Walking tour and talk on The Puritan statue - Springfield, Massachusetts

photo by J.T. Lynch

I'll be leading a walking tour in Springfield, Massachusetts this coming Saturday, September 8th from the Puritan Statue on State Street to Stearns Square, and then to Court Square to discuss Puritans and Artisans.

Sponsored by the Armoury-Quadrangle Civic Association, the walk will be about a mile in distance, and a few centuries in time. We will discuss the sculptor - - Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the foundry craftsman and sculptor who created Springfield's Civil War statue - - Chicopee's Melzar H. Mosman (about whom I'm currently writing a book); about the landscape architect for the first site of the Puritan statue on Stearns Square - Stanford White; about Chester W. Chapin, the descendant who gifted the stature of his ancestor to the city; and about Deacon Samuel Chapin himself, "The Puritan."

Join us at the Springfield Library and Museums visitor's center at 10:30 a.m. 

Washington's message on the Touro Synagogue

George Washington visited the oldest synagogue in this nation (founded in the 1600s) at Newport, Rhode Island.  His remarks on the Touro Synagogue are a reflection of, and support for, the new Bill of Rights.

“...every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

He wrote this in August 1790.

"For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.^"

He meant it.  We should mean it, too. 

Happy Hanukkah and blessings to all our countrymen of all faiths.

Mayflower Compact - Plymouth, Massachusetts

To all our American readers, Happy Thanksgiving.

New book on Springfield, Mass. Founder William Pynchon

Coming up in Springfield, Mass. - a free talk by author David Powers on a new book about the founder of Springfield:

BOOK SIGNING & TALK

DAVID M. POWERS, Author

“DAMNABLE HERESY:

 WILLIAM PYNCHON, THE INDIANS, AND THE FIRST BOOK BANNED (AND BURNED) IN BOSTON”                                                                 Wipf & Stock, Eugene, OR, 2015

                                               

Springfield was founded on May 14, 1636 by William Pynchon.

Let’s celebrate this important event with a talk by author David M. Powers.

SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2015  ~  2:00PM

CLASSICAL HIGH CONDOMINIUMS

235 STATE STREET, SPRINGFIELD

FREE PROGRAM

hosted by Historic Classical, Inc., a non-profit agency

SUGGESTED DONATIONS IN ANY AMOUNT ARE APPRECIATED

Parking available in lot to right of building. Site is wheelchair accessible.

Connecticut River Valley Tobacco Growing

This sign showing a giant green splotch on the Connecticut River Valley, illustrates the extent of commercial tobacco growing in western New England.  From about Portland, Connecticut, following the river up to lower Vermont, we see a huge swath of land that more or less replicates the gouging of the glacier that once sat here.  Maybe its peeling back layers of earth as it retreated is the reason for this area’s having some of the most fertile growing land in New England.  Certainly left behind a lot of dinosaur footprints.

The first European settlers here were quick to notice, and quick to exploit, the fertile land, and started growing tobacco as early as the 1650s.  The native tribes hereabouts, however, had grown tobacco for their own use long before that.

Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum

The colonists smoked it in clay pipes then, and some was shipped back to the mother country, but it is said that Connecticut’s Revolutionary War hero (and French and Indian War) Israel Putnam, bringing tobacco seeds back from Cuba was the start of the growing of this special tobacco for rolling into cigars.  We visted his monument in this previous post.

 

Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum

Commercial tobacco growing, mainly on small family farms, took off in the 1800s, when cigar smoking among men became popular.  The kind grown here was called Broadleaf, the outer wrapper of the cigar.  Competition from Sumatra later in the century inspired growers hereabouts to turn over a new leaf, so to speak, in tobacco growing.  In the early 1900s they came up with the idea of erecting enormous light cloth tents over the tobacco fields, which by cutting direct sunlight and increasing the humidity of the atmosphere underneath the tenting, replicated the growing conditions in Sumatra.  This is called Shade tobacco, and it is considered the finest cigar wrapper.

The tobacco farms, not just small family farms anymore but also large commercial plantations (part of Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts was once the site of the American Sumatra company plantation), was a huge influence on the economy of the Connecticut River Valley, and provided thousands of jobs.
 

Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum

Local folks, including many teens, found work here, but tobacco growing is such a labor-intensive project, with a lot of work done by hand, that workers were sought from other parts of the country to work here seasonally.  One of the first drives to bring in outside workers occurred during World War II, when of course a lot of local men were called into the service.  During these years, many young people arrived from the South. One of them a young Martin Luther King, Jr.
 

Religious services, Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum 

He arrived here in 1944, when he was just 15 years old.  He obtained a job on a tobacco farm in Simsbury, Connecticut that summer to earn money for college.  In The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (ed. Clayborne Carson, IPM, Time Warner, 1998), Dr. King recounts that he was surprised that he could attend a “white” church, and eat in any restaurant he wanted, because there were no segregation laws in the north.  “I had never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford.”

He wrote home to his parents in June, 1944:

I am very sorry I am so long about writing but I have been working most of the time.  We are really having a fine time here and the work is very easy.  We have to get up every day at 6:00.  We have very good food.  And I am working kitchen so you see I get better food.

We have service here every Sunday about 8:00 and I am the religious leader we have a Boys choir here and we are going to sing on the air soon.  Sunday I went to church in Simsbury it was a white church…On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see.  After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all the white people here are very nice.  We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.

Tell everybody I said hello and I am still thinking of the church and reading my bible.  And I am not doing any thing I would not do in front of you…

Your Son...

The adult Dr. King continues in his autobiography, “After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation…I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.”

Obviously, not all learning experiences on the tobacco farms were quite as profound as this young man’s, and later decades came to know labor unrest, with conditions that were not always satisfactory in the larger work camps.  Waves of other newcomers came to the Valley as temporary tobacco workers and stayed to make a home here, from Jamaica, from Puerto Rico, as well as from Central America, Haiti, Mexico, and Africa.

 Choir, workers from Jamaica, Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum

The height of tobacco growing occurred in early 1920s when some 30,800 acres in Connecticut alone were devoted to this crop.  Today, there are only about 2,000 acres left.

This is due to a number of factors, in part to the value of real estate turning land over to industrial parks and shopping plazas, to the fact that cigarette smoking eclipsed the popularity of cigar smoking, and that younger generations have come to understand that smoking will kill you.

 Exhibit Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum, photo JT Lynch

Two excellent sources of information on the history of tobacco growing in the Connecticut River Valley, used for this article, are the Connecticut Public Television documentary “Connecticut’s Tobacco Valley” (produced and directed by Frank Borres,  2001), and the Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum.

 

Photo JT Lynch

 

This museum is comprised of a tobacco shed with machinery, implements, and tobacco, and a separate archives building containing many artifacts, exhibits, photos and books on this interesting aspect of western New England history.  It’s located in Windsor, Connecticut.  Have a look here at the website.

Another viewpoint of the story of tobacco farms in Connecticut will be discussed this Thursday on my Another Old Movie Blog when we take a look at “Parrish” (1961), which starred Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, Claudette Colbert, and Karl Malden.  It’s a lavish, Hollywood version of tobacco growing, but a lot of it was filmed right here in Windsor, Connecticut.  I hope you can join us.
 

The Connecticut River Mouth - No City, Only Sound

This is a remarkable place. This is the mouth of the Connecticut River. When Dutch navigator Adrien Block first sighted this place in 1614, we may imagine it looked similar to what it does today. The Connecticut River is rare among major rivers of the US in that no large city developed where it begins.

There’s just this.

Serene and natural, with nary a skyscraper or refinery in sight.

Now, how did that happen?

This is largely due to a geologic trait. The river carries an enormous amount of silt, as far away as from where it starts in northern New England, and sweeps it down through the hinterland, dumping it at the mouth, creating a sandbar here where it joins Long Island Sound. The silt deposits were a challenge to navigation in the early days, clogging up the works, so the speak, and so made for an inopportune spot for a metropolis.

Boston has its Charles River, and New York City its Hudson and East River. Philadelphia has its Schuylkill, and D.C. its Potomac.

The Connecticut River has instead a less auspicious, but more peaceful paradise.

The river has had its ups and downs over the years (literally, as the Algonquin word “quinetucket” means long tidal river - which it is as far as Windsor Locks near the Massachusetts border). The repository of waste from factories and human habitation left the river in dismal shape some 50 years ago. Today, through extensive cleanup and conservation measures, it has been upgraded to class B, fit for swimming and for fishing.

