. It looks like the Ionic columns and even the vines wrapped around them are tenaciously hanging on, biding their time until the warmth returns. 

In winter the tile floor of the pergola is covered with a layer of treacherous ice. The black railings and intricately wrought gates become wet with snow and sleet. It’s as if the house is protecting itself from outsiders while the family, or the seasonal park employee at the entrance, is away. But with caution and good boots you can still walk between the columns. 

This is the other side to summer houses: the wheelbarrows leaning unused up against a stone wall, the little outdoor theatre covered in snow, the garden bare. 

The 42-room mansion, built in the Renaissance Revival or Italianate style, is graceful yet imposing, with its arched doorways and heavy stone. (The Harkness’s main residence, on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan, was also Italian Renaissance-inspired; it is recognized for its simplicity in the face of surrounding luxuriance. Edward Harkness chose to forgo a Fifth Avenue address by placing the house’s front entrance on 75^th Street.)

Eolia was left to the State of Connecticut in 1950, and it became a State Park two years later. Visiting some summer houses of the same period (yes, Newport, that would be you!) can make a person feel like a lowly peasant. 

But there’s something different about Eolia. Edward Harkness and his wife, Mary, were significant philanthropists. They donated millions to fund education, the arts, and healthcare. Their grand home in New York now houses the offices of a charitable foundation started in 1918 by Edward’s mother, Anna. Perhaps that’s why you don’t feel like a trespasser as you schlep across the snowy grounds at Eolia. There’s a sense that the family who once came here to escape the heat of summer wouldn’t mind the masses (or just one or two of them) traipsing through their property on an icy day.

Horses and Carnivals and Potions, Oh My!

Sometimes a location that appears very ordinary at first glance turns out to have had a fascinating past.

I admit it. I’m often guilty of assuming that things which look boring are boring. I should know better, because it's frequently not true. So many unremarkable things, places, and people end up having a truly wacky story behind them. Case in point: Stenger Farm Park on Clark Lane. I’d seen the park before, and thought nothing more than “Hmm, a park.” (I may even have assumed it was in New London.) But it looked like any other open space with woods and trails and a dog run, nothing that made me want to stop the car or start going through historical documents to learn about it.

But it turns out, as it often does, that this park had many previous incarnations, during which it was many unexpected things to many sundry people. Starting in 1733 - though one could start earlier - the land divided between two men, Thomas Leach and George Richards, who already owned other property nearby. The western boundary of the land was adjacent to “eight acres of swamp land granted to Clement Minor for the killing of wolves.” Wolves, it seems, were a significant problem at the time, and hunting them was encouraged through bounties.

The deed to the farm passed through the hands of several owners until it was finally sold in 1889 by John George Burckle to Nicholas Stenger. Stenger was probably a German immigrant – he spoke with a heavy accent, people said - and he moved here from New York, where he is thought to have owned a drug store. He had invented a medicine, which he claimed was “the greatest cure on earth for all diseases,” and which he made on his Waterford (then it really was New London) property.

An advertisement for the tonic, called N. Stenger’s St. Nicholas Salve, is hilarious in the manner particular to old-fashioned newspaper ads. Stenger claims his product can treat everything from bronchitis to sore eyes to “shot wounds,” sometimes, suspiciously, in conjunction with taking a drink of bitters. The treatment method is to rub the salve on the affected area, from teeth to neck to places that I’m not sure if Patch would allow me to quote. You can even eat it, as Stenger claims one doctor did, and be cured of your stomach pain in half an hour. Stenger describes doctors as being a little threatened by his invention: “We dare not use it” they tell him, because “it cures too quick, we couldn’t make a living.” This powerfully efficacious drug does not, in fact, contain any active ingredients. In case you thought for a moment that it might be real, the ad is quick to assure you that “there is positively no poison or other dangerous ingredient in St. Nichols Salve.”

In 1917 Stenger died of something his Salve could not cure, and he left his property to his son, who subsequently left it to his heirs. It stayed in the family and remained a well-respected dairy farm until the early 1970s.

Before the turn of the 20^th century, residents began stabling their horses at Stenger Farm over the winter. It cost $5 per month, including care and hay. During the summers, these horse owners held races on a half-mile track originally laid down by John George Burckle. The horses pulled sulkies, or light single-seat two-wheeled carts. This form of entertainment ended in the 1930s, but Stenger Farm continued to host other sorts of amusements. In the 1960s, a carnival was set up there, complete with rides.

The town of Waterford bought the property in 1979 and turned it into the 95 acre recreational space we know (or simply drive past) today. I can be sure that now when I drive past it, I won’t just passively register “trees, fence, wooden park sign.” I’ll think of snake oil and carnivals, sulkies and mysteriously-accented immigrants, horses racing and wolves stalking in the night.

The Mill On the Seal

A whole bunch of history is contained within the little circle that is Waterford’s town seal.

Waterford’s town seal is ubiquitous and unobtrusive. You could see it, technically, countless times before really seeing it. I really saw it by accident, when its little mill building and water wheel happened to catch my eye. Was there a historic mill somewhere in Waterford, I wondered, a tourist attraction craftily hidden away? A quick search indicated that there wasn’t. So how did the mill get on the seal? Was it a real structure once?

I looked at the seal again, this time on purpose. Inside a circular border of text (Agriculture – Industry – Prosperity – Waterford  - Oct 1801 - Connecticut) I first saw the wheel, the stream, and the small wooden house. When I looked closer I saw that there were two oxen and a person (a girl, I imagined, because of her rather girly hat) leading them. There was also a flock of tiny sheep behind a wooden fence, and a small boy fishing in the aforementioned stream. A tree grew in the center, and behind it there were fluffy clouds in the sky and a rolling landscape stretching out beyond. The scene was a bit twee: early New England rendered like a cartoon.

And then I found there was a good reason for this. The seal was created in 1946 by Waterford resident Martin Branner, who drew the comic strip “Winnie Winkle.” It was first published in 1920 and widely syndicated. It won the National Cartoonist Society’s Humor Strip award in 1958. Branner, originally from New York, had also been a vaudeville dancer and served in WWI. 

The gristmill in Branner’s drawing was indeed real. Built in 1732, it was called the Jordan Mill, and it was located on what, in typical early New England style, became Mill Lane. Town residents would bring their corn there to be ground into meal, and they were not to be “hindered from washing their sheep at the aforsd place as formerly.” The mill burned down many times and was frequently rebuilt as something else; the original wooden gristmill eventually became a brick factory that produced tweeds and submarine equipment.

But there were other mills in Waterford, and not all of them ground grain. There were sawmills; fulling mills, which produced woolen cloth; and turning mills, where wooden handles were turned on lathes. Later, immigrants opened textile and paper mills, and with technology learned back in the United Kingdom they manufactured goods like satinet fabric and manila paper.

No one knows exactly how many mills Waterford had in the early days. Many references to them exist, but the casual tone with which townspeople refer to what they know well (“where the sawmill formerly stood” may have been the 18^th and 19^th century version of “over there past the Dunkin’ Donuts”) does not lend itself to a precise count.

Today there are remnants of that time everywhere, as modest as the girl on the seal, hiding her face with her broad-brimmed hat. A millstone was a circular slab of rock long before it was the name of a nuclear power plant. Then there’s Oil Mill road (the oil was ground from flax- and cottonseed), and Jordan Mill Pond. 

And of course, Mill Lane. I drove down it when the town was half-buried in snow, to see what was left of the Jordan Mill site. The road terminated at the brick building that was the mill’s last incarnation and its icy parking lot, with signs indicating that parking was reserved for mill business only. Across the water Jordan Mill Park, with its picnic area and trees, seemed frozen solid. The little bridge across the dam was closed and fenced off for good measure. But the water fell, rushing, as it must have when the locals came here to grind their corn. I watched it for a minute, then I got into my warm car and drove back into the present day.

Oswegatchie

It’s a cool word, a summer vacation colony, a historic district, and a window to a mysterious past.

Oswegatchie. It’s a great word. It renders my spell-checker helpless. The program senses there’s something wrong and throws up a warning red squiggle, but can provide no better suggestions.

Oswegatchie means “black water,” or “black river,” or “at the very outlet.” I’m choosing to believe the last one, because that is the definition used by the US Navy. It might also mean “coming or going around a hill,” although that sounds suspiciously like someone made it up, as in, “Go away around that hill again, and stop asking me what this word means.”

There’s an Oswegatchie River and a town of Oswegatchie in upstate New York (there used to be two of them.) There are the Oswegatchie people, an offshoot of the Onondaga, one of the Seven Nations of Canada. There’s an Oswegatchie Coffee Company. Spend long enough looking these things up, and the word starts to sing itself in your head, to the tune of “Oklahoma.”

In Waterford, the name can be found on a road, a school, and a fire company.

Most famously it evokes the Oswegatchie Colony, a summer resort area for the rich and playful that started to become popular in the mid-to-late 1800’s. The Oswegatchie House, the best known of the Colony’s hotels, took its name from the nearby quarry; it began as a boarding house for quarry workers. There is no mention, in the descriptions of boating and tennis and visits by President Woodrow Wilson and dancing at the casino which opened in 1915, of how the quarry itself came by the name. The early Indian inhabitants of the area were Nehanticks.

Today, the Oswegatchie Historic District is the kind of neighborhood you visit with a carefully marked map and an agenda, both of which you soon abandon in favor of getting lost among curved lanes, grass islands, little dead-end streets, and glimpsed water views. The latter are dangerously pretty, the kind of visual temptation that brings you back to the Driver’s Ed mantra about the car going in the direction you are looking. Sometimes you turn and a perfect house or three appears in front of you, dream homes for a commitment-phobic apartment-dweller who sees houses simply as architecture and potential, and coos over them as if they were kittens. With a few obvious exceptions, it can be hard to tell which of the closely packed homes are original “cottages” - built in a hodge-podge of styles, they are often called “whimsical” or “fantastical” - and which are not. The area was built up further after World War II, when much of the farmland that had not already been developed was divided to create housing for year-round residents. 

In this modern suburban landscape, though, there remains some feeling of the past. I’m discovering that this is something Waterford does well. I don’t know what a fog plain is or was, but when I see the sign for Fog Plain Road I envision something ancient and mysterious, shrouded in mist. Similarly, looking out over the waterfront in the Oswegatchie Historic District, you can imagine the days of posh summer crowds, and of early settlers and Nehantick Indians before them. But you also get a fleeting sense of a time before that. And the question of whatever precise meaning Oswegatchie may have had fades into that unknowable world of water and sand.

But Did They Go Clang Clang Clang?

Waterford’s once-extensive trolley system is now hidden by decades of progress and concrete.

Traveling on Route 32 from New London to Norwich, passing through Quaker Hill, it’s easy to be entirely unaware of the history you are driving over. There is no physical evidence, and no commemorative sign, indicating that this used to be the route of the Montville Street Railway.

Less than 100 years ago, trolleys, not cars, carried people this way. They took passengers to picnics at Richards Grove, and students to school. And they were not only in Quaker Hill – there was once an extensive system of light rail covering Waterford and beyond. Trolleys stopped at Golden Spur Park, in East Lyme, and in Oswegatchie. They stopped at nearly every block in some areas. A ride across Waterford cost 10 cents. Trolleys also delivered packages. Not only could you go north and south, you could also travel west to New Haven on tracks owned by the New London and East Lyme Railway, and later, take the Shore Line Railway east to Rhode Island. 

Nation-wide, it was an era of electric rail. In theory you could take trolleys from Boston to Chicago, if you were, well, off your trolley. Waterford’s light rail heyday was short - 1900 to 1934 - but revolutionary. The new mode of transportation opened up areas that had been difficult to access, for people as well as for development and commerce. Eventually, the trolleys allowed for the creation of a suburban society in which they were unnecessary; they paved the way for their own paving over.

It’s not unusual, when walking or driving through the older sections of American cities, to look down and see disused trolley tracks bisecting an ordinary street or open space. When I found out Waterford had had trolleys of its own, I was surprised, because I’d never seen such a thing here. It had never occurred to me that many places must have had extensive trolley networks which later were simply built over, erased.

I spent a little time searching for vestiges that might somehow have been left. Supposedly, part of what was once a trestle remains near Keeney’s Cove. I couldn’t see it when I went to check; maybe I was looking in the wrong place, or from the wrong vantage point. Maybe it’s no longer there. If any trace of Waterford’s trolley days remains, it’s not something you will unintentionally trip over, like the preserved fossils of tracks in other towns. 

If cities build upon their past, and rural places leave it alone, suburbs often seem to hide it, as if they’re ashamed. It takes an effort to imagine it. Driving on Route 32 you have to try to picture the trolleys, open to the summer air; the passengers on their wooden seats; the conductors outside on the running boards collecting fares. Where Richards Grove Road slopes down to Smith Cove, today there is only a dead end and the fenced-off tracks of those other trains, the Amtrak and Shore Line East trains we still use. It takes some imagination to envision the people disembarking from their trolley cars and walking down towards the grove that once was here, looking quaintly formal in white dresses and suits and excited at all this newfangled possibility.

Notes On Quaker Hill

I was looking for one or two interesting facts in a neighborhood I knew little about. I found ten.

1. There weren't really Quakers. Among the first settlers of the strip of land north of New London were the Rogers, a family of Congregationalists turned Seventh-Day Baptists turned trouble-making sect of their own known as the Rogerenes. Some of their anti-establishment beliefs were similar to those of the Quakers, an unpopular group at the time, but they didn’t choose the name themselves – the appellation “Quaker Hill” was bestowed upon the Rogers’ land as a dig by their enemies. (Waterford didn’t have any Quakers, at least not officially, until 1985.)

2. Guilford has Connecticut's largest town green, and Milford has the longest. I've never heard any place claim to have the smallest green, but if no one's already measured them, I'm betting Quaker Hill has a pretty good chance. (Though technically it might not count; see #4.)

3. Bloomingdale Road comes out behind the ShopRite in New London! Go ahead, laugh, but I had no idea. I turned onto it out of curiosity and drove on (and on) up the hill. It seemed the road continued for a very long time; if I’d come out in Bozrah I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. I wondered if I should turn around, but the hills were so pretty, and I kept discovering things (like a Piggery!) so I kept driving. And then, all of a sudden…ShopRite. Crazy.

