Old Norwichtown Cemetery

Its address is Old Cemetery Lane, but it's easier to get there if you park in the lot of the Bank of America on Town Street and look for the worn paths that lead you behind the old stone wall. (The people in the drive-thru line will wonder where you've disappeared to, if they notice you at all.) The cemetery is bigger than it looks from the street below, and hillier. It is divided into two sections, one on either side of a little stream, and it hides a wealth of Norwich history. Samuel Huntington, signer of the Declaration of Independence (and first president of the United States?) is buried here, along with many of his notable relatives. So is Hannah Arnold, Benedict Arnold's mother; and this is Norwich, so that is a big deal. So are 20 French soldiers who served here under Lafayette. If you decide to wander through this Colonial-era burying ground, look out for the range of expressions among the many soul effigies, from worried to stern to downright annoyed. Also look for the headstones by the so-called Norwich Ovoid Carver, whose primitively lettered, rounded grave markers are a reminder of just how far in the past Connecticut's early days can seem.

5 Underrated Small Connecticut Cities

"PEACOCK ALLEY," NORWICH

Happy New Year, and welcome to a new type of post I've been wanting to incorporate into The Size of Connecticut. I had the idea to do a little series of "Top Fives," grouping five similar destinations, in the hope that it might help people looking for a particular type of place to go.

This first one is about some of the small (population-wise, though some are tiny in area as well) Connecticut cities that often fly under the radar of people in the Nutmeg State and outside of it. For the purposes of this post I'm defining city as a municipality that is incorporated as a city (in Connecticut, you can't always tell what's a city and what's a town without looking it up) and one that feels urban: these places are walkable, they're relatively densely populated and built up, they've historically been centers of industry (not just farmland), and they offer plenty of things to do, places to eat, and sights to see.


Norwich

Population: 40,493

The so-called Rose of New England, at the confluence of the Thames, Shetucket, and Yantic Rivers, is the place to go if you like to be surprised by dramatic architecture and topography. From the downtown area, with its hilly, one-way streets and unpretentious waterfront, to Norwichtown, where 18th and 19th century homes surround the town green, to the time-warped old mill village of Taftville, Norwich is as unexpected as its new peacock mural - painted on a set of alley stairs - would suggest. This city can seem a bit abandoned at times, but that's what lets visitors pretend they're the first to have discovered it.

Some other Norwich attractions are the Slater Memorial Museum at the Norwich Free Academy, the Leffingwell House Museum, the Veterans Memorial Rose Garden in Mohegan Park, the Spa at Norwich Inn, and several history-centered walking tours, including one dedicated to local hero-turned-villain Benedict Arnold.

New London

Population: 27,620

With only about five and a half square miles of land to its name, New London is tiny. But the Whaling City, located where the Thames River meets Long Island Sound, makes up for that by being saturated with what feels like more history per square inch than any other place in the state. It's also got more than its fair share of art galleries, coffee shops, and restaurants. Here, old-fashioned beaches and lighthouses meet military pride and an eclectic, artistic, diverse downtown. New London seems to constantly swing between downturn and revitalization, but you could say it's impressive the city exists at all, given that the aforementioned Benedict Arnold burned most of it down in 1781.

A few of New London's highlights include the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the Custom House Maritime Museum, the Hempsted Houses, the United States Coast Guard Academy, Fort Trumbull State Park, the Old Town Mill, Monte Cristo Cottage, the Connecticut College Arboretum, Ocean Beach Park, the Historic Waterfront District Heritage Trail, and Whale Oil Row.

Middletown

Population: 47,648

Within Connecticut, Middletown's appeal is no secret (though residents of the state's corners who are less familiar with its center can be quite surprised the first time they stumble across this charming city.) But elsewhere, aside from the occasional "Most Romantic Main Street" award, Middletown is relatively unknown. Which is too bad, because this place - funky college town meets plucky New England city in a spot geographically fortunate enough to offer a plethora of activities for sporty outdoor types - should be on more people's "to visit" lists. The main attraction is the downtown area, situated along the Connecticut River. It's full of interesting places to eat, drink, and shop, and it looks like the set of a wholesome Midwestern musical with a Northeastern edge.