Here with the towns of Old Saybrook on one side and Old Lyme on the other, you can take out your boat, or sit on the dock to fish, or just stand on the banks on one of those eternal, golden summer days and let your eyes wander on what Adrien Block’s eyes saw, and agree with him that this river begs to be explored.

First Church (Center Church) of Hartford, Connecticut

Life is often both dignified and comical at the same time. While I would not suggest that the small church pictured here is funny, dwarfed as it is by a larger glass and steel office building, but one may smile all the same at the stubborn refusal of the outdated past to shirk away from the bold and brassy present. I would not call the modern structure “the future”, because it may not be standing in the future. The church however, I would certainly bet on.

It’s already been standing since 1807.

The First Church, or Center Church, of Hartford, Connecticut holds a long and respected place in Connecticut history. It’s first pastor was Thomas Hooker, who when trudging off into the New England Wilderness after a dispute with John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded Hartford on the Connecticut River in 1636.

In the past 375 years, four buildings have served the congregation. The first was a log building where the Old Statehouse stands today. The third structure, built in 1739, stood where the present church stands today. The present meeting house has stood here since 1807, (at the dedication, the congregation was treated to the first performance in Hartford of the “Hallelujah!” chorus from Handel’s Messiah.)

A church welcoming of other faiths, it allowed the first Roman Catholic Mass in Hartford to be celebrated in this building in 1813.

With a few additions and renovations in the last couple of hundred years, the meeting house has weathered a far greater test of time than the shadows thrown from taller, newer buildings.

The bell in the steeple was cast in England in 1633. It still rings out on Main Street.

For more on the First Church or Center Church of Hartford, have a look at this website.

Springfield WitchTrials

Some forty years before the infamous Salem Witch Trials, a husband and wife were put on trial for witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts. They were innocent of witchcraft, but one of them was guilty of murder.

It happened in 1651. Hugh Parsons was a bricklayer on lower Main Street, who by his neighbors’ accounts, could be a bit moody at times. A neighbor woman, named Blanche Bedortha, criticized Mr. Parsons in some manner, and he retorted with the threat, “I shall remember you when you little think of it!”

The ruffled Goodwife Bedortha blamed Hugh Parsons for the sudden zing of static electricity she felt on her nightgown, since no one knew what that was or had a scientific explanation for it. She claimed he hexed her.

Then his second child, Joshua, died, and Mrs. Parsons’ went insane. The neighbors accused Mr. Parsons of having murdered the child. Mrs. Parsons did not help much when she, by now hysterical, confessed that she and her husband both were witches. Hugh was her third husband. I don’t know what she thought of her earlier two husbands.

Hugh got it from all sides now, as neighbors blamed everything from a cow’s having no milk, to cuts, nightmares, and minor illnesses on him being a witch.

Hugh was arrested and marched by the constable through the streets, and taken to Boston where the trial was held. The court found him guilty of witchcraft.

Fortunately for Hugh, about this time, Mrs. Parsons pulled herself together and confessed that she killed her son. They sent her to Boston for trial. Hugh was set free in May 1652. Mary was convicted of murder. All charges of witchcraft were dropped, possibly because things had just gotten too complicated and everybody was probably sick of the Parsons by now.

On the morning she was to be hanged, Mary was found to be too ill to be taken from prison. She died in her cell the next day.

Hugh never returned to Springfield, and may have left Massachusetts. He probably couldn’t wait to leave.

Mother Goose's Grave - Boston

One stop on The Freedom Trail in Boston is the Old Granary Burial Ground, and here is the grave of Mother Goose. So to speak.

It’s interesting that this gravesite is one of the most visited by sightseers. As you can see, there is a pile of pennies at her headstone that fans of history, or nursery rhymes, toss here for good luck.

You don’t really get good luck by tossing a penny onto a monument or a well or fountain, but that never stops us from enjoying the fantasy. Perhaps it’s much the same with visitors to the Mother Goose Grave. It’s also a bit of a fantasy, but that never stops some people from taking it as fact.