4. Once upon a time, there was The House in Middle of the Road. It was located at the intersection of Old Norwich Road and Old Colchester Road. It was burned down by the Fire Department for training purposes, and the land on which it stood is now the Village Green. Oddly this tale seems to be a favorite of real estate companies. Why this will make people want to buy houses in Quaker Hill, I do not know. Other sources say the structure on this site, whether the same house or a different one, was a general store.

5. In 2002, the Quaker Hill Historic District made the National Register of Historic Places. The buildings that qualify it date from the 1780s to the middle of the 20^th century, and represent a range of architectural styles. There are the expected Colonials and Greek Revivals, Queen Annes with porches and early Capes. There are Craftsman bungalows and Ranch houses, at least one Tudor Revival, and touches of Georgian and Gothic for good measure. That is by no means a complete list; it would probably be easier to list the styles that are missing.

6. The Old Norwich Road was once the Norwich-New London Turnpike. This 1792 road, the first turnpike in Connecticut, followed an earlier country road, which itself took the route of the old Mohegan Trail.

7. The Red Lion Tavern, overlooking the green, was built in 1824 by Asa Wightman. It has a four-bay facade, apparently because Wightman’s Baptism considered five bays to be unacceptably over the top.

8. Quaker Hill's Post Office was constructed in 1961. Before that, mail was processed in one of the neighborhood's general stores.

9. I confess that for years, every time I ever saw Scotch Cap Road I thought it must have been named after a pepper. Until I looked it up for this column and realized that the innocuous-looking yet extremely hot pepper is called a Scotch Bonnet. A scotch cap is a hat, often called a Tam o'Shanter, which the pepper supposedly resembles. I could find no mention of why the road was named for a hat, however.

10. The first recorded human activity in West Farms, the area of New London that would become Waterford, took place in 1645 in what is now Quaker Hill. Appropriately for a place that would remain primarily farmland for centuries, that activity was the haying of meadows along the river.

Through The Cemetery Gates

Going for a drive through Jordan Cemetery.

Lately I keep finding myself in cemeteries. It’s inevitable when you write about history, I guess. Death is one of those concrete details, like births and marriages and the conquering of land, that can be pinned down. It’s a historical plot twist that books and timelines can usually be sure of, a point to help secure a person, or a time, in your mind.

For all the cemeteries I’d been to, though, none were in Waterford. I felt like I was neglecting Waterford’s dead. So I went to Jordan Cemetery. There may be more intriguing burial grounds in town, but I took the easy way out and started with the largest. At 35 acres, Jordan Cemetery is vast. The first burial here probably took place in 1826. The business was family-owned then. The Chappells ran the cemetery until 1932, when they sold it to the Jordan Mutual Cemetery Association

My original idea was to stroll through the grounds, reading the truncated biographies of generations of people carved in stone. But it was cold. Very, very cold. And so I took the easy way again, and drove. That turned out to be a good thing because Jordan Cemetery is like a town, with different sprawling neighborhoods and multiple roads and four-way intersections.

In the rows of graves, eras overlap. There are some old obelisks; if you can use the word “modest” to describe obelisks, that’s what they are. There are some grander monuments, too, but even those seem restrained, humbled by time or by the presence of so many newer graves. There are time-worn small stones, which would not be remarkable on their own, but which, overshadowed by shinier and larger memorials, seem to cling tenaciously to the past.

Obelisks went out of style long ago, in favor of rectangular slabs bearing just a last name, written in bold letters. There were couples buried beneath grave markers etched with two hearts entwined, and a headstone in the shape of a peace sign that made me think of a tribe of Neolithic hippies. Some graves were adorned with flowers and flags and knick-knacks disturbed by the weather, some with nothing.

Find A Grave lists two famous people (well, the site categorizes them as “somewhat famous”) buried here. Wallace A. Beckwith fought in the Civil War, and received a Congressional Medal of Honor. William Jennings Miller represented Connecticut’s 1^st District in the House of Representatives. Before that he fought in WWI, as an infantry soldier and then a pilot. He lost both legs in a plane crash in France in 1918.

Wars are another way to pin down history. Captain David Connor, buried in section 16 of Jordan Cemetery (whichever one that is), fought in the Spanish American War, with the 3^rd Connecticut Volunteer Infantry. He died in August of 1933, so not, obviously, during the Spanish American War. Staff Sergeant Edwin Rivera, of the Connecticut National Guard, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. His grave stands apart in its own island of grass. It is festooned with crosses and mementos and bows, and small American flags that have managed to stand upright despite the wind.

I drove down the narrow roads uncertainly. There was no room on any of them for a car coming the other way, and there was no mark indicating whether they were one-way, or which way was correct. But no one else was around. At the outer edges of the cemetery, the places where the gravel roads become faint dirt tracks on grass, I turned around. That seemed off limits. It is one thing to wander through the domain of the dead, searching for snippets of times gone by. It’s something else to enter the blank spaces that wait for new arrivals, to intrude on history not yet made.

Roped In

What happens when you stop to consider the origin of one of Waterford’s main roads.

I’ve been accused of thinking too much, but in some ways I think far too little. Take place names. I repeat them complacently for years, never pausing to question what they mean, and then suddenly out of nowhere it hits me that Oxford is the place where oxen used to cross the river. Or that Montana has mountains in it. Or that Baton Rouge really does mean “red stick.” In that same dim-witted vein, I recently found myself asking: what in tarnation is a rope ferry, anyway?

Alright, the ferry part is obvious, when you think about it. The current bridge on Route 156, between Waterford and Niantic, replaces an old ferry route. Official ferry service at “Nahantic bar,” on what had originally been Governor John Winthrop’s farm, was first established in 1720. Though the privilege of running the ferry was always connected to the farm, neither Winthrop nor the subsequent owners, the Palmes family, had run regular ferries. The lease was then given to John Champlin, and the profits, which were never great, were given to the schools.

That much makes sense. But it came as somewhat of a shock to me, in my ignorance of waterborne transportation methods, to read that the passengers were “propelled across by means of a boat and rope.”

For the benefit of the similarly ignorant, many rivers in the US and around the world had rope ferries in those days, and some still do. They are called cable or chain ferries these days. The guiding cables reduce the need for a skilled pilot. Most of them are powered by engines or the river itself, but Saugatuck, MI and Stratford-upon-Avon in England still have rope ferries that are operated with a hand crank.

Trying to imagine taking a craft like that to downtown Niantic, I drove west on Route 156 over the bridge I’d crossed unthinkingly so many times before. It was hard to un-see the heavy structure that now obscures the view of the Niantic River below. Today there are so many ways to pass above the water – by car, train, on foot – that I’d never thought of traveling on it. 

The business of the rope ferry’s passengers must typically have been as mundane as that of most people who cross the bridge today. But sometimes players in extraordinary events had to take the ferry too. After the battle at Lexington on April 19, 1775, Israel Bissell was sent to “alarm the country quite to Connecticut.” When Bissell, or his replacement, reached New London, he stopped to deliver his news and then continued west. According to the website of the Connecticut SAR, “A post rider would normally leave New London at 6 P.M. traveling five miles west to a rope ferry which crossed the narrow Niantic River.” Usually this journey would be a slow one, but in this case the “news could not afford to wait. After a brief rest the post rider began again, this time traveling at night crossing the rope ferry under a cloudy sky.” Whoever he was, he (or they) then continued with his message along the Connecticut coast, and eventually to Philadelphia.

That isn’t the ferry’s only Revolutionary War appearance. My search for “Rope Ferry” also turned up this passage in the book Secret New England: Spies of the American Revolution. “…he learned of a Tory line of communications running from Canada to the vicinity of Rope Ferry (Waterford, CT). He reported this information to Lt. Col. William Ledyard at New London, and also at this time got himself recruited by a British intelligence officer.” The site of the little river crossing was starting to seem downright dramatic.

Back on Rope Ferry Road, I turned near the base of the bridge, where I’d never had reason to go before. I drove around the watery, prosaic world of traps and floats and vessels in the shadow of the bridge, near Mago Point Park. I felt like I was standing on an edge, and not just that of the land where it met the water. Here something (suburbia? the march of time?) ended, and something else, something intriguing and enduring, took its place. I still couldn’t exactly imagine traversing this water on a ferry propelled by a rope. But it was easier to picture it here, on ground level, than it had been up there on the bridge. It was quieter here, and more conducive to pondering, and a small inkling of the crossing’s old potential for drama remained.

A Look Into Waterford’s Oldest Homes

On the trail of an old-time Waterford property.

The simple drawing, done in 1835, is of a house with a center chimney and low sloping roof. The window panes are detailed, as are the puffy trees and bushes outside. It looks like it may have been done quickly, or from very good memory. There's nothing fancy about it - the Connecticut History Online database, where I found it, calls it a “rough sketch” -  but it held my eye for a long time. I sent it to my mom. “It looks like the houses you drew when you were little,” she says. “Except you would have put the windows in the roof.”

There is writing on the picture. It says "Beckwith House, Waterford, Con. 1/2 East of Niantic R. - 3/4 South of Meeting Ho.- 4 miles from New London." I wondered if I could find it. There is a Beckwith Street, I discovered, in Niantic, and on it a Beckwith House, a special education facility. Could that be it? That was west of the river, though, and a little more than four miles from New London. Still, I thought, who knows what John Warner Barber, the man who created the sketch, was thinking? As for the reference to the meeting house, there had been several at different times. It was less than promising, but it was the only lead I had, and I was impatient. I found Beckwith Street, a small quiet road, and the house. It had two stories, a flat roof and a pretty porch, and was clearly not “my” house.

I shifted my focus to the Beckwiths themselves. Waterford has had a lot of Beckwiths - I had encountered one just recently, buried in the Jordan Cemetery - and some of them had houses. In the library, I read about Guy Beckwith, who served in Captain Nathan Hale’s company in the Revolutionary War. His house was on Butlertown Road. John Beckwith, who also fought in the Revolution, had two houses, one on Spithead Road and the other on Daniels Avenue. This was going to require a lot of driving.

But there was more. Jason Beckwith owned a shipyard on the Niantic River. During the War of 1812 he hid one boat on the other side of the river and could not refloat it again. He also hid numerous other craft from the British Navy on Niantic Bay. I wondered if some similarly crafty later Beckwith had hidden their house, too.

And then came the moment where if I’d been a movie character, I would have looked up from my book with an inspired expression, and rousing music would have played. There was, once, a Beckwith homestead overlooking the shipyard. It was not there now, but it was somewhere: someone, at some point, had transported it to Locust Court off Niantic River Road.

Locust Court was quiet, much like Beckwith Street in Niantic had been. I drove slowly, feeling like a house-stalker. And then, there it was. At least I thought it was. I circled around and drove past again, like a 16-year old girl outside the home of the boy she likes. It didn't look very old at first glance, but then again, if the drawing was accurate, the structure was so basic as to be timeless. It was freshly painted, and the doors were different. The doors in the sketch had struck me as charmingly lopsided; maybe they had been rendered incorrectly and the “new” door was right all along. Or maybe the house had been updated sometime within the past 176 years, or the strangely-placed doors were concealed on the other side. The center chimney and sloping roof remained.

The house had no visible advertisement of its connection to Waterford's old shipbuilding family. There was no plaque, no mention of its venerable age. If I hadn’t been pursuing it, I probably would have passed it by. But it was a sweet house, with a simplicity just like that captured in the sketch. I took its photograph, guiltily, feeling a bit predatory and ridiculous. Then I left, promising that from now on I would leave it alone.

Passing Time

On being lured in by archival photographs.

I once applied to work at an indexing company. Mostly, I just needed a day job, but I also liked the idea of organizing the contents of books into alphabetized lists, of making information easier to find. I always turn to the index before reading a new book. There are a few topics - not obsessions, exactly (well, alright, maybe sort of obsessions) that I always look up before reading anything else. That company didn't hire me, but it still pleases me to see all the mentions of one particular thing nicely gathered together. One of the words I look for now, thanks to this column, is Waterford.

It’s the same if the information is organized digitally. Last week I wrote about a photograph I found on Connecticut History Online, and after that I kept going back to the site, and the results of my “Waterford” search. Three of them drew me in with the lost worlds suggested by their thumbnail photos.

The first picture is of a party. In it, well-dressed children and adults surround a Maypole, stretching the ribbons taut. Behind them is a white “Victorian style cottage” and a tall leafy tree. It was taken at a “birthday fete” at Sandy Point in the summer of 1885. These days affluence and privilege are worn casually, not broadcast with top hats, white dresses and dark sashes, or wreaths in your daughters’ hair. If the people around the Maypole were here partying today, they would almost certainly be less richly attired, though I suspect their summer house would be bigger. It looks quite modest by today’s standards. Maybe, aside from the clothing, it is their expansive lawn that gives them such a toplofty air. Perhaps the original photo was blurred at the edges; if not, time has begun to take its toll. The impression is that the scene is fading, starting to bleed away.

Another photo shows a diminutive railroad station, the kind that is often re-purposed into boutiques. Many of them survive as functioning relics, quaint backdrops for passengers wearing jeans instead of dark overcoats and carrying laptop bags instead of briefcases. The station is light-colored with a dark roof and trim, and there are two small outbuildings beside it. A little way from the buildings is a sign that looks almost home-made, a rectangle on a post, that says Waterford. This town looks nothing like the Waterford I know now. Instead it resembles the commuter Connecticut I grew up in, defined more by proximity to The City rather than any unique qualities it might possess. A man stands where the tracks diverge. The date is given as “between 1890 and 1930.” I ponder the idea that time once stood still long enough to make it impossible to pinpoint a range any smaller than forty years. I lean closer to my screen to attempt to see the man better. There is something about him, the way he stands, maybe that suggests he’s given up. Maybe he knows that his era, and his station stop, will soon be gone.