A handful of places to go in Middletown are Harbor Park, Wesleyan University, NoRa Cupcakes, and the Parklands at Long Hill. With children, try the Kidcity Children's Museum, Adventure Rooms, and Oddfellows Playhouse.

Winsted

Population: 7,321

Winsted - an incorporated city for Connecticut's purposes but technically a part of Winchester, the larger town that almost completely surrounds it - looks like no other place in the state. Its most unusual feature, a wide Main Street with buildings lining just one side, gives this New England town a feeling of the Old West. The design is the reaction to a catastrophe. In 1955, the floods that deluged many Connecticut towns flattened much of Winsted's downtown. After that, Main Street was rebuilt to give the Mad River, which usually flows happily beside it, room to go mad again. Winsted, called the Laurel City, is one of Connecticut's earliest mill towns, and old brick factory buildings still loom large in its landscape. Now some of these mills are being put to new uses, and the city might just transform itself yet again.

Here's a selection of Winsted points of interest: the Soldiers' Monument and Memorial Park, Whiting Mills, the Gilson Cinema and Cafe, and Ralph Nader's American Museum of Tort Law.

Derby 

Population: 12,830

Derby is Connecticut's smallest city (its motto is literally "Connecticut's Smallest City") which makes it worth visiting simply as a curiosity. (How did those early settlers cram a whole city into such a small space, and why did they bother?) But although this industrious little city with a very small-town vibe is not exactly bustling with activity, there's more to this tiny municipality than a superlative. The Housatonic and Naugatuck Rivers converge here, making for some lovely waterfront walks and views. (There are also six bridges.) Preserved 19th century buildings surround Derby Green, where the road signs bear the names of female relatives of the private developers who convinced the local government to lay out the streets. And Derby is very proud of its very weird history, including this Revolutionary War story about pork.

If you go to Derby, places to check out include the Derby Greenway, the Sterling Opera House, the General David Humphreys House, and Books by the Falls. 

Connecticut's One-Room Schoolhouses

I grew up practically down the street from an old one-room schoolhouse, but I didn't really care about them - or begin to notice them everywhere I went  - until I found this one while researching a travel story. Since then I've found schoolhouses all over Connecticut: in towns, in cities, and on rural roads. I've also become very fond of them - strange, perhaps, since I hated almost every minute of school from kindergarten to college.

Now, I think of these historic one-room (and sometimes technically larger) schools as a classic bit of Connecticut scenery, worth seeking out or at least stopping to appreciate when they turn up unexpectedly along your route.

Some of my favorites.

-State Hero Nathan Hale taught at two schoolhouses. In urban New London, the little red school named for him stands at the center of the city's downtown on the Parade across from the train, bus and ferry terminals. Thirty miles away, its counterpart in rural East Haddam stands alone on a grassy hill above a church. Both are maintained by the Sons of the American Revolution.

-In North Woodstock, the Red-White School is pull-over-and-stare adorable.

-Killingworth has one of Connecticut's largest collections of schoolhouses, but the mint green Union District Schoolhouse is a special one.

-And in Ledyard, where an impressive number of old schools have been preserved, the Geer Hill Schoolhouse is particularly sweet.

How to find schoolhouses.

Searching online for any town's name + "old schoolhouse" will frequently turn one up. (Except in some rare cases where you will instead find clubs playing old school house.)

Often, local historical societies own and care for schoolhouse buildings, so check their websites as well. Some simply keep the school building from falling down, but many offer programs for local children and sometimes for the public. Some schoolhouses have been put to creative use - one is now an art school in West Hartford, and another is a restaurant in Wilton. Many are private homes.

Sometimes, if the school is of particular interest to the town, it will be listed in the "history" or "visitors" section of that town's website.

If search engines and historical societies don't reveal any schoolhouses where you're heading, look for local history books at independent bookshops, museums, and in the "local" section at Barnes & Noble and other large bookstores. If you can't get to a store, try Google Books - just search for the town's name + school or schoolhouse.