Facts are a bit sparse here, but there’s enough to go by. Nursery rhymes have existed for centuries, but “Mother Goose” may have had her origins in 1697 in France through author Charles Perrault, and may even be traced to a poem by another French author nearly 50 years earlier. A book of nursery rhymes published in London in 1780 also relates to Mother Goose, and six years later in 1786, she made her debut in American literature with the Isaiah Thomas reprint of this book. We may assume that “Mother Goose” is not a real person, but rather the personification of the writers of otherwise anonymous nursery rhymes through the last few centuries.

So why the Mother Goose grave in Boston? It is actually the grave of a woman named Mary Goose, who was the first wife of wealthy landowner Isaac Goose. After Mary’s death, Isaac married a woman named Elizabeth Foster. Elizabeth Foster Goose became stepmother to Isaac’s many, many children, and then had many of her own. You might say “she had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.”

But that’s beside the point. One of Elizabeth Foster Goose’s children was a daughter also named Elizabeth. Daughter Elizabeth married printer/publisher Thomas Fleet, who in about 1720 published a collection of nursery rhymes supposedly made up by his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Goose. Mother Goose’s rhymes were republished in 1765 by John Newberry, and published as noted above by Isaiah Thomas (who was married to a granddaughter of Elizabeth and Thomas Fleet, keeping the Mother Goose franchise in the family).

The nursery rhymes were published again in 1860 when the nation was going through a period of nostalgia for the past (since the present was then looking so foreboding), and resurrected the poems not only of Mother Goose, but the information that the publication of these rhymes had some connection to a Boston family. So the legend was born.

Another interesting aspect to the --fairly tale, we may call it, for that is what it is -- is that though the body of Elizabeth Foster Goose is rumored to be buried here in the Goose family plot, she is not named on the headstone. Only Isaac Goose’s first wife, Mary is listed here. There is no real evidence that Elizabeth Foster Goose is actually buried here. There is no real evidence to believe she made up any nursery rhymes for her children or grandchildren, but only perhaps repeated ones handed down to her from others.

But, don’t let all that stop you from visiting the grave of Mother Goose in Boston. There is another Mother Goose grave in London, I believe. Perhaps they toss pence on her grave there.

For more on Mother Goose, have a look here and here. For the Mother Goose Grave, have a look at this website.

Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry - Oldest Ferry Service

This quiet little river crossing is the ferry on the Connecticut River that links Rocky Hill with Glastonbury in Connecticut. It is the oldest continuously operating ferry service in the United States, some 355 years this year.

If you were on the road hereabouts in 1655, you could cross on the raft, propelled by the crew using long barge poles. They tried using a horse on a treadmill once, and then steam power in the 1870s, but today you’ll cross on the barge called the Hollister III, towed by a diesel-powered flatboat, the Cumberland.

She holds three to four cars or trucks (depending on the size of the vehicle) at a time, and if you’re fifth in line, why you just wait your turn. Plenty of people do, as the ferry makes between 80 and 100 crossings a day, especially at rush hour. “Rush” hour may not be exactly the right word, but if you’ve got ants in your pants, that’s just too bad for you.

It’s $3 per vehicle, and $1 for walkers or bicyclists. The ferry runs from May 1st through October 31st. There is no service in the winter. The river tends to freeze. Tough to get the boat through. You understand.

But, it’s May now, so as with so much in life, enjoy it while you can.

For more on the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry, have a look at this website, and this one, too.

Earthquakes in New England

Devastating earthquakes, most recently in Haiti and in Chile, draw our sympathy and response with aide to the anguished people suffering these mysterious events, and renew our curiosity about the peculiar horror of shaking earth.

The recent earthquake in the Baja Peninsula reminds earthquake-prone areas that these natural phenomena are always a factor. New England has its own, obviously much milder, history of earthquakes. An earthquake off Cape Ann, Massachusetts was noted by future President John Adams in his diary on November 18, 1755:

We had a severe Shock of an Earthquake. It continued near four minutes. I was then at my fathers in Braintree, and awoke out of my Sleep in the midst of it. The house seemed to rock and reel and crack as if it would fall in ruins about us. Chimnies were shatter’d by it within one mile of my fathers house.

It was fairly severe quake, and knocked the weather vane off the roof of Faneuil Hall in Boston. That month the plates under the Atlantic Ocean seemed particularly active, as earlier that month on November 1st, the city of Lisbon, Portugal was destroyed by an earthquake.