The last one is a grainy photograph from 1936. The description reads “Starboard view of a small sailboat and a rowboat. A boy in a lifejacket can be seen in the sailboat. Two men are visible in the rowboat alongside.” But that doesn't capture the scene. The boy turns over his shoulder to look at the photographer, his face a blurred circle of paleness and shadow. The boom is very close above his head, and he looks very small. One of the two men in the other boat might be looking at the boy, or he might be looking down. The other is looking at the camera or off somewhere behind him. That man holds the two oars. There is a third boat, even smaller and grainier, in the distance. The sky looks dull and gray, as before a storm. You can almost see the curve of the earth on the horizon. The people in the picture are sailing “at Waterford,” but they could be floating on the open sea. There is no reason to think it wasn’t a happy outing, yet it's a sad picture, if only because it depicts something irretrievable.

The inscription on the back of the third picture gives the names of the boaters - Nat Herreshoff II, his father, and H.C.W. It also says, “10 years go quickly.”

Back To the Salt Works

The owner of a 19^th century Waterford salt-works was not who you might expect.

Long ago, when I was a college acting major, one of the lessons impressed on me was that although the profession for which I was training was currently regarded as glamorous (at least if you got famous) it was historically considered a very low vocation indeed. Actors were at best like cobblers, practitioners of a skilled yet unappreciated trade, and at worst - i.e. usually - they were like whores. In parts of Europe they were denied Christian burials. I think our professors told us this in case of the unlikely event that one of us actually succeeded. "You might have a house in the Hamptons,” we were meant to say to ourselves, “but remember: the Elizabethans thought you were trash.”

I remembered this when reading about Waterford's old salt-works. Waterford has two salt-works in its past. The first was located at the head of the Niantic River and built in 1778. The usual trade routes had been blockaded by the British, making imports like salt, a necessary preservative, hard to obtain. The second, the one I was researching when I recalled the cynicism of my education, was built in 1803 on land that is now part of Waterford Beach Park.

James Fennell bought four acres of land between the current Alewife Cove and the shoreline. He sold stock, promising six bushels of salt each year to every shareholder. But making salt out of salt water was not as easy as it sounds. The works were beset by fire, storms, and plain bad luck. In the end the “evaporation lagoons” on the watery property were, well, not worth their salt. “Only 12 1/2 bushel annual payment was ever made on the mortgage. It is unknown if the shareholders even earned that much.”

What makes this strange (or stranger) is that Fennell happened to be a British actor who had performed in Edinburgh and Covent Garden and had made a name for himself in theatres along the Eastern Seaboard of America. He was said to be “a remarkably handsome man,” and was particularly known for his Othello. I couldn't picture such a person engaged in manual labor on the shores of the Sound. But there he was.

“Let those who have witnessed my performances of the emperors, kings, and princes on the stage,” Fennell later wrote, “imagine my issuing from my friend's house at daybreak, alone with my axe, my spade, my saw, and a bucket full of smaller implements, to parade with them on my shoulders to the place of destination, three miles off.” At this point he accidentally cuts his hand with the saw, and goes on in his overwrought style: “What an occurrence to a romantic mind, tolerably stored with historical anecdote, for the indulgence of ominous conjecture! My blood flowed freely; I was fatigued; I sate down and contemplated the drops as they fell to the ground on which I rested… However, I soon roused myself, took my spade, covered up the blood, and raised an altar of turf over it. I then summoned the assistance of my usual agents, Folly, Obstinacy, and Pride, and having obtained it, proceeded in laying out my plan.” A storm breaks out, but Fennell erects “a [temporary] shed, with the assistance of a kind neighbour, whose curiosity had induced him to inquire what I was about, having observed from his house on an eminence my to-and-fro motions on the beach. This done, and the storm having commenced, we set to and enjoyed the shelter…but the astonishment of my neighbour was extreme, when I told him that I had come there for the purpose of making salt without fuel.” Other locals were similarly skeptical. “So great was the incredulity of one, that he declared that he would as soon believe that I [could] turn shore-rock into a Goshen cheese, as that I could make salt without fire.”

Fennell's life differs depending on which account of it you read. Some give the résumé version, with successes highlighted and failures quietly obscured. Others concentrate on the gambling and prison time. In his autobiography, “An Apology for the Life of James Fennell,” published in 1814, he paints a picture of a constant trans-Atlantic mad dash full of financial instability, theatrical mishaps, and moments of triumph and acclaim. You could say he alternated acting jobs with money-making schemes, except that his acting was sort of a money-making scheme. The “New-London and Waterford Salt Works” were not his first; he’d had plans for similar ventures in Virginia and Maryland, had had another attempt destroyed in New York, and had made “basket-salt for my daily bread” in New Jersey.

The unprofitable Waterford salt-works survived for three years. Then Fennell was informed that “in the course of an hour and a half, the salt-works had been destroyed by a violent storm, which had broken over the peninsula on which they had been erected, and carried all before it.” He was briefly - and dramatically - financially ruined by this. (“Some, the pursuers of the unfortunate, who grasp at the first fruits of a fallen tree struck by lightning, and watch the shipwreck of another's fortune, to steal a fortune for themselves, had amassed a considerable stock of timber, boards, Etc. from the ruins.”) But he soon rose to the next high of his roller-coaster life, opening a school in Massachusetts and making a good deal of money once again on the stage.

Fennell died in 1816. No one, at least so far as the official record is concerned, attempted to make salt on the shores of Waterford again.

The Secret Graveyard

Just one of the strange places you find when you’re lost.

There must be some law of the universe stating that anytime you’re driving along looking for something - a building, an address – a line of impatient cars must accumulate behind you, making it impossible to slow down. Not wanting to become that hated slow lost person, you drive at normal speed, trying to look simultaneously out both side windows and at the road ahead. And when it becomes apparent that you’ve missed what you were looking for and you turn around, another line of cars will accumulate behind you in that direction, too. I was on about my third such turn when I saw the graveyard. I was on Rope Ferry Road, at the top of the hill, near Niantic. I’d read a bit about the cemeteries of Waterford, and I was sure this was not mentioned among them.  I wasn’t sure of what I’d seen at first, but it looked decidedly historic. I forgot about the place I was originally looking for, and turned around again.

There was space to pull over, and a paved path. I parked my car and walked through a gate of crumbling stone and iron. The grave markers were arranged in order of height - obelisks neatly lined up at the back, then large gravestones, medium-sized, and smaller ones, in rows down the sloping hill. At the bottom, breaking ranks and scattering at the edges of the small plot, were some misshapen unmarked stones and a few flat slabs tipped at unsteady-looking angles. It was a sunny day, but after weeks of rain, the ground beneath my feet was still disconcertingly spongy. Off in one corner a few scattered graves stood apart by a tree, and I wondered if there was a reason for it, or not. The cemetery was bordered by a stone wall, like a front lawn. As I came out, a man struggling to peddle a bicycle up the hill looked at me quizzically, as if to say, “What are you doing over there?”

And what was I doing over there? What had I just found? I spent the next few hours in that strange fog usually associated with traveling to a foreign country and experiencing something you don’t entirely understand and can’t immediately verify. It seemed a silly way to feel about something I had seen in the early afternoon, on a busy road, just minutes from home. I thought I could find an explanation in seconds and the feeling would go away, but the obvious search terms and the stand-by history books revealed nothing.  Finally, spurred on mostly by self-doubt, I pieced together enough scraps to convince myself the place was real.

It was called Durfee Hill, though sometimes it was spelled Durfey or Durphey. It was once part of a farm bought in 1741 by Richard Durfee, though it had had several owners before that. I thought the name looked familiar, and indeed, I had encountered these 557 acres of land before: whoever owned them also held the rights to the rope ferry. I read that Richard and his wife Sarah are buried in the small cemetery, though I had not seen their names.

I did see that of Thomas Durfee, whose grave, one of just two decorated with bright new American flags, was hard to miss. I managed to confirm the bits of information on his headstone. He was veteran of the Revolutionary War, a private in Captain Eell's Company, 3rd Regiment of the Connecticut Line. He died on August 28, 1794. That made the whole thing less mysterious; I couldn’t have hallucinated the details of a life archived on a genealogy website. I found more about him. His house was used for a barracks in the summer of 1779. It was burned when Benedict Arnold's troops burned New London; Durfee protested and was taken prisoner. He was supposed to appear in Superior Court in New London to testify against a man he'd accused of trading with the enemy, but did not show up because he was in New York on a British prison ship. He once put an ad in a newspaper offering a Negro boy for sale.

I had my little story in my head, of what had happened to me, the chance sighting and the anticipation of walking through the open gate. But every part of this land and each of those people had whole stories too, stories far richer than mine. Who came to visit the grave of M.Y., and what memories were evoked for them on seeing those two initials carved in stone? What happened to Stephen G. Thatcher, who served in the 1st Connecticut Volunteer Cavalry and died on February 7, 1862, at age 23? A perfunctory search told me that the 1^st Connecticut fought impressively in many battles, but Thatcher could not have participated in any of them, because the regiment was training in West Meriden until February 20. I wanted to keep searching; I was sure I could find out Thatcher’s fate if I had enough time. But his was only one grave on Durfee Hill, and I could never track down all of them.  Could I ever know, for example, what happened to Jasper Champion, who had children named Sands and Waitstill and who was “lost at sea in the winter of 1781, aged 43 years”? Looking at the text tilting like waves on his tombstone, I thought there are probably few things that sound as romantic, and yet are as horrible, as being lost at sea.

I never found that other place I was looking for. I’ll go back and try again soon. Only I fear I might never get to it. I might be distracted and drawn in again by some other unexpected enigma hidden in plain sight just off the road.

Ghosts At Seaside?

Some say there is paranormal activity at Seaside Sanatorium, but the property may simply be haunted by its past.

As I walked around the locked gate, past the sign that said “CLOSED TO PUBLIC VEHICLES,” down the abandoned road towards the gloomy boarded-up buildings, I wondered if I would find Waterford quite so endlessly strange if I’d grown up here. I suspect that I would think what I did of the somewhat similar suburb where I was raised: that it was about the least fascinating town in the nation. To a newcomer, however, Waterford is full of oddities, and any number of strange curiosities could be hiding behind a strip mall, or tucked away in the bend of a coastal road.

On this day, my curiosity of choice was the old Seaside Sanatorium, originally a tuberculosis hospital, now an abandoned historic property in a state of impending blight, closed off and dilapidated and awaiting its eventual sale by the State of Connecticut. I suppose if you’d known about it all your life you’d think it was just a political issue, or an interesting place to walk by the beach, or maybe a building that adventurous or bored people snuck into in search of old medical stuff and evidence of ghosts. But I, having heard of its existence only recently, found it wonderfully sinister and bizarre.

The word sanatorium made me think of European mountain villages, of 19^th century literary types wasting away dramatically while carrying on doomed affairs and writing melancholy novels. Tuberculosis was “consumption,” which barely even sounds real anymore; it sounds like it exists solely in the mind of hypochondriacs in plays. But here was a real sanatorium, in southeastern Connecticut, built by noted architect Cass Gilbert (Woolworth Building, US Supreme Court) in 1934.

At that time it was believed that tuberculosis could be cured by rest, good nutrition, and fresh air, hence the prime beachfront property. While backwards compared to our current understanding of bacterial infections, it was certainly better than earlier thoughts about the disease, which held that it was caused by fairies dragging the afflicted person away for “compulsive nightly visits to the fairy mounds, so that every morning the victim returned exhausted and unrefreshed” or, less commonly, by witches who turned people to horses at night, leaving them literally “hag-ridden.” It was also far more pleasant than other early medical treatments, which included surgery to collapse one lung and let it “rest.”

I wasn’t thinking about any of that as I walked around the fog-draped buildings. I was alone, except for the seagulls overhead and a small gaggle of geese walking to and fro on an expanse of green lawn. Their honking was drowned out by the incessant crashing of the waves, and the constant battering of the cold damp wind that whipped tears from my eyes. All I was thinking about, as I wiped them away, was that this climate was more likely to give a person a respiratory illness than to cure one.

The windows were covered with plywood or broken, and there were “No Trespassing” signs posted on a few of the doors. I had read about people breaking in and discovering old papers in the halls and signs of the supernatural. I had also read that security was vigilant. I saw no signs of guards, but I did not attempt to break in. It was atmospherically creepy enough from the outside, and anyway I was far too cold to be brave.

Off to one side of the entrance was what appeared to be a tiny post-apocalyptic junkyard. There was an old traffic light on a post, a vintage electrical box of the type you sometimes see on a sidewalk by an intersection, and one of those large metal contraptions that hold up lights or road signs above the street. This had a wire dangling from it. On the lawn, between the main building and the beach, was a swing set missing its swings. It may have come later, but it reminded me that the original patients at Seaside were children.

When antibiotics began to be widely used to treat tuberculosis in the 1950s, eliminating the need for sanatoriums, Seaside became a geriatric hospital, then a home for the “mentally retarded.” It closed in 1996, amid allegations of abuse and suspicious deaths. Knowing all of that made the buildings even eerier, and the warning signs more ominous.

A little red structure like a diminutive covered bridge caught my eye. I thought children would have liked to run down the gently sloping hill and hide inside its walls. I wondered if the young patients thought this was a pretty place, this grand house with sweeping views where they were sent to live, or if it seemed foreboding even to them. I walked away, back up the drive, and turned back to see the buildings through the fog. Like the patients they had been built to accommodate, they sat waiting, either for someone to save them, or to waste away.

A Village Carved In Stone

It took me a while to really find Graniteville, though it was never truly lost.

Graniteville, the neighborhood that grew up around Waterford's granite quarries starting in the 19^th century, is now not much of a 'ville at all. It's more of, well, a road. Oh, there are buildings on it, and some of them look old, but if you're thinking of a "historic district" as a recognizable cohesive entity, then Graniteville will disappoint. Honestly it probably won't even reach that level, because to be disappointed you have to be expecting something, and most people who drive down Rope Ferry Road, between the St. Paul in Chains Rectory and the place where that power line cuts through open space, are not.