Following a Schoolhouse Road will very occasionally yield a schoolhouse, but more often it won't; many have been torn down or moved over the years to more central locations for preservation.

In my opinion, though, schoolhouses are best when found by chance. Some good areas to do that are Ledyard and Killingworth, as mentioned above; country roads; older residential areas; and any part of town with a large concentration of historic houses and museums. A town where nothing of great import has happened since the 18th or 19th century is a good place to explore. And if you see a small white, red, or stone building, especially one with two doors, chances are it was once a school, even if it is no longer marked as such.

Schoolhouses were sometimes built in the center of a road. I've heard that this was a way of sparing good farmland, and/or that no one would dispute the ownership of such land. In any case, a small structure on the traffic island in the middle of an intersections is likely to have been a school.

Norwichtown.

Finally, if you're wondering about the school in the above photo, it's the Dr. Daniel Lathrop School on the green in the Norwichtown section of Norwich. In 1782, Lathrop left 500 pounds sterling to be used for a free grammar school. It was completed in 1783, and is one of Connecticut's oldest surviving brick schoolhouses - though there is another, very similar one nearby, known as the East District School, built just a few years later.

If you visit this school, a special bonus is the 1774 Joseph Carpenter Silversmith Shop next door. I've come across one or two blacksmith's shops in Connecticut before, but this is said to be the only remaining silversmith's shop in New England.

The other buildings facing the Norwichtown green, though much larger, are equally send-you-back-in-time lovely.

Update.

I created an Instagram account, @OldSchoolCT, just for historic Connecticut schoolhouses. There I'll collect schools I've featured on the Size of Connecticut, schools I've posted pictures of elsewhere, and new-to-me schools that I come across when out and about around the state.

Once You Had Gold

I've spent too much (yet not nearly enough) time in the lonelier stretches of America's heartland, parts of Ohio and Indiana and Missouri that could absorb multiple Connecticuts and probably not notice, places you can only traverse on little seldom-used highways that go on all afternoon. The towns scattered across this land don't need outside attention, and don't expect it. When they get it, they look at it askance. But there was a time when these little map-dots thought they were the center of the world. At least, that's all you can assume from their municipal buildings.

And for a long time, I associated gold-plated grandeur in the semi-wilderness with towns like this, with the far places out there in Central Time. But then at some point I encountered Norwich City Hall.

This, you realize the minute you set eyes on it, quite probably while attempting to get back to some turn you missed off a one-way street in a confused, ancient-feeling and empty grid, is a building from a time when they knew how to build buildings. 1873, to be exact. The clock tower came later. And, something I was surprised to learned from Historic Buildings of Connecticut, the "European plaza" was built at the late date of 1999. So maybe there's some hope of being the center of the world still.

House Of Blue

This building was not always this color. And this color as you see it is not the color this building really is. It's darker, deeper, less definable, like something out of my Crayola Crayons box from long ago. Blue Green, maybe, or Green Blue, or somewhere in between. Because of its color this house, on Main Street in Norwich, stands out despite being literally surrounded by buildings much larger and more spectacular than itself. The house - I assume it was once a house - is visible from surprisingly far off, even when the shifting angles of Norwich's unfolding hills would seem to make that impossible. It was built, it seems, in 1742, but I don't know what or who for. Now it contains offices. It's one of those structures I am inordinately fond of; they are never the ones with the shiny gold dome or the magnificent facade. I like this one for its double chimneys and its little dormer window, its two double doors, and the way they match both the fire hydrant and the tree out front. And for its color, which has been distracting me for months as I navigate nearby roads and bridges, and which seems like it must have been the color this house was meant to be, all those years ago.

Empty Bottles and Broken Glass

The thing about writing a blog no-one reads is I'll never know if anyone got my Lucinda Williams reference in the title up there. Anyway that's Greenville, and this is Greeneville, a section of Norwich. (Which is just full of cool, sort of semi-autonomous seeming sections.)