It is conjectured that the earthquake recorded in 1638 was an even bigger one, scaring the Puritans silly. Another famous diarist, John Winthrop, noted many aftershocks in the following weeks.

We’ve since had a fair scattering of smaller quakes through the late 1800s and 20th century, one of the larger probably being the January 10, 1982 quake that reached about 5.9 on the Richter Scale, followed by several days of minor aftershocks and a second quake on the 19th, reaching 4.8. Another that hit Quebec and was felt in all New England states occurred November 1988, reached 6.0 on the Richter.

During those shaky moments, diners at the Top of the Hub restaurant on Boston’s Prudential Center got as rattled as the dishes; the ceiling shook at the old Boston Garden where the Celtics were just about to play the Milwaukee Bucks; and in western Mass., the old 10-story control tower at Westover Air Reserve Base was evacuated.

Hardly the stuff of disaster such as what victims of very destructive earthquakes must endure. We wouldn’t want it any other way.

Settler's Rock - New Shoreham, Block Island

New Shoreham is the smallest town in the smallest state. This memorial, called Settler’s Rock, dedicated in 1911, commemorates the 250th anniversary of the purchase of Block Island and settlement here in 1661. The plaque lists all the names of the settlers. Think of it as an early directory.

For more on New Shoreham, Block Island, Rhode Island, have a look at this website.

You Are Here: Historic Deerfield, Mass.

This historical marker on what is known as The Street, is located in Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts.

It is a mile-long world of its own, originally laid out in 1671 and along which you can visit museum houses from the 1730s to the 1840s on their original sites. This New England village is surrounded by working farms along the Deerfield River.

For more on Historic Deerfield, have a look at this website.

The Pilgrims and the Printing Press

Before we leave Thanksgiving behind us for another year, let’s recall that one of the items brought to the New World on the Mayflower we believe was a printing press, a large iron piece of which was used to shore up a splitting beam on the voyage.

The Mayflower Compact was handwritten, but this replica of the 1669 printed copy shows the printing press was just as instrumental at founding, and preserving, an equitable nation as the bonds of commonwealth established by the Mayflower Compact.

This 1723 printing of the Thanksgiving proclamation by the Lieutnant Governour and His Majesty’s representative in Massachusetts Bay boldly ends with the typical flourish GOD Save the King. While the Pilgrims may not have quite gone along with that, they might have been still more amazed at the level of freedom which a free press achieved, and would continue to thrive in a democracy the likes of which they never conceived.

Here is the Massachusetts Spy out of Worcester in 1775, only a few weeks after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, when “God Save the King” was replaced by “Liberty or Death!”

Here we have a less incendiary newspaper from Northampton, Mass. in more placid times of 1826, and from Holyoke, Mass. in 1882, when we see the dawn of the 20th Century brought advertising to a more prominent place in the media. The Holyoke Transcript, later the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram, has followed the path of many newspapers of the last twenty years and is now defunct.

Today we are losing our newspapers with alarming rapidity, but communication continues in its myriad forms. Keeping an open mind rather than choosing to read only news which pleasures but does not challenge, and opinion in which we are already in agreement is the worst form of tyranny, because it is self imposed. We seem to need to re-learn that every once in a while through the centuries.

These printing press photos are from Sturbridge Village. Go have a look at the printer plying his trade.

Pilgrim Monument, Plymouth, Mass.

Before there was Thanksgiving, and before there was Plymouth, Mass., there was this thin, curling, arm of sand upon which the Pilgrims landed before looking for more hospitable and more promising land to choose for new home.

This is the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod. The tower, perched on High Pole Hill, rises 350 feet above sea level. The tallest all-granite tower in the U.S., it was constructed from 1907 to 1910, when President William Howard Taft came to dedicate the tower, a campanile in the design of Torre Del Mangia in Sienna, Italy. Next year in 2010, the monument celebrates its centennial.

The view from the top is spectacular, for there is nothing as tall as this for miles. The curve of the Cape can be seen (more clearly on some days than others when the fog and mist set in), and the cozy town of below, the wharves stretching outward, are all indications that Provincetown would not continue to be so bleak of prospects as the Pilgrims had imagined.