However, I was. I looked fruitlessly for Graniteville for a long time. But eventually - now I will resort to a cheesy yet necessary metaphor - I found a lot there, but only once I figured out where to dig. Once I knew what I was looking for, and put some effort into uncovering it, it began to fall away in great slabs, revealing a surprising wealth just beneath the surface. In fact, after I’d become accustomed to the search, I found that some of what I wanted had been present on the surface all along, blending in with its surroundings, waiting silently for me to chip it loose.

There was, for example, a red barn. I'd always noticed it, not because I thought it looked historic, but for the rustic heart hung on its side. I'd stopped to take a picture of it years ago, just because it looked so adorably “country,” like a prop for a photo shoot involving kids in overalls and heritage chickens. But the barn is actually a significant part of Graniteville. The style is Gothic Revival, with an eccentric little pointed double window. And the house, also painted red, was the home of Philo Gates, son of Warren Gates, who started the first major quarrying operation in 1832, providing granite first for the Harlem Railroad and then for forts and lighthouses along the East Coast.

There is another house, with an intricately carved fairy-tale porch - a Carpenter Gothic-meets-Italianate porch, it turns out, on a Greek Revival house. This appealing stylistic mash-up was home to stone-cutter Francis Gilbert. Before the process became mechanized, quarry work was relatively egalitarian. Workers could form cooperatives, and some later ran sites of their own. They were also some of Waterford’s first immigrants. They came from Ireland and England and Scotland, but also from Sweden, Finland, and Italy. Those who did not speak English wore an identifying numbered pendant around their necks.

Children attended the two-room schoolhouse, built in 1878. Now it houses a boy scout troop, and it looks distinctive but nothing about it screams “quarrying history” at passers-by. I looked for a while for something more old-schoolhouse-like, until I realized it was this red structure, standing there plain as day, clearly visible from the road. Its front steps are made of granite.

The industry started with “taking off millstones” from the rocky land in 1737, and in time it provided foundations for buildings like New London’s U.S. Customs House as well as quotidian objects like pavers. Work slowed with the advent of concrete and the 1938 hurricane, and ended with World War II. All of the 31 “contributing buildings” of the district have an attached person, a nurse or a blacksmith. Some of their names are recorded, some are not. Each is, or was, a small piece of an irrecoverable world.

The houses are not the only relic from the days of the quarries. The Statue of Liberty and Grand Central Terminal, to name just two of many, stand atop bases of Waterford granite. And at the Western edge of the district, invisible from the road, are two old quarries. Supposedly they contain pieces of excavated stone and old equipment wrapped around a tree. I haven’t ventured into the woods to look for them, but someday I will. Which means I just might have to write about Graniteville again.

An Execution In the Rain

There is no mystery to how this road got its name, just a sad story over two and a half centuries old.

Joshua Hempstead, in his diary entry for November 21, 1753, notes that “it Rained moderately for most of the day.” It was raining moderately, too, when I went to see the place where Hempstead was that day, on Gallows Lane. He had come to see a hanging. The "Cross Highway" off the road to Norwich through what is now Waterford was over two miles from where Hempstead lived; he “rid” there. Many other people came from much farther - Frances Manwaring Caulkins, in her History of New London, Connecticut, estimates up to 30 miles. There were ten thousand spectators, Hempstead reported, “of all sexes & nations.”

The eponymous gallows had been set up to execute Sarah Bramble, for the crime of “the Murdering of her Bastard Child.” It had happened in March of the previous year. Bramble had given birth to the girl and hidden her body for four days. Then, when alone in the house, she burned the body, finally hiding it in a box in a “secret place.” This information was gathered by Hempstead and others at what he calls an “Inquisition.”

She was presumably a servant - she lived in the house of Bryan Palmes - but other than being young and white and having committed infanticide, she is a blank. Hempstead recorded practically every raindrop that fell and every local ship that sailed away, but gossip, aside from its most basic outlines, was not his concern. Who the father of her child was, the circumstances of her pregnancy, whether she gave any reason for killing her baby, or what the evidence is that she killed it at all, are not known. We do know she was executed at 3:00 pm, on what Caulkins described as the “highest part of the road.” “It is a rugged, wild and dreary road, even at the present day,” she wrote, in 1895.

It was dreary when I drove up it too, and I could imagine it being rugged, though its wildness has been tamed. Now it cuts through the Connecticut College Arboretum. Wire fences separate the road from the trees. No one else was out driving on that wet morning except campus security. The rain fell into a little body of water, a stream or pond, that looked steely and cold. I couldn't tell exactly where the highest hill was, but I knew it must be near Bolles Lane, because Joshua Hempstead mentions the place being “above Jno Bolles.”

The story is dreadful whatever the truth of it is, no matter if Sarah Bramble was insane or evil or misunderstood or forced into her awful deed by another. Perhaps it was too distasteful even for the local citizens who decided on the guilty verdict and turned out to watch the punishment, because it was never done again. Bramble’s was the only public execution of any white person in New London. But apparently no one had a problem with the road name. I imagine it was at first just a fact, then either a warning or an approval or a remembrance, and eventually simply a name, divorced from its original meaning, or a relic of Old New England, an odd selling point almost, like a haunted house.

It was that transition, not the hanging itself, that I thought about as I drove up and down the hills of Gallows Lane. Through every stage of development this area went through, every house built, every street sign approved and council meeting held, no one ever wanted (or no one ever wanted badly enough) to erase this less than happy episode of local history. I drove the length of the road several times, thinking that this was a little morbid. But I would never want to change it either. I quite like living in a place that does not forget the darkness of its early years, but lets it run like a jogging trail through the Arboretum woods, ensuring that along with prominent people and geographical features, the memory of tragedy also has its place.

Poor House

I wanted to find Waterford’s oldest dwelling. I would not be deterred by danger, confusing house numbering, or my own ineptitude.

I know, intellectually, that recent history exists, but it’s the old stuff that always sucks me in. This time it was just a few lines on a sheet of paper I’d Xeroxed for a completely unrelated reason. “In 1691 Samuel Waller built this oldest surviving house in Waterford,” it said. “In 1726 the 21 Gurley Road house was deeded to Joshua Moore. A lean-to was added for his son. During the nineteenth century a brick ell was added in the rear when it served as the town’s almshouse.”

There was no way I couldn’t go looking for that. And I thought it would be easy to find, given an address on a road that still exists. What I assumed would be a quick errand to see a standard restored historic house turned into an odd little quest in yet another corner of Waterford I’d never before had a need to investigate.

The first thing I discovered is that there was no 21 Gurley Road. At least there didn’t appear to be. I saw 15, and 17, and then, where more houses should have been, there were some woods, with a sign saying “Lot 4 Sale.” The house numbers then resumed in the mid-20s.  I was flummoxed. They couldn’t have simply torn down Waterford’s oldest house…could they? And then I realized… I was in East Lyme. 

Noting to myself that there was Gurley Road, Waterford, and Gurley Road, East Lyme, and that they were not the same thing, I looked again. And I did find things, a lot of things. I found a Greek-Catholic Church, which I didn’t even know existed. I found acres of gently rolling hills, crisscrossed with stone walls, as if the houses that once stood there had mysteriously vanished. I found woods that began abruptly at the edge of farmland with a row of high, pale gold trees. I just didn’t find the house.

The search continued, though it began to seem more trouble than it was worth. I parked on a steep hill, and when I went to back up I shifted into neutral instead of reverse, nearly sliding forward into a steel fence. I (ok, my car, but still) was chased by a large dog.

And still, there was no house. But I couldn’t believe it didn’t exist. I drove so slowly that I began to worry that people in the other houses (many of them historic and prettily painted but clearly marked with numbers that were not 21) might see me and suspect me of something sinister, or worse, and more accurate, something ridiculous.

But I finally found it, or rather, I found the glimpse of it you can catch if you drive very slowly and look carefully through the trees. Its weathered wood exterior appeared to be crumbling. I could just make out the peak of the roof, a tree-bark-colored line, almost camouflaged. The surrounding area, what I could see of it from the street below, seemed to be a tangle of overgrown brush. For an almshouse, it looked in desperate need of alms. Nearby was a foreboding trail with a “No Trespassing” sign posted on a tree. I wanted to venture in, but I have a theory about how many times in one day you can escape a pursuing dog. So I just stopped there on the road, which was probably unwise, and took a picture through the leaves. I thought that if the house had to be abandoned, it was fortunate that it was so hidden.

Later I read about the house and its inhabitants. There wasn’t much. Samuel Waller was a horse trader, and Joshua Moore, who owned the house later, was Waller’s step-son. The windows, as well as the lean-to and brick addition, none of which I could see, were added later. The property was bought by the town in 1847 for the purpose of creating a poorhouse, or “poor farm.” It is the first building the town ever purchased, and so it is not only the oldest house in Waterford, but the oldest public building.

Maybe someday it will be open to the public again, not as a poorhouse but as a reminder of Waterford’s earliest architecture and residents. And hopefully then it will be easily accessible with an identifying sign out front so that everyone can find it without getting lost and fending off excitable canines along the way.

Not So Poor House, After All

Last week I glimpsed the exterior of Waterford’s oldest surviving house. Then I went back to see it up close.

I walked past the “No Trespassing” sign, up the driveway. It was a grass strip, with two worn dirt tracks tire-width apart. Between them, amid scattered dead leaves, were little purple flowers, violets or forget-me-nots, more flowers in one place than I'd seen anywhere else this chilly, rainy spring. I kept walking, away from the road, and entered a sort of bower of un-pruned trees. I could hear water running, a brook or stream, though I couldn't see it. There was a pond, blanketed with green and surrounded by broken and hanging branches. Cars rolled by on I-95, visible behind the pond. I thought of how often I, everyone, had driven right past this spot and never known it was here.

A thin strip of something hung along the trees as if to section off the driveway from the lawn, a sort of eruv separating me from the 17th century. I looked closer and saw that it was an electrical wire. Someone had been here, doing something, at some time in the modern era. Maybe they were still here. But aside from the incessant hum of the highway, there was no hint of any other human presence.

I turned to the house. It was gray, with a steep roof. The door and first-floor windows were covered with boards and the upper windows were left open, their panes gone. The brick addition behind the house, visible in old photos, was either gone or obscured by trees. The whole thing looked more dilapidated than what I had seen from the street, but less sad. There was a certain beauty in its decay, not in that “taking pictures of crumbling rust belt mansions for my Tumblr” kind of way, but in an organic way. In some sections the shingles hung like peeling tree bark, as if this was part of some natural process. It looked like something from 1691 because I knew that’s what it was, but it could have been built at any time, by anyone wanting simplicity.

A large black bird sat on the peak of the roof. It flew off and returned several times. I stared at it, wishing it would stay still so I could watch it. There was something ancient and predatory about it, though it took no notice of me.

The barn, or shed, closer to the road, was similarly weathered though in better shape. It looked in danger of being consumed by leaves, though in a timelessly pretty fashion, like a detail from a painting.

I did not venture off the path or attempt to walk around the house or even onto the lawn. That seemed wrong, in a way that trespassing did not. Plus, there were overgrown bushes in the way. As long as I stayed on the driveway, I felt like I was behind the rope at a museum, wanting to touch the art but held back at a respectful distance.

Before I saw the old almshouse up close, I thought it was sad that this chapter of Waterford history had been left to crumble. But as I walked back to the road along the flowery drive, leaving the sound of the running water behind me, I thought the house seemed - if a house could have an opinion - content this way. If the bushes and brambles continued to grow, and the buildings were covered over, leaving only a thin line of roof for large black birds to perch on, that didn’t seem so bad. Someone would find it again someday, someone more adventurous than me. But until then, if the house remained in peaceful solitude, I don’t think it would mind.

Besieged On the Niantic

Mohegan leader Uncas battled his enemies all over Connecticut, including right here in Waterford.

When I was in school, the curriculum regarding Native Americans had two components. One was a game in which we stood on a lawn and pretended to be caribou, moving a certain number of allotted steps in various directions, like some kind of pretend-tundra chess. The other was a vague sense that Indians were to be pitied, because they were unfortunate hapless people to whom bad things had happened.

So you can imagine I was thrilled to learn, at a much much later date, that while many individuals and tribes were indeed the victims of horrible misfortunes, they were not nearly as passive and one-sided as our lazy teachers had suggested, and in fact they were - and are, of course - as complex and human as everybody else. And that they are not one amorphous blob of people called “the Indians.” And that most of them had nothing to do with caribou.

Perhaps because of the gaping holes in my early education, when I encounter stories about Native American history now, I absorb them with the simple enthusiasm of a fourth grader.

Which brings me to my recent discovery that Uncas, Sachem of the Mohegans, once took refuge from a force of marauding Narragansetts in a fort on the Niantic River in what is now Waterford.

It happened in 1657, in the years of fighting between Mohegans and Narragansetts after the Pequot War ended and before King Philip’s War began. The Narragansett incursion into Mohegan land was one of a number of similar incidents. Uncas, outnumbered, was forced to retreat to one of his forts, located “at the head of the Nahantick” or “on the Niantic” in Oswegatchie. The siege would probably have succeeded, forcing Uncas to surrender, if he hadn’t been assisted by a number of well-armed Englishmen who managed to enter the fort. At their appearance, the Narragansetts and their Niantic allies retreated. Uncas pursued the enemy, and killed many of them.

The Legislature in Connecticut approved of the Colonists’ actions and ordered that several men remain in Uncas’s fort to defend him against future attacks. But a later meeting of the Court of Commissioners in Boston decreed that Indian tribes should be left to fight their own battles, without English interference, and Uncas’s defenders were told to leave.

This was merely one minor episode in the military and political career of Uncas. Born before the arrival of European settlers, he managed to parlay his alliances with them to a position of great regional power. He was often opposed and frequently defeated, yet he survived while his enemies declined. Uncas seems, at least to my fourth grade sensibilities, marvelously ahead of his time. He was able to work the systems of various cultures to his own advantage, knowing when to be humble, when to be bold, when to be faithful and when to appear to be so. He spent many years running and hiding, but he survived well into old age, possibly as old as 95. We know his name, even if that is as far as our knowledge goes; the names of men like Miantonomi and Pessacus are, outside of history books, lost.