Greeneville dates from 1833. I'd been through it many times without guessing it was anything more than just, well, more of Norwich, the part north of downtown along the Shetucket. There are houses here, some symmetrical and dignified in that subtly smug New England way, and some plain. But the structures that always caught my eye were the old mill buildings between the railroad tracks and the river.

Some have been razed since this area's prosperous century came to an end some time before WWII. The industrial buildings that remain are mostly unused now, and exist in various stages of dilapidation. They go on for blocks, so that it's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. Their silhouettes stand stark and jagged against the sky like a bombed-out skyline.
In high school, I remember, we had to take some silly tests designed to determine what we should do with the rest of our lives. They weren't used for anything; I don't think any teachers or counselors even looked at them. Maybe they were just for us, in case we were undecided. I'd known what I wanted to be when I grew up since I was 8, and indeed I went to college to study just that, so I didn't need any such tests. But I do remember they predicted my future career would require "perhaps some college" - a phrase my friends and I found unendingly hilarious - and that the jobs they suggested for me, based on my personality or aptitudes or whatever it was, included detective. Let me say I would make a terrible detective. I'm scared of spiders and sudden noises, I'm about as intimidating as a three-legged kitten, and when I watch The First 48 I can never tell who's lying. But I realized in Greeneville that I do in fact spend a lot of time driving slowly around neighborhoods observing things.

I spend a lot of time walking around where I shouldn't, as if the signs don't apply to me, and taking pictures as if for evidence.

And there's a not-insignificant part of me that loves the quiet aftermath of disaster, and being the first - or at least feeling that I am the first - to encounter it.

Greeneville got its name from entrepreneur William P. Greene. It's easy to say he planned and developed a self-sustaining little town around a power company, but when you read about him it seems more like he pointed at the riverbank and willed a new, forward-looking world to appear. Not only an industrialist but a philanthropist and local leader (he was Mayor of Norwich for a while) he had been a lawyer in Boston and an owner of mills and factories by the Yantic River before he imagined Greeneville into life.

The Shetucket powered textile and paper mills, and it carried the boats that brought raw materials and shipped out finished products. In 1840 the railroad came - Greene was the impetus behind that too - and the market for Greeneville's goods became a national one. During the Civil War things quieted down (because cotton is the fabric of our lives) but then ramped up again, and the town's activity only increased.

There are no elaborate company owner's mansions in Greeneville, as there are in some of Connecticut's other industrial revolution boom towns. This self-contained village, its shops and its multitude of churches, was inhabited by the workers and their middle-class managers. Reading about it in its prime turns up the words and phrases of a time both familiar and lost, like "tea peddler" and "electrified streetcar line" and "Chinese laundry" and "gaslight."

Back to the Shetucket for a minute. Greene saw the potential power of the river - as opposed to the obvious power of the Yantic and its naturally occurring falls - and became a founder and major shareholder of the Norwich Water Company, which built a dam and this canal, which runs parallel to the river for a mile and which is not the type of body of water that springs to mind when you think of Connecticut.

Greeneville's overtly capitalist nature was thoroughly entwined with its leaders' philanthropy and the closeness of the community that developed here. Company owners provided the land for the cemetery and churches to draw workers from nearby rural areas and foreign countries (mostly Ireland in this case) and the whole thing churned along as efficiently as their artificial waterfall. In an obviously self-protective move that nevertheless seems quaint today, the power company, when leasing its riverfront space, restricted potentially dangerous tenants like chemical plants. Not that the Industrial Revolution was some kind of paradise free of corruption and exploitation, but you can't think about all this without contemplating oil spills and hideous sprawling office parks and wondering what might happen if today's corporate villains would only stop villaining (that should totally be a word, right?) for a minute to read about Greeneville. Oh well.

Greeneville became part of Norwich in 1874, and modern conveniences like electricity soon followed. In the end, what finally turned Greeneville from industrial village to sleepy neighborhood was the Depression, and competition from the South, and foreign manufacturers, and synthetics.