The area of Waterford where Uncas’s fort was located is now an almost aggressively peaceful place. Little boats tied up to the banks rest on still water. Roads curve to reveal perfect natural vistas that could be on postcards. Driveways lead to private river views. Water-birds call out as they must have before there were people around to hear them. Despite the atmosphere, it’s not hard to imagine a battle unfolding here. Where I grew up, there are probably similarly tranquil neighborhoods that once saw dramatic events involving Colonists and Indians. It’s too bad that, instead of making us act like arctic deer, our teachers didn’t just take us there.

Memorial Day, Inadvertently

Taking a minute to stop and check out a roadside monument, just in time.

What is it about war memorials that makes people want to place them where they can be driven past, usually at fairly high speeds, but not walked to or read without a special effort? I'm convinced this country has fought in wars no one's ever heard of, only because their monuments are located in the middle of busy intersections or otherwise inaccessible spots. (Then there are some that are a bit too accessible, like the Korean War Memorial in Washington DC, which juts invisibly out of the ground – so that anyone walking by can catch their foot on it and - well, let’s just say, be careful around that thing when it’s dark out.)

Anyway. I'd driven past the monument on Route 156 near the intersection with Great Neck Road I don't know how many times, occasionally looking over in a vain attempt to find out what it was. But the three large stones with affixed plaques, arranged in a semi-circle in the grass, were too far away. I didn't know for sure that it was a war monument, though I guessed because of the array of American flags. And, of course, because of the “let’s put this where people can’t read it” thing. Finally I decided my ignorance had lasted long enough. Those stones looked important, and I felt remiss for not knowing what they said.

On closer inspection I found there was a sidewalk in front of the memorials, but it didn't seem to lead to anywhere. I parked in the closest lot I could find and crossed two busy streets. (There’s a distinct awkwardness to being the only pedestrian for miles, surrounded by drivers. You want to tell them that yes, you do have a car, it’s just over there, really.) I got to the Sidewalk To Nowhere, and realized the little park in which the stones stood was quite pleasant and well cared for. Sure that the passing motorists were wondering what the heck I was doing, and how I got there, I started to read.

I was expecting recent wars, but the first plaque surprised me. “To honor those patriots from the land now Waterford who courageously responded beginning with the Lexington alarm in the War of Independence,” it said, above a list of names. I was struck by how many of them were repeated two or three or more times. There were six Douglasses and eight Beebes.

The next one commemorated veterans of the Civil War, and featured more names (but fewer Beebes  - just four - and no Douglasses.) At the bottom of that list was another tribute, easy to miss, honoring the ten Waterford residents who fought in the Spanish American War, “Beginning with the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor April 1898 and ending with a peace treaty February 1899.” If, like me, you had forgotten the Maine (sorry) here’s an explanation for this confusingly punctuated sentence. The Maine was sunk in February 1898; the following April is when Congress declared war. Hostilities ended in August, and the Treaty of Paris was signed that December and ratified by the Senate in February of the next year.

The third stone honored veterans of “The World War.” It had the most names of the three memorials. Next to five of them were tiny stars, marking those who lost their lives. At the bottom was a date, the reason for the plaque’s sad and ironic title: “Dedicated November 11, 1928.”

Only after I left did I realize that I had found the Sidewalk To Nowhere and read the lists of names just in time for Memorial Day. I usually don’t do anything special on that day, except be happy that it’s part of a three-day weekend. I can’t say that crossing a few streets is really doing anything either – on the scale of laziness it’s one step above staying home and drinking lemonade. But on Monday, if I am at home drinking lemonade, I’ll also be thinking about those stones, and all those names, especially the ones with little stars.

Shipwrecks, Prisoners, and Bombs

Waterford has a lot of coastline. It's no wonder that a surprising assortment of ships have found their way here.

There are probably many, many stories of nautical adventures and misadventures along Waterford's shores. Recently I've encountered four.

The first involves a brig of the Connecticut Navy, called the Defence. Before winding up in Waterford, the Defence had captured an impressive 13 British ships and 600 prisoners, and earned a reputation for feats of daring. Abigail Adams was invited on board the ship at Plymouth, and wrote to her husband John that, “She is a fine brig, mounts sixteen guns, twelve swivels, and carries one hundred and twenty men...no private family ever appeared under better regulation than the crew.” She marveled than none of the men were allowed to swear. Adams and the other ladies drank tea, and the crew “showed us their arms, which were sent by Queen Anne, and everything on board was a curiosity to me. They gave us a mock engagement with an enemy, and the manner of taking a ship. The young folks went upon the quarter deck and danced.”

But in 1779, the Defence, “fleeing from a superior enemy, she struck Bartlett's Reef off Waterford and broke up...the ship was unsalvageable.”

The Defence was not alone in crashing against Bartlett Reef. Years earlier, a Spanish vessel called a snow, bearing indigo and other valuables, grounded here and was badly damaged. The ship, the St. Joseph and St. Helena, was towed to New London where the cargo was stored...and then stolen. It was 1752, so Spain complained to England, England investigated, and mayhem - which I won’t get into here because the setting is no longer Waterford and because I could see it growing to the length of a small book - ensued.

And then there's the odd little episode that took place in 1782. No one says much about it, at least not that I've been able to find, but it seems that during the Revolution, the Americans were so appalled by the conditions on British prison ships that they determined to retaliate. So they built their own floating jail, named it the Retaliation, and moored it on the Thames, “about a mile from the ferry” – that is, in present-day Quaker Hill. At one point there were 100 prisoners recorded held on the ship, which was only used for a short time. Some of them, civilian merchant seamen, escaped to West Farms. Apparently this was the only enemy intrusion on the land that later became known as Waterford.

Five years earlier, another incident unfolded here, this time in Niantic Bay. The British frigate Cerberus was anchored there when the crew of a schooner tied up behind it noticed a fishing line in the water. Pulling it in, they discovered it was tied to a barrel, which they pulled aboard. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t just a barrel. Connecticut native David Bushnell (who had gained attention when his pioneering submarine, the Turtle, blew up in New York Harbor, failing to damage the British ships there but succeeding in frightening them off) had stuffed it with explosives, creating one of the first underwater mines. The barrel and its twin were meant to slam into the Cerberus and explode; instead the bomb went off on the schooner, killing three men and wounding another.

After finding these tidbits, I’m going to be looking out for more – and watching the ships in Waterford’s coves with far more interest than before.

Waterford and the World

I found a little timeline of Waterford watersheds. And I decided to look up what was happening elsewhere at the time.

In 1637, the first Europeans set foot on the land that would later be known as Waterford when Captains John Mason and Daniel Patrick led their men overland to Saybrook following the Mystic Massacre. 1637 was apparently a banner year for disturbing European behavior; Dutch traders saw the dramatic rise in tulip bulb prices peak and crash, bursting the “Tulip Bubble.”

1693 brought the first Post Rider through Waterford, while in Switzerland, Jacob Amman formed the breakaway sect of Mennonites who came to be known as the Amish. Also – who knew there were specific dates for this sort of thing? - some scientists give 1693 as the year the Dodo went extinct.

The first local militia company was formed in 1714, led by Captain James Rogers. That year across the pond, the British Parliament offered a £20,000 prize to anyone who could come up with a way of determining a ship’s longitude at sea. And the Ottoman Empire declared war on Venice, kicking off the Seventh (!) and final Ottoman-Venetian War.

The first schoolhouse was built in Waterford in 1725, the same year that the Comte de Rochambeau - who would go on to lead French troops in the American Revolution - was born, and Catherine I became Empress of Russia.

Local mill owners had been removing stones from Waterford ground for almost a century, but millstone quarrying became a major operation in 1832. Also in that year, Greece gained independence from the Ottoman Empire.

In 1880 Waterford got its first commercial windmill. It was operated for six months out of the year by John Calvert and his three employees, who were paid 50 cents per day. Over 800 miles away, Wabash, Indiana became the first city in world to be fully lit by electrical power.

Waterford’s First Trolley Line opened in 1900, beginning the transformation of farmland to suburbia. In South Africa, the British fought the Boers, and in China, Imperial forces and Boxer rebels fought, well, pretty much everyone else.

The automobile first came to Waterford in 1903, the year that Cuba began leasing Guantanamo Bay to the United States.

In 1923 Waterford got its first fire truck, Mt. Etna erupted in Sicily, rendering 60,000 people homeless, and the Great Kanto Earthquake struck near Tokyo, killing 145,000.

It wasn’t until 1956 that Waterford installed its first traffic light, at the Post Road and Clark Lane. Elsewhere, Tunisia and Morocco gained independence from France, revolution swept across Hungary, and Pakistan became the first Islamic Republic.

In 1970, Millstone I, Waterford’s first nuclear power plant, went online. In other nuclear news of that year, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect.

In 1984 the Crystal Mall was built in Waterford, and the corresponding world events begin to coincide with my own memories. Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. Marines to pull out of Lebanon after the suicide-bombing of their barracks the year before, and famine in Ethiopia became a cause célèbre. Also in 1984 Upper Volta changed its name to Burkina Faso, though I can’t say I remember that one.

Dead Ends

Some topics look promising, but they quickly trail off into uncertainty, and attempting to follow the trail leads only to more questions.

They are two words, two things or places, and not one, into which I’d initially conflated them. Mamacoke and Manitock. Two names that evoke rich histories and intriguing goings-on, names so foreign they turn my Word document into a sea of red squiggles.

They attach themselves to points on the map, man-made and natural: Mamacoke Road, Mamacoke Cove, Mamacoke Island. Manitock Hill, Manitock Spring, Manitock Spring Water Company. The latter is sometimes Manatuck, and the Internet seems to want it to be Manotick, which is the one thing it definitely is not. (Though there is a Manotick, in Ottawa.)

I don’t know for sure what they mean, but one dictionary I found says they are Algonquian for “a great hook” (Mamacoke) and “a place of observation, a lookout” (Manitock.)

When they are mentioned in books, they reveal tiny snippets of history, but not the history I want. Christopher, James, Stephen, and Sylvester Miner lived on Manitock Hill. They were veterans of the Revolutionary War. So was William Tyack, who was an Indian, and whose ancestors lived near Tyack Swamp, which is on Manitock Hill. There is a moraine at Manitock Hill, created by glaciers scraping the earth 20,000 years ago. It’s only a minor moraine.

Quaker Hill was once known as Upper Mamacock; whether that’s a typo, an alternate spelling of Mamacoke, or another name entirely, I don’t know. European settlers found “established indigenous hay” there in 1645. Later, in the late 1800s, wooden ships were built there, but almost all evidence of this enterprise is gone now.

I think that maybe if I see some of these places myself, something about them will somehow magically become clear to me. I head out in a drizzle that soon turns to a downpour. By the time I get to Manitock Hill, the roads are beginning to flood, and then I miss my turn, and I’m annoyed. I wonder what’s Algonquian for “rain”, and “annoying”, and “why doesn’t this town have more storm drains?” The road up the hill itself, if the map on my iPhone is to be believed (which sometimes it’s not) looks narrow and inhospitable. I can imagine myself getting up it, finding nothing, and having to back the car all the way down through accumulating puddles.

So I give up, and in the still surprisingly persistent rain I drive towards Mamacoke Island - now a natural area owned by Connecticut College - on Benham Avenue, near Harrison’s Landing where they once built wooden boats. Maybe it’s just the weather, but I feel like I’m entering a world apart, a cross between a quiet beach-y neighborhood and a wilderness, with dense woods on both sides that soon open into a clearing. The history I want, if it’s there, is somewhere in those soggy impenetrable-looking woods. I cross the railroad tracks. Then the road ends, and I get a view of Mamacoke Cove through the downpour. Grey water, cold-looking, through a veil of trees.

Nearby Mamacoke Road is marked, fittingly, “Dead End,” and it is. It comes to an abrupt stop shortly after it begins. Luckily there is a small parking area to turn around in. As I do, I see a rust-colored blur in some trees ahead. A dog, I think. But it is a doe, and she lifts her head and watches me. She stays there, still and staring, as I reverse and drive away.

This Flight Has Been Cancelled. Forever.

Waterford had an airport; I had no idea.

I don’t know why Connecticut got rid of “We’re Full of Surprises.” I liked it much better than “We’re Closer Than You Think.” It was funny, an (unintentional, probably) admission that some of the surprises were less than positive, and, I realized when I started to investigate our tiny state more, it was true. I’m amazed that more people don’t drive off Connecticut back roads into trees, their necks craned the other direction, saying, “What the heck was tha-?”  “We’re Closer Than You Think” is just insulting. For people who live in Wyoming, Connecticut is probably just about as far away as they’d predict. But maybe, since the state has dropped it, Waterford could claim “We’re Full of Surprises” for itself.

Because, as I recently learned, Waterford once had...an airport! Of course this will not come as a shock to longtime residents or anyone who’s paid close attention to Waterford news over the past few decades. They will know, as I did not, that today, the former airport site lies empty, the victim of years of legal disputes, a Ponzi scheme, big ideas unfulfilled, and deals gone nowhere. (When I read this, I was relieved to learn that New London is not alone in its ability to create this kind of debacle.)

But once, not that long ago, it was a busy airfield, home to about 30 small private planes. It had two runways, first grass, then gravel, and finally asphalt, each about 2,000 feet long. There were also commercial flights to destinations like New York, Block Island, and Nantucket. There was a flight school. Once, a flying car - automobile on the road and airplane in the sky - landed there. The 1940s and ‘50s seem to have been a heyday of experimental aircrafts; the one that flew to Waterford was probably an Aerocar, with detachable wings and tail.

The airport was built in 1945 by Russell Corser, on the old Whitman family dairy farm. It was sometimes called the Waterford Airport, sometimes New London Waterford Airport. It was a popular place to stop, and well-liked by the aviators who landed there, until it closed in 1988. Noise complaints and re-zoning made the operation of the airfield virtually impossible. The last vestige of the farm, the dairy barn, was burned by the Fire Department in the mid-90s.

The site is right by the highway, a perfect location for any of the office parks it almost became over the years. Where Parkway South ends, just before the barricade that prevents you from driving into the unpaved unknown, you can see a small corner of the 328-acre space. It’s overgrown with unruly bushes and grass, and a billboard rising up out of it advertises available lots. When I drove by, an upside-down couch lay by the side of the road, as if too tired to venture onto the property.

Aerial photos show the property over time, the two runways crossed near the top like skis, tiny planes dotting the grounds. In the later photos they resemble negatives, or ghostly impressions of runways, one marked with an “X” to indicate that it is closed to traffic. Now, the property is simply a forgotten pot on the back burner of a development company. Despite being close to everything, there is a remoteness to it. Over the years, three bodies have been found there.

But it still counts as a surprise. And as a reminder that this town was once a destination that didn’t require a long trip on the highway to reach. Waterford, for about 40 years, really was Closer Than You Think. 

The Secchiaroli Barn

A historic Waterford building might be preserved, and with it, memories of an important aspect of the town’s past.

When you look for what remains of the past in the present around you, a lot of what you find is in some stage of disrepair: crumbling facades, remnants of buildings, signs stuck onto what is now marking what once was. Sometimes it’s sad to come across these relics, tottering between rescue and collapse. The National Trust for Historic Preservation calls them “endangered.” Sometimes, though, finding dilapidated structures and half-forgotten places is what makes the whole thing interesting. A perfectly preserved old building, seamlessly blended into modern society and well cared for, may be a beautiful and impressive sight, but there’s no sense of wonder in stumbling over it.

That’s part of the reason why the history I tend to notice and seek out is the fragile kind. The small old building wedged between two newer, larger ones; the peaceful meadow where explorers once walked or armies once fought. I tend to think about the “no longer extant,” the “here stood,” the lacuna in the ancient book. The fact that some memories are lost is fascinating, and inevitable.

But sometimes, a site gets a chance at a second life. Recently a study was commissioned by the Town of Waterford, involving a team of architects, engineers and other experts. Funding came partially from the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Historic Preservation Fund of the National Park Service. And all of it was done for what looks to be, at first glance, an unremarkable little barn.

The barn on Miner Lane was built in 1923, and housed dairy cows for twenty years. It is two and a half stories high, made of brick masonry and wood. Its gambrel roof, used in early 20^th century barns to increase space for hay storage, gives it the look of a much older structure. It is typical of the barns of its day, and represents not only the sort of farming common in Connecticut at the time but the decline of the original Yankee farmers and the advent of the European immigrants (Italians, Jews, Poles, and others) who took their place.

Alessandro Secchiaroli was 17 years old and could not read or write when he sailed from Italy to New York in 1904. He made his way to a waiting construction job on Plum Island, then to New London, where he worked in foundry and married Redenta Montesi. In 1911 the couple moved to 15 acres of rocky land on Miner Lane. They had four children, three who survived. They began to accumulate cows, and deliver milk from their horse-drawn wagon. There were chickens, too, and orchards, and grape vines. Redenta worked at the home and farm and Alessandro worked everywhere (collecting garbage, selling cinders) day and night. The house and land expanded, and then there were trucks and pigs and vegetables and, of course, the new barn. There is more to this story, as anyone from an immigrant family will have guessed: more work, more changes, more hardships and successes. The Secchiarolis moved back to New London, but their children maintained the farm in Waterford, as their descendants still do today.

Miner Lane is a road you don’t go down unless you have a reason to. Construction vehicles rumble in and out of driveways, and an unexpected railroad track crosses the pavement. It’s one of those industrial-slash-agricultural areas in which I feel useless and lacking in any practical skills. It’s also the kind of place where you never expect to find – but always do find - some humble representation of the almost unimaginably hard work that laid the foundation of any modern town. The barn, now owned by the Town, looks a bit worn and tattered. But it’s still standing. Beside it is the ruined foundation of a building, with only a red brick chimney remaining. There was a silo here once too, which blew over decades ago. But the barn endured. Perhaps, now, it will continue to do so.

Back To West Farms

A search for historic barns turns up other reminders, less permanent than buildings, of Waterford’s rural past and present.

Last week I wrote about a historic barn. Its back-story made it a unique structure, but I knew that with Waterford’s agricultural past, it couldn’t be the only one. And indeed, once you start to look, you find that the town formerly known as West Farms is dotted with all manner of old barns. Historic Barns of Connecticut, a project of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, has catalogued 110 of them.

Connecticut’s first barns were “English barns,” rectangles with pitched roofs and doors on their broad sides. As the English farmers grew more American, their barns changed too. They were easier to construct and built to serve multiple purposes. Through the centuries, more changes were applied to farm buildings in the region. Doors were moved from under the eaves, where rain dripped down, and barns were enlarged. Basements and windows and ventilation were added. Barns were connected to houses and other buildings. Advances in building methods and design continued until Connecticut largely moved away from farming. Many barns were torn down or allowed to decay. But some, in various stages of decline or preservation, remain.

So I set out to see if I could find a few. And I did. I found plain wooden barns, brownish-grey and weathered, looking dignified and proud despite the empty spaces where their windows should have been. I found bright barns and barns with decorative stars and one barn with writing on it that managed to mix Colonial simplicity with a sort of retro advertising look. I saw tantalizing maybe-barns, hidden behind houses and half-concealed by draperies of trees, and feral barns, overtaken by weeds and vines.

I also began to see barns where there were none; old brown houses and derelict garden sheds took on barn-like attributes in my hopeful mind. I saw sheds that were obviously new but constructed and painted to resemble old barns. Those didn’t fool me for a minute.

But it was the non-barn sights I saw that really took me back to me the time when Waterford’s farms fed the people of New London. Plain metal gates separated driveways from fields, and wagon wheels, now purely ornamental, were propped against trees on front lawns. Inviting open spaces between houses looked like mini-farms waiting to be revived. I think it was the sight of plastic chairs on a square platform idyllically anchored in the middle of a lake that made me realize: This is not a place that used to be the country. This is the country. Or maybe it was the moment, on a hill darkened in the afternoon sun by trees overhead, when I turned the corner to find a small flock of hens by the roadside.

Out of all those barns, the dilapidated and the restored, the brightly painted and the fading, the spacious and the teeny, my favorite was perhaps not even a barn at all. It was the little corn crib that stands on Jordan Green, made of pale wood with a green door. When I saw it, it seemed to sum up all that the denizens of Waterford’s past stood for. It was plain and useful, yet aesthetically perfect in its lack of ornamentation. It would probably have been a commonplace fact of life in the time of those who used it, unnoticed as a fast food restaurant or cell phone store is today. But to me it was enchanting. (I started envisioning a “Corn Cribs of New England” coffee table book.)

Historic Barns of Connecticut says, about their efforts to document old farm buildings, “...in many parts of the state the sense of loss is based on anecdotal evidence. We simply don't know where the state's barns are, what they look like, and how they were used. We don't know what we are losing.” This is true of the structures themselves. But in terms of the memory, the hazy sense of what it means to be connected to the land around us, we can sometimes catch hold of what we’re losing during a few hours’ drive on a sunny day.

The Shaw-Perkins-Nevins House

Where the history of a home is entwined with that of a family.

I’m beginning to think that the little blurb explaining this column might as well say something like, “Exploring the things you drive past that don’t look significant, but are.” In this edition, the condo building at 50 Rope Ferry Road.

It must have looked huge, once, surrounded as it was by sprawling farmland, dotted with sheds and barns, and beyond that, possibly, more open space. It must have been the most imposing structure on either side of the road for hundreds and hundreds of acres.

Now it’s eclipsed by the larger, modern buildings around it. They are purposeful buildings like the Waterford Public Library and Waterford High School, much more noticeable – as they should be - than the putty-colored condominiums in their midst.

But if it hadn’t been for that house, those other buildings would not be there at all. They, and the land they stand on, were carved from the farm that had, as its center, the structure that was a once grand mansion.

The farm would eventually grow to cover 300 acres, but wealthy New London merchant and ship owner Nathaniel Shaw bought just 14 acres in 1762. (The land included a house, built between 1714 and 1734, by the grandson of George Chapple, whose own 1664 dwelling on the property was the first documented house in West Farms. It stood where the condo building at 54 Rope Ferry Road is now.) Shaw’s grandson,  lawyer Thomas Shaw Perkins, inherited the land and in 1820 built what would be the Nevis Mansion for his wife, Marian Griswold, whose father (and grandfather and three other relatives) had been Governor of Connecticut.

The mansion was Greek Revival, quite a new style at the time. Later, it acquired a Victorian 2-story ell, a Southern Georgian Revival façade, and attic rooms for the family’s Irish servants. (One curiosity of the house was a double closet door hiding a safe which hung over a cistern, poised to drop to safety in case of a fire.)

One of the eleven children of Thomas Shaw Perkins and Marian Griswold, Cornelia Leonard Perkins, married banker David H. Nevins. (Some say David Hubbard Nevins and some say David Henry Nevins; I’m siding with the lazy and/or un-confrontational writers who just go with H.) He purchased the house where his wife had been born, and the surrounding farm, in 1854. The family moved in permanently in 1860.

Their daughter, Marian Griswold Nevins (the consistency with which the family recycled names could drive all but the most dedicated genealogists mad; there’s a tangle of stemmata on the back of my research for this that looks like a New York subway map) was married in the library of the mansion in 1884. Her husband was acclaimed composer Edward MacDowell. They had met in Germany, where Marian went to study piano with Clara Schumann but ended up with MacDowell for a teacher instead. The couple went on to found the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire in 1906. America’s first artists’ retreat started as an idea of Edward’s, but it was Marian who ran the Colony for many years after her husband’s death, traveling the country giving piano recitals to raise funds.

The house on Rope Ferry Road stayed in the Shaw-Perkins-Nevins family until 1958, when Anna Nevins, sister of Marian Nevins MacDowell, died at the age of 96. It’s described, in the list of buildings that make up the Jordan Village Historic District, as a “large, rambling, 2-story, eclectic frame house.” The families that occupied it are large and rambling too, branching out in all directions like the newer additions to the building, while keeping within their refined circles. I could probably have written this many words or more on any one of these inordinately accomplished people.

But I’m starting to think that I could do this with even the less pedigreed houses. I could close my eyes and touch a house on a street map, pick a name at random from its past, and be led into an entirely unexpected world.

Little House On the Green

The perfect simplicity - and slightly perplexing history - of the Beebe-Phillips House.

There is a book called Creating New England Villages, which gives instructions on how to fabricate miniature wooden copies of some of the region’s most charming buildings. There is a covered bridge, a church with a clock on its tall steeple, a squared-off lighthouse, and a gristmill.

And there is Waterford’s own Beebe-Phillips House. It is sometimes called a Farmhouse, but usually a Cape Cod or central-chimney Cape. It was built at 284 Post Road, near Fog Plain and Ellen Ward Roads, but it was moved to the Jordan Green in 1974. It is there today, unpainted except for the white trim around its windows which matches its white picket fence. It is a calming house, instantly evocative of the simplicity we now associate with the 1800s. It’s one of those houses that make you want a life full of chopping wood and baking bread.

The Beebe family name goes back further than this house, to Waterford’s early days. Eight Beebes fought in the Revolution. They had names like Jabez and Joab and Jeduthan. They lived on Fargo Road and Spithead Road and Manitock Hill, and other places not recorded. But the things that are recorded about them are even better.

Azariah Beebe was one of the signers of the petitions to separate Waterford from New London. He worked at a shipyard with his relative Winthrop Beebe, where he is said to have once fallen twenty feet and remained unscathed. He was also unfazed when an explosive charge he set at the bottom of a well went off right next to him, and when another carpenter dropped a hammer on his head. Azariah Beebe supposedly told the man, “Mind your chips.”

When James Beebe married Sarah Chapman of Lyme, they agreed that “after Marriage sd. Sarah is to be removed to the residence of sd. James and is to carry with her the property she is possessed of...in case sd. Sarah shall outbide hir sd. Husband she is to receive Back said property...and is further agreed that if sd. James should die before his wife, she is to have a home in James’ House during her widow-hood and also the Use of a Cow during sd. Term of time.”

The Beebe-Phillips House was built in 1838 (some accounts say 1832), but aside from its relatively tall second story, it looks like something from centuries before that. Its center chimney and floor plan, with two front rooms and a kitchen in the back, are typically colonial. The kitchen would have had a larder at one end, and a continuous fire. Though other architectural styles came and went, and a few local people embraced them, this type of simple, traditional English house remained the norm in Waterford for over two hundred years.

Some descriptions I found say the house on Jordan Green was built by Orrin Beebe, and occasionally it’s referred to as “the Lydia and Orrin Beebe House.” But other sources say that it was built for Lydia Beebe when she was widowed. She was young, with an infant; her husband was lost at sea. Strangely specific details of this version include that the original Post Road lot cost $60 and that Lydia took in sewing in exchange for firewood. Her baby may have been named Orrin Beebe as well, as there is a record of a Lydia Beebe with a son of that name. There are many Lydia Beebes, however - both Azariah and Jonathan married women named Lydia, and both named daughters Lydia. (Two of Jonathan and Lydia’s other children were named Thankful and Mindwell.) I found nothing at all about how or when the “Phillips” became attached.

I want to know these things - because I like facts, because I’m curious, because I want to get things right. But looking at the house with its weathered clapboard siding and summery wreath on the front door, I imagine that even without these details, I can sense instantly what the people who lived there were like. I assign to them the characters of their home: quiet, unpretentious, comforting, and rooted in the past, no matter how often they are picked up and moved around.

Old School

The exact history of the Jordan Schoolhouse may be lost, but the essence of it remains.

For something that looks so solid and uncomplicated, information about the Jordan Schoolhouse is surprisingly fragmented. Its original location is not known. Sometimes it is described as the oldest surviving public building in Waterford, sometimes the second oldest. It was moved to the Green in Jordan in 1972. From where, exactly, no one seems to mention, though someone does point out that its granite steps were taken from the schoolhouse in West Neck.

I thought it would be easier to find out about this building than its similarly preserved neighbor. After all a school is public, open, and can’t be kept off the record or ignored like a private house could be. But although it comes up a lot, none of the tidbits I found can be combined to form a complete timeline of the school’s past.