The community that once existed here is gone, I guess, and cannot return again. But as I circled around the high ridge of Prospect Street and the dead-ends by the tracks and the numbered streets of this little grid, I felt I was very much intruding on something. Not at the mill buildings, in all their failed splendor, but on the residential streets and in front of the few businesses where people drove and walked and watched. I am not sure that they would say the purpose and cohesion of their village had been swept away.

FWP Tour 9 (Part 1 of 3)

Tour 9 is my third attempt to follow a driving tour laid out in Connecticut: A Guide To Its Roads, Lore, and People, the Federal Writers' Project guidebook published in 1938. (Obviously, I'm not doing these in order. The first one I did is here, and the second is here.) Tour 9 is described as "From New London to Massachusetts Line (Worcester), 56.2 m., State 32 and State 12." (They liked their arbitrary italics in 1938 I guess!)

Though the tour starts in New London, it doesn't include much of the city, except the glimpse you catch of the Coast Guard Academy, a streak of dignified red brick, green lawn and symmetry, as you speed north up Route 32. This road "travels the same route as an old Turnpike, the first to be completed in America." It was built to connect the commerce of New London to the agriculture of West Farms (now Waterford.)

The Guide notes the neighborhood of Quaker Hill, "a residential section on a high bluff above the Thames," and correctly points out that the Rogerenes, the religious sect the area was named for, were not Quakers. (I've written a bit about the Rogerenes and Quaker Hill here.)

"Waterford spreads fan-like about New London," the book says, in what sounds like a sly insult, "a township without a community of the same name." But quite quickly, after a few of the promised "wide views" of the river, I have left Waterford and entered Uncasville, a village of Montville. The book calls it a "neat, prosperous village" manufacturing "silk and cotton fabrics and paper goods." Today it does not look particularly neat or prosperous, and there is no evidence of silk. I miss the crossing over the excellently named Oxoboxo Brook as well as the Uncasville Library, which may no longer exist. But I do see something very rare these days in America and perhaps especially so in Southern New England; something closer to the Depression-era itinerary I am following than the strip malls and Dunkin Donuts of Modern Montville: a hitchhiker.

Uncasville was named for Uncas, the 17th century sachem of the Mohegans who fought the Pequots (and others) and allied himself (mostly) with the English settlers in the region, using his remarkable political acumen to make his tribe (which hadn't even existed as a separate entity until a short time before) into a major regional power. I had noticed before, sort of, but I did not really see until now just how much here is still named for him. Perhaps it's because there are more buildings to stick signs on, and more streets to name, that there seems almost more of an Indian presence here than in the Plains or Mountain States, with their vast reservations.

I enter the village of Mohegan, which my book calls "a thriving Indian community, no longer a Government reservation, but still nominally governed by a chief called 'Malagah' (Leap Dancer), who rules over the 36 remaining half-breed members of the tribe." But that was a long time ago (see: government-sponsored publication using the phrase "half-breed") and the existence of the village of Mohegan, like Uncasville, is currently apparent mainly from the brown sign identifying it as the "seat of Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, friend of the English." But the Tantaquideon Lodge, a "small structure of native granite," and a museum, is right where the Guide says it is.

"About 200 yards from the highway on the blue-marked Mohegan Trail, is the Mohegan Congregational Church erected for the remaining members of the tribe in 1831...a Brush Arbor Ceremony has been held here annually in the latter part of August since 1860. Formerly green brush arbors were erected as temples to the gods of the harvest, and the Indians, forming a chain, danced through the temples..." There is no blue-marked Mohegan Trail anymore, that I can see, and by 1938 there was no more brush arbor ceremony. But I turn past the Tantaquidgeon Lodge down a little road and find the church. (The one in the picture above.) I don't know if the Mohegans of 1831 wanted to be Congregationalists; the book does not say.

Some of what I am told to look for is either gone, moved, or hidden in plain sight among the modern town that has grown up along Route 32. I completely miss "the cellar stones of the Birthplace of Samson Occum, the first (1759) ordained Indian minister," said to be "in a large field." But I can't miss what was then the "Site of the Old Fort and Burying Ground," down a road marked "to Fort Shantok." This is now Fort Shantok Road, and the site is Shantok, Village of Uncas, on the Mohegan Indian Reservation.