The plaque on the simple red building says “Built Circa 1740,” yet I have in front of me a book that claims it was built – as a house - in 1758, by one Jedidiah Brown, and that it was used as a school for an undetermined period, but was first identified as such in 1851. Also in front of me is an open browser window with a website that says in the mid-19^th century, the building was the home of a widow named Eliza Gallup and her three children. (I love how “widow” in those days was, at least in writing, a whole occupation, a job requiring skill and hard work, like “seamstress” or “lawyer.”)

That there was a school in Jordan was important enough to be mentioned on the official historical marker that tells the story of the town’s origins: “The Jordan area was first mentioned in 1663 and the Jordan Schoolhouse in 1737.” The school mentioned in 1737 was located somewhere northwest of Rope Ferry Road and the Jordan millpond.

In 1801, the first Waterford Town Meeting was announced with a note posted on the “school house at Jordan Plain.” Meetings were sometimes held in the schoolhouse too. One 1815 meeting met at “the House Now Occupied as a School House,” a phrase that unintentionally sums up everything that makes old schools so unthreatening compared to modern schools. The red house on Jordan Green, with its gambrel roof, was similar in style to other 18^th century houses in the area. It doesn’t have anything of the cold municipal building about it. When you look at it you don’t imagine squeaky hallways and rows of lockers and echoing gyms.

But you do imagine the essence of school - books and early mornings and friends, multiplication tables and recess and mean little boys - which is perhaps why it doesn’t matter to me that I haven’t found definitive answers to my questions about when it was built and where it was located and which school, exactly, these records are talking about. I can still picture what happened here, wherever “here” was at the time.

Each year the children would appear on the first day, wearing new clothes or wishing they were. Some would be eager to start and some would have rather stayed home, but by summer all would be impatient to run free. In the winter smoke would waft from the chimney, and inside the students would try to work and stay warm at the same time, concentration wavering. Initials would be carved in desks. At lunch time they would eat the food they’d brought, or perhaps walk home, and whatever discipline had prevailed in the preceding hours would vanish, and a fierce social tussle would commence. And yes, they would learn things, to varying degrees. They would study subjects as practical as their sturdy school building. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I think the things you’d learn would have to be more useful if you learned them in that little red house.

The Waterford Connection

This town - and people from it - turns up in some very unexpected places.

Living in St. Louis, I frequently heard about the unusual number of people who can be linked to the city. The phrase “the St. Louis connection” comes up in conversations and newspaper articles and is even printed on a T-shirt. As an outsider, I quickly found myself connecting far-flung people and places to St. Louis too: once you pay attention, you begin to notice a surprising number of references to the city, sometimes from the oddest of sources. They stand out, I think, because St. Louis is just small enough for it to evoke surprise when it turns up, but not so small that this never happens.

Waterford never struck me as the “connection” kind of place. But I’m almost starting to think of it that way, because although it doesn’t reach St. Louis levels, I’m discovering that where you would never think to look for Waterford, there it is.

Try Ohio - Warren, OH, to be exact. The town was named after former Waterford resident Moses Warren, who went West with the surveying team of the Connecticut Land Company in 1796. The Company had bought the land, a portion of the Connecticut Western Reserve, from the State of Connecticut, which had claimed it since John Winthrop, Jr.’s 1662 Charter granted the new Colony the land “from the Said Norrogancett Bay on the East to the South Sea [i.e., the Pacific Ocean] on the West parte.”  (The leader of the surveying party, General Moses Cleaveland, was originally from Canterbury. The Ohio city named for him eventually lost its extraneous “a.”)

Or, if that’s not strange enough, try the Bering Sea at the tail end of the Civil War. No one tells you in school (or ever, really) that the last engagement of America’s deadliest war took place in Alaska. But it did, and a Waterford whaleboat captain was part of it. Samuel Greene, born in Quaker Hill, was commanding one of several New England whaling vessels that were captured near Little Diomede by the Confederate raider Shenandoah. In one year, the tenacious captain of the Shenandoah, James Waddell, sank or captured 38 U.S. ships and took 1,000 prisoners. Greene and his crew were taken in June of 1865, months after Lee’s surrender. Waddell refused to stop fighting until his British allies confirmed the War was indeed over.

Another Waterford-native-unexpectedly-meets-Civil War story involves not boats, but trains. Thomas Rogers grew up in Quaker Hill and worked on the railroad in New Jersey before forming the company that built the locomotive known as the General. This locomotive gained fame after its involvement in the dramatic 1862 Georgia raid known as the “Great Locomotive Chase.” A group of Union soldiers and civilians, attempting to capture Chattanooga, hijacked the General and drove it towards Tennessee, destroying tracks and telegraph wires while being pursued by the train conductor on foot, in a hand-car, and in other locomotives. They made it from modern Kennesaw almost to Chattanooga before they were caught. Some were executed, some managed to escape, and others were exchanged as prisoners of war. If this sounds like a movie, it was two: a 1956 Disney film, and a 1926 silent comedy starring Buster Keaton.

Sometimes, it’s not that Waterford residents go elsewhere and get mixed up in unusual happenings, but that unexpected things take place right here. In 1887, two farmers, Christopher Brown and Charles W. Payne, leased some of their Quaker Hill land (what is it with Quaker Hill?) to James A. Boss for the purpose of drilling for oil. But usually, locals in search of the earth’s buried treasures leave Waterford first. John Isham Chappell, John Keeney, David Austin, and Griswold Avery, for instance, got caught up in the frenzy of the Gold Rush and set out for California. They took a shortcut through the isthmus of Panama, walking through the jungle for 28 days.

There’s another Waterford to California via Panama Gold Rush story that’s far more exciting. It centers around a ship that...well, it’s too full of twists and turns to get into at this point. But tune in again next week.

We Left Our Boat In San Francisco

How a ship named for a local river ended up high and dry across the continent.

The Niantic was built in Connecticut, but if anyone knows where, exactly, they don’t think it worth mentioning. The story of this ship gets more interesting the farther she sails from the Waterford river whose name she bears. It gets even more interesting when the ship is beached, never to sail again.

Built in 1832 as a China packet, Niantic was described as “a slow sailing, bluff bowed, three masted, full rigged sailing ship...extremely broad for her very short length...” In her last China Trade voyage, in 1840, she left the port of Canton (Guangzhou)  just before it was blockaded in the Opium War and sailed to America via Anjer, Indonesia (amusingly, from a Connecticut-centric point of view, the start of the Great Post Road) full of lucrative tea and silk.

In 1844, having been sold and converted into a whaler, she headed for New Zealand and the whaling grounds of the Pacific, returning in three years loaded with “one hundred and twenty barrels of sperm oil, twenty-four hundred barrels of whale oil, and ten thousand pounds of bone.” A year and another sale later, the Niantic left Rhode Island for the Pacific Northwest, but found, while in port in Peru, that everyone was heading for San Francisco and gold. Passengers would now be more profitable than whales.

One of those passengers later recalled, “She came into Panama with a clean, whitewashed height between decks of seven feet in the clear, and sailed away with 280 good, glad men. The good old ship brought us [to San Francisco] in sixty-four days, and in all that time never a pump-brake manned or called for, never a creak of timber joints and never a smell of rottenness. Her passage for time was unprecedented, and not often beaten since...”

Another recorded their arrival in California. The passengers, “each determined to be the first off for the mines,” had packed their pick-axes and pans, and “all were looking to the glorious future with a faith that would have removed mountains, particularly if they were suspected of having gold concealed underneath.” As they sailed towards the city, “We could not have made a more auspicious entrance...it seemed to us that the gates had been thrown open, and we ushered in to view some fairy scene....San Francisco is spread out before us, where rides a fleet of two hundred sail. We feel that we have attained the acme of our ambition, that we have really entered the 'Golden Gates.'” The Captain said, “Gentlemen; I have nothing to say; your voyage is up; go ashore.”

The ship was then sold and hauled onto the shoreline, at today’s Clay and Sansome Streets, to be used as a storehouse. It was common for ships to be repurposed in this way, but the Niantic became the most famous. In 1850, a visitor observed, “Her hull was divided into two large warehouses, entered by spacious doorways on the sides, and her bulwarks raised upon about eight feet, affording a range of excellent offices on the deck, at the level of which a wide balcony was carried round, surmounted with a verandah, that was approached by a broad and handsome stairway.”

Later, another wrote: “The front of the city extending rapidly into the sea, as water-lots are filled up with the sand-hills which the steam excavators remove. This has left many of the old ships, that a year ago were beached as storehouses, in a curious position; for the filled-up space that surrounds them has been built on for some distance, and new streets run between them and the sea, so that a stranger puzzles himself for some time to ascertain how the...Niantic became perched in the middle of the street...”

In 1851 the ship was almost burned down, and the Niantic Hotel was constructed on the remains of her hull. Known for a time as San Francisco’s best hotel, it was torn down in 1872 and the Niantic Building was erected in its place. This in turn was replaced with another Niantic Building in 1907, and in 1919 a commemorative plaque was put up. It tells of how the “emigrant ship” became a warehouse and a hostelry, but it does not mention the Niantic’s origins in Connecticut, or that her name evokes a river, a village, and a tribe from 3,000 miles away.

Waterford’s Wandering Library

Before the current building and the historic building before that, the local library was just a group of dedicated people and a roaming batch of books.

It might not really be the case, but it seems to me like an unusual proportion of Waterford buildings have been moved at least once. Of course historic buildings are moved often for preservation, but sometimes the image I have of Waterford from its early days up to the 1960s or ‘70s is of structures being dragged about and rearranged like those tiny collectible buildings you buy in gift shops.

One of these wandering buildings is the old library. Of the three preserved buildings on Jordan Green, the little white library is the least conspicuous. It has neither the instantly recognizable look of the red Jordan School House, nor the obviously historic qualities of the Beebe-Philips House. In addition, it is partly obscured by a tree. But it is appealing, when you stop to look at it, bright and tidy and wholesome.

But even before the library building was constructed, the concept of the library had its own peripatetic past. And so did the books themselves. The number of times and places those books have been moved is honestly rather confusing. I thought I could skim a few accounts of the story and be done with it, but in the end I had to make a timeline.

1922: A small group of citizens attend a meeting at Jordan School and vote to establish a library association.

1923: Waterford Library Association, Inc. is formally created. Donated books are gathered in the basement of the First Baptist Church, but after a fire breaks out there, volunteers scramble to get them to a nearby woodshed.

1924: A carriage house on private property on Rope Ferry Road is offered to the Association for use as a library, and the books are moved in. The furnishings are donated by the committee members and other supporters.

1926: The collection becomes too large for the carriage house. Charitable contributions and bake sale proceeds add up to $473.52. The idea of constructing a new building is raised.

1927: Gifts of land on Great Neck Road and a new building enable the plan to be enacted.

1928: The new library building opens. (This is the small white house now located on the Jordan Green.)

1959: The library property is condemned by the State Highway Department as part of the rebuilding of Great Neck Road. The state pays $26,000 for the land and allows the building to be moved. The current Library property on Rope Ferry Road is purchased with $7,000 of that money.

1961: The small white house is cleared of its books by volunteers who transfer them to a temporary home in the old Jordan Post Office at 91 Rope Ferry Road. The old building is given to the Town and moved to Jordan Green, where it became the office of the Recreation and Parks Department, and later the home of the Waterford Historical Society, which it remains today. The Library Association is renamed the Waterford Public Library, Inc.

1966: Books and other essentials are moved once again, from the rented former Post Office to the new location.

While all of this was going on, other changes were taking place in the administration of the library as well. Aside from the organization and the fundraising, donations and grants that kept the library alive, there were the women who ran it. At first the collection was managed by the committee, then in 1926 one of its members completed a library course and became the - unpaid – librarian. In 1931 a part-time library worker was hired (at $40 a month) and finally in 1958 a professional, full-time librarian was appointed.

That was part of the appeal of the little white building when I stopped to look at it the other day. It’s not just nostalgia for a time when a one-story house was once seen fit to hold a library. It’s that over the decades, as the collection traveled around, it was followed and shepherded by so many people, volunteers and philanthropists and workers, who probably had other things to do but who devoted their time and effort to give others access to books.

Beer, Tarpaper, Groceries…and Your Mail

Jokes about postal workers aside, just trying to figure out the history of sorting the mail in Waterford is enough to make you lose your mind.

I thought the Waterford Library got around, but I hadn’t encountered the tangled yarn that is the story of Waterford’s post office. Or, I should say, post offices, as there have been many.

In 1826 the Post Office was in a tavern (located on the later Veterans Memorial Green) and its owner, James Bulkley, was the postmaster. When Henry Gardner bought the building he became postmaster, and his eleven year old son assistant postmaster. Because Gardner was a Southern-supporting Democrat and postmasters were politically appointed, he was replaced by the Lincoln administration in 1861. The post office was then relocated to Jordan Village.

From 1890 to 1936 it stayed there, at first in the Saunders General Store at 101 Rope Ferry Rd. In a photograph from around 1900, a sign above the door says “Groceries & Provisions” then below that, in small letters, another says, “Post Office.”

In 1942 the Post Office leased a new building at 91 Rope Ferry Road which had been constructed just for them, marking the first time the PO was not tacked on to another business as an afterthought. In 1960 it moved again, to a building on the Post Road, and finally in the surprisingly recent year of 1992, the current Post Office was opened right nearby, representing the first time Waterford mail was distributed from a building owned by the Postal Service.

There seems to have been a short period in which the Post Office left Jordan Village, but I haven’t found out where it may have gone. At this point, if you told me it lived briefly in a barn with someone’s cows, or a haystack, or a bakery in a small cupboard above the flour and sugar, I would probably believe you.

Then there’s the Quaker Hill PO, which is another shaggy dog story. In 1890, Postmaster Henry O. Woodworth ran a Post Office at his tarpaper plant. He later moved it to his store, in the famous “house in the middle of the road.” That house (the road it stood in the middle of was Old Norwich) had been a stable and a grocery store, and would later be a convenience store, private home, and “gas and oil’s source.” In addition the Waterford Guardian, a newspaper that existed from 1956 to 1957, was published there.

Mail that arrived in Quaker Hill by train was sometimes was brought up to the Post Office in a row-boat, though that changed in the trolley era.

For two years (1917-18), the Quaker Hill Post Office was even located in a trolley stop, which (of course) was also a variety store. It was located atop a hill, on what is now Scotch Cap Road, and it was called “the shack.”

In 1924, Louis Ginsberg also ran the Post Office from his store on Old Norwich Road. He’d moved the building from a previous location across the street and raised it up, so that the store-slash-Post Office could be placed underneath. When this location became too small, the PO moved to a building next door to the Quaker Hill firehouse. In 1961, the current Quaker Hill Post Office - the village’s first one designed expressly for that purpose - was opened.

There was also once a Waterford Post Office with its own zip code, solely for the National Foreman’s Institute, later the Bureau of Business Practice.  (If you didn’t know what that was either, they published business books with stupifyingly boring-sounding titles.) From 1963 to the 1990s, the company had 06386 all to itself.

The old village of Millstone, overtaken by its namesake nuclear power facility in the 1960s, once had a post office too, along with its own school and railroad station.

It’s both amusing and improbable that a town with such a simple background should have such a complex history of dealing with its mail. But it could be the way of the future as well. The website of the United States Postal Service depicts their new “Post Office replacement model” with a cartoon of a small building. The USPS logo can be seen on the front, along with a sign that says, “The Grocery Store.”

Partial Steam Ahead

Captain Stevens Rogers, born in 1789 in Goshen, helped sail the first steamship to cross the Atlantic.

The story is so perfect that it sounds apocryphal. Four year old Stevens Rogers was sleeping in a small boat on the beach near his family’s Goshen home when the tide came in, lifting the boy out on the waves. Hours later, as his panicked family gathered in their New London (later Waterford) farmhouse, a sailor walked in. In his arms he carried the sleeping Stevens, who he’d spotted from his own ship further out at sea. And you can guess what happened next.

At fifteen Stevens ran away from school to the docks in New London, seeking a position on a ship. His parents were adamantly against their son being a sailor; they encouraged him to become a farmer instead. “The sea has claimed too many men of my family,” his father said. But Stevens found a captain willing to employ him on a voyage to Cuba. “Make him work hard so that he will be quite sick of his venture before you get back.” Stevens’s father told the man.

That first trip would have turned some boys into farmers; Stevens, lacking ID to prove his nationality, was almost impressed by the British Navy twice. The first time, the captain’s defiance drove them off. The second time, Stevens was prepared: he’d tattooed an American flag and eagle on his arm. (Other anecdotes attesting to his boldness and patriotism pop up throughout his life, although during the War of 1812 his luck evading the British ran out. He was imprisoned in Dartmoor in England and again in Halifax.) When he returned from Cuba, he wanted to be a sailor more than ever. He was soon in charge of merchant ships of his own.

Stevens sometimes worked with his distant cousin (and later brother-in-law) Moses Rogers, a sea captain with a very distinguished résumé. In 1818 Moses had a new command, a ship being built in New York. He took Stevens on as sailing master, or navigator.

Here the story becomes less predictable, because this was not just any ocean-going vessel. This one was to be powered by steam. The 109-foot Savannah had the masts of a sailing ship plus a smokestack and paddle-wheels which could be folded and stowed away in bad weather.

Almost everyone was skeptical of the steamship’s chances, including her owners, who shipped their cargo on another boat. Passengers could not be found, and even hiring a crew was difficult. In 1919 the ship arrived in the Georgia port she was named for, and President Monroe came aboard for a short cruise before the Savannah left for Liverpool. Stevens Rogers expertly guided the vessel he’d helped construct to Liverpool in 29 days, though only partly under steam. In England there was suspicion – some thought the strange craft had come to spring Napoleon from his island prison - and hilarity: when the steaming Savannah was spotted off the Irish coast, she was thought to be on fire. A British cutter sent to the rescue had to chase the steamboat for hours, only to learn its services were not needed.

The Savannah traveled on to Copenhagen and Stockholm, where the crew received compliments on their unusual vessel from Royals and other prominent citizens. In St. Petersburg, the Czar of Russia wanted to buy the ship, crew included. The offer was declined, and after a stop in Norway, the Savannah returned home. There, she was sold and converted into a packet; despite wide enthusiasm, America was not yet entirely ready for steam.

Stevens Rogers eventually gave up sailing, at the request of his wife, and replaced it with a range of occupations from lumber yard owner to tax collector. Historian Frank O. Braynard points out that in his 79 years, he “remembered the death of George Washington and lived to see Lincoln shot.” Most of the tales of the Savannah we know today were recorded by people who heard them from Rogers himself. Fortunately, he lived in an era when it was easy to be caught up in extraordinary things, when a young boy from Waterford could travel the world and become part of history seemingly without trying, simply by wandering down to the water’s edge.

Drawing the Line

Figuring out exactly where the original borders of Waterford were is trickier than it might seem.

In 1801, when Waterford was set off from New London and became a town of its own, the borders of the new town needed to be defined. Because the original Waterford was larger than the Waterford of today, I wondered what areas used to be a part of town but now belong to someplace else. I thought it would be easy to look up. I soon discovered otherwise.

The 1801 lines began “at the north-east corner of the city of New London where it joins the Groton line.” That was easy enough to find on a modern map, but “thence westerly on said city line to a large rock on Plumb’s hill, so called, about four rods west of the road leading from Norwich to New London” was not. I was starting to see some flaws in my idea, namely that large rocks tend to move over the course of centuries, Plumb’s hill probably no longer belongs to Plumb, and I don’t know how long a rod was. The rock problem continued with the next part of the border, “thence running south 37 deg. west, to a large rock belonging or lately belonging to John Ashcroft, a little to the eastward of Cedar swamp.” Just how large were these rocks, I wondered. And did no one foresee a time when later citizens might wonder which of several rocks was meant, or when the Cedar Swamp might be drained, or when no one would remember which land was once owned by John Ashcroft?

At the time, town borders were inspected in the ancient British tradition of “perambulating the bounds.” I could imagine how early 19^th century people traipsing through woods and along streams might recognize a “high water mark” and a “large clump of rocks” as landmarks. Today there is something almost unimaginably parochial about their interpretation of their landscape, a seeming inability to conceive of a person from someplace else, who might not know that the aforementioned “large clump of rocks” at the western point of Lester’s Gut was known as “the great shore rock.”

For all the perambulating that must have gone into creating them, the original borders only applied for the following 38 years. In 1839 a new town, East Lyme, was created from parts of Waterford and Lyme. This was common at the time. Old Lyme and Lyme were one until 1855. Though Old Lyme is the newer town, it had been settled first. Lyme itself had been previously set off from Saybrook, which is now Deep River. (And now I’ve gotten myself into a whole other county.) Ledyard was merely a part of Groton before 1836. Montville, which features in the original Waterford boundaries (“northerly on said Lyme line, to the southerly line of the town of Montville”) had been incorporated from New London in 1786.

A map of Connecticut showing town boundaries demonstrates this history of cutting up and rearranging. Amid the straight lines are many squiggles and zigzags and curves, necessitated by rough terrain and the constraints of whose farm ended where, who owned which clump of rocks. Waterford combines an almost-straight line, a naturally wavy coast, a sharp curve, and that border with East Lyme, which looks as if it incorporates – to paraphrase a joke about a different country - the places where the man who drew the line had his fingers on the ruler.

Having abandoned my first idea of tracing the old bounds myself, I decided to at least drive the southern border. From Hunt’s Brook - then Alewife Brook or Lester’s Gut - the border extended “westerly as the sound runs to the southerly line of the town of Lyme.” No matter what year it is, following the Sound and stopping at the border with Lyme (i.e. Old Lyme) seemed pretty fool-proof. So I drove out of Waterford into the village of Niantic, which was sparsely populated in 1801 compared to Flanders, to the north. I passed familiar campsites and hotels and beaches, stores and restaurants and sidewalks full of strolling vacationers. Only this time everything looked slightly different, because I saw it through the eyes of those early Waterford town planners. “All of this,” I imagined them thinking, “All of this once was ours.”

Mysteries Of Cohanzie

The land between the Mall and Quaker Hill is full of all kinds of unlikely facts and tales.

It’s easy to ignore Cohanzie. It’s a district, but though it’s not a Historic District like Jordan or Quaker Hill, it is historic: the earliest reference to it comes from the mid-18^th century. It’s located in an area you wouldn’t wander into unless you were looking for something specific. And then once you do find out about it, it doesn’t look like anything very special. It looks normal, residential, happily uneventful, with some parks and a fire station and a disused brick school building. But once it occurs to you to wonder about Cohanzie, some of the things you turn up are most unusual.

The name Cohanzie, it was once said, derived from “an old Pequot who had a wigwam in a dense swamp in the district, where he dwelt and made brooms and baskets for his neighbors, long after all others of his race had disappeared from the neighborhood.”

The earliest known reference to the district comes from 1750. In 1794 (or thereabouts) it was sometimes spelled Cohanzy.

In the early 1700s, large wild animals still roamed the area. Cohanzie, along with Spit Head and Potaquonk, by the Rope Ferry, “had their traditions of bear bunts and painter waulings.” (Which I assume were bear hunts and panther maulings, though the other things sound even more fantastical.)

Vauxhall Street Extension was once called the Cohanzie Road. There are other old names, no longer referenced much anymore, like the Cohanzie Gardens farm, dating from 1870, which sold its produce (some out-of-season, grown in greenhouses) locally and as far away as New York.

Cohanzie used to be the place to go for ice: Walter R. Perry was the biggest purveyor of ice in Waterford in the late 19^th century. His first icehouse at Cohanzie Lakes had a capacity of 6,000 tons. His second held 4,000 tons. (For a comparative illustration of just how much ice that is, another Waterford icehouse of the time held 300 tons.) Perry’s ice was known for its quality. It was written that “especially in emergency cases, the Perry company's special delivery has been found invaluable. Numerous auto trucks and horse-drawn wagons are used to supply this company's demand.”

The reservoir pond for John Winthrop Jr.’s New London grist mill was on his farm, creatively named Mill Pond Farm, located in what would become Cohanzie.

The Cohanzie School was built in 1923. It replaced four earlier schoolhouses. One is gone; its lot is now a part of the highway. One became a section of a house. One still stands, its 1861 provenance apparently forgotten, on Parkway North. Another small one is apparently still standing on Vauxhall Street. I have never noticed it there, so I looked at Google maps, hoping their photographers caught something I missed.  But the images were blasted with sunlight, and part of the street was obscured by a ghostly brightness. The large 1923 building is closed now, and vegetation is just beginning to overtake its walls.

All of which gives this decidedly normal-looking place an air of mystery. The first time I ventured into Cohanzie, not knowing where I was, my brakes started to act up and I feared I’d crash into a tree on Dayton Road. The most recent time, I happened upon the extensive Leary Park, which I’d never even heard of. Looking at the map while writing this, I see that the area is bigger than I thought, and I wonder what will happen if I go there, and what I might find.

Old News

Finding local facts that are just as good as fiction in a newspaper from the 1800s.

I recently stumbled across something I would never have even thought to look for. In the Repository, a New London newspaper first published in 1858, a correspondent using the pseudonym Pequot wrote two short pieces under the heading “Waterford In Olden Times.”

The first concerns the memories of “Patriarch of Waterford” Stedman Newbury, who had died about 80 years earlier and whose diary the writer was allowed to see. The keeping of the “memorandum-book” had begun with Stedman Newbury’s grandfather Nathaniel Newbury, whose first notation was a record of his marriage to his wife Elizabeth in 1706. He listed their children: Nathaniel, Jr., Elizabeth, Samuel, Mary, Hannah, Nathan, Eunice, Sarah, one name that is illegible, and another I’ll be adding to my roster of outstanding Colonial-era names: Mehitable.

The bulk of Pequot’s story recounts an experience that Nathaniel (the son) had on Plum Island. He’d moved there because his wife Hannah Lester’s sister married Mr. Beebe, who owned the island. On a cold, windy March day, he and some other settlers on the island set out for a mill on Long Island in their only boat. They were quickly overturned by “a flaw of wind.” Nathaniel, a “very strong man and a good swimmer” in his own estimation, managed to help all his fellow passengers onto the capsized craft. But he could not flip the boat over in the rough waves. One by one, despite Nathaniel’s exhortations, they grew too cold and gave up. “One after another,” he related to his son later, “my companions dropped off and perished in the sea.”

He stayed there overnight, close to shore but unheard over the crashing waves. Just before morning his wife thought she heard a voice and led the others to the water. As dawn lit the scene they saw the boat, and at length remembered an old canoe in a barn. They “stuffed the wide cracks with blankets and seaweed” and sailed to rescue Nathaniel. He said, “For months I was not expected to live, but a kind providence smiled, and in about six months I began to recover.”

He later left Plum Island, whether because of that incident or not is unclear, and lived in Jordan (or “on Jordan” as the Repository article has it.) His house there was passed down to his son Stedman, owner of the memorandum-book.

There was something about this story that made me wonder if these people were fictional. True stories of the fortitude of 18^th century families can evolve - or devolve - into clichés, mixtures of 19^th century sensationalism and Biblical begats. But the Newburys of Waterford were absolutely real. Nathaniel Newbury’s house had a gambrel roof, and might be the oldest house in Jordan village. Stedman Newbury also liked gambrel roofs, and built three houses himself. He sold his father’s house to “Black Dick” Morgan, who was rumored to have been a pirate, proving, I suppose, that there’d be no need to fictionalize any early Waterford tale. Stedman also served in the Revolutionary War. He is buried on Mullen Hill Road.

I was going to write more here about the Newburys, and the very strange second installment of “Waterford In Olden Times.” But as Pequot found, it really deserves its own column. At the end of his first essay he promised to return with “an anecdote of [Nathaniel’s] wife, Hannah ester, and with your permission bestow a passing notice on their neighbors on Jordan a century ago.” With the addition of another century and a half, I promise to do the same.

(I was not able to write the promised follow-up for Waterford Patch, so I posted it here.)