I was the only person there, in this cemetery-slash-monument-slash-historic village-slash-park with sweeping Thames views. Geese pecking at the grass watched me as I got out of my car and wandered.

It was cold, and a harsh wind came and went. I kept thinking someone else would appear, or perhaps someone else was there already, watching me from one of the small buildings on the land. I did not need the signs to tell me to be respectful; somehow the chill air and the quiet and the earth, covered with leaves and moss and springy from a recent heavy rain, delivered that message.


I paused on the height overlooking the river, careful not to step too close to any of the minute gravestones scattered beneath my feet. There were more recent markers, too, shiny ones with properly carved names, but I stared only at these more ancient ones. I remembered suddenly that I was standing in a sovereign nation, that this park spanned not just time but place.

Continuing north, "the highway climbs to the top of Trading Cove Hill. This district...abounds in Indian history, legends, and memorials." Several road signs still allude to Trading Cove, "where early settlers from across the river traded with the Indians." The trading continues, in a way, at Mohegan Sun casino, which rises like a shimmery apparition off to my right. Settlers from all over come to trade with the Indians still, not in skins and shells but in US Dollars and smoke-filled, shiny, tacky-luxury escapes.

I kept going, past restaurants in odd little old buildings like something out of the Wild West, past crumbling broken-windowed ruins of mills or factories, to Norwich, at the confluence of the Thames, the Shetucket, and the Yantic. The Guide doesn't linger in Norwich, home of rose gardens, Benedict Arnold, FedEx packages you can't be home to accept, and some truly fabulous architecture. But I did, for just a few minutes. It's a strange-looking city - in a good way - and unique as Connecticut goes. The first time I saw it I almost wondered where this place had come from, that refused to look like everyplace else.

The funky attention-seeking buildings of Norwich deserve a post (or three) of their own, but until I have time to do that, you can ogle some of them at Historic Buildings of Connecticut.

When I parked by the waterfront, more geese were watching me and a dirty swan was preening itself haughtily on the river. Every time I've been here, I've been the only person not waiting in an idling car. On this day I saw one other person who was not car-bound, walking quickly and talking loudly in Spanish into his phone. I walked quickly too, because of the cold, along the water to a sheltered little concrete space under a bridge.

Norwich, the Guide says, is a "mercantile center" with a population of 32,438. Today it has only about 4,000 more than that. Norwich is where the Guide, and therefore I, leave Route 32 and continue on Route 12, through what the book calls "textile towns and villages of Connecticut where frequent mill failures have altered at least temporarily the socio-economic pattern." I wondered if that pattern had been not merely altered by the Depression, but set.

Taftville

Taftville was/is/will be a late 1800's mill village and a neighborhood of Norwich. The Taftville Mill, later called Ponemah Mill, produced cotton textiles. The mill and the village built up around it - a row of stores, a church, a school, a collection of not particularly eye-catching houses where the workers, first Irish then French Canadian, lived - hang suspended between past and present and future.

There are people in the houses and stores in the storefronts - well, some of them. There are cars in the parking spaces and flea markets in the vast mill buildings, which are set to be converted into "luxury apartments." You can walk a block along a Taftville street that slopes down towards the Shetucket and feel, within the space of that minute, that you are in a ghost town, an average slightly depressed neighborhood, and a soon to be mini-Mecca of yuppie-dom.

It's hard to tell which will prevail, I'll say one thing. I took these photos in color, but when I looked at them, they didn't accurately represent what I'd pointed the camera at. It was only when I turned them sepia that I recognized the place I'd just been.

I Have Seen Roses Damask'd, Red and White...

I went to the rose garden in Mohegan Park in Norwich once before, but it wasn't open. Either that or I couldn't work the gate, which, knowing me, it was probably the latter. But this time it was definitely open.


And it was practically empty - some other people wandered around for a few minutes and then left, but mostly it was like a private rose garden.


The roses are past their prime now that it's so late in the season, but I think I like roses better that way...