Looking eastward, we see the beginning of the Cape Cod National Seashore, with its natural setting, its dunes that are only some inches to some feet high and yet with a curious trick of perspective, seem like great hills. This part of Provincetown is likely how the Pilgrims saw the place when they first landed here, and how fortunate it is that has been preserved.

When they arrived on the Mayflower, sailing from Plymouth, England some 67 days before, the 102 passengers moored here for some five weeks while small parties explored the windswept, barren land. They composed and signed the Mayflower Compact, which they acknowledged and vowed that they were “straightly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole by everyone.”

You'll note that though the Pilgrims found on the tip of the Cape what they considered to be barren land, there was at least ample free parking.



Then it was a brief sail across Cape Cod Bay to a new “Plimoth”, and a new adventure.

For more on the Pilgrim Monument of Provincetown, Mass., have a look at this website.

French & Indian War Soldier's Grave - Coventry, CT

The headstone stands in the shelter of low stone wall on a windswept rise of ground in Coventry, Connecticut. It is a place of reflection and some poignancy.

Corporal Benjamin Carpenter, of the 1st Company, D Regiment, a veteran of the French and Indian War, died in 1785, only a few years after a Revolution created a new nation. When he fought for the King did he consider himself English, as so many British subjects in North America who fought in the French and Indian War did? When did he stop thinking of himself as British and start thinking of himself as American? Did it happen before 1776? After? Would he have marveled at the thought of an American flag (let alone a 50-star flag) marking his grave?

We may marvel that Corporal Carpenter lived to be nearly 90 years old, was born in 1695, which would have made him over 60 years old when the French and Indian War began. Not just a citizen soldier, but a senior citizen soldier.

He was in his early 30s when he married Rebeckah Smith, who was some ten years’ his junior. She died three years after him. This child of the 17th century, who became a solider late in life, and lived to see a new Republic born, had this new marble replacement stone placed in during the Great Depression by WPA workers. He might well have marveled at that, too.

Since he is gone, we may consider all these things, and marvel for him.

Miles Morgan statue, Springfield, Mass.

Miles Morgan, who braved the western Massachusetts wilderness in the 1630s, is not bothered by a little bit of snow on his rakish cocked hat.

Sculpted by Jonathan Scott Hartley, the statue stands in Springfield’s Court Square, with the Campanile piercing the big blue sky in the background on this clear, cold day.

Morgan was born in Bristol, England in 1616, and traveled as an adventurer to Boston in 1636. He married a girl named Prudence who was a fellow passenger on his ship. Settling in the new plantation of Springfield on the Connecticut River, Miles Morgan built himself a fortified blockhouse, which became the fledging community’s fortress of safety when the settlement was burned during King Phillip’s War.

Eventually, young Springfield’s young hero went back to the mother country, where he died in Wales in 1699. But here in Springfield his image stands, forever ready for action, his musket on his shoulder, fearing nothing.

First Congregational Church, Woodstock, Connecticut

Here is the 1st Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Woodstock, Connecticut. Though we may view such buildings as something that should be slapped on a Christmas card, there is more here than is just picturesque. The beautiful old church is the heart of a vibrant congregation just as connectect to the present as to the past.

This "quiet corner" of Connecticut was settled by Massachusetts Bay Colony pioneers around 1690, bringing with them the "New England Way" which subscribed that each individual congregation should govern itself. This meeting house, the third one to be constructed, was built in 1822.

For more on this church and its congregation's activities, have a look at this website.

Been to the "quiet corner"? Let us know.

One by Land, One by Sea

Two state capitals, one view by land and the other by sea, were established at roughly the same time. The Dutch trading post on the Connecticut River begun in 1623became a thriving English colony a decade later. The pennisula settled in 1625 became the City on a Hill and to future generations, the cradle of liberty.


Hartford has the oldest continually published newspaper in the country, the oldest art musuem. Boston has the oldest school and the oldest college. Somewhere along the way, Saukiog became Hartford and Shawmut became Boston, and both are wrapped in confusing ribbons of superhighways now. Parking might still be a challenge, but getting to these cities has never been easier.

Been there to the Freedom Trail or the Wadsworth Atheneum? Let us know.

Massasoit of Plymouth

Here is a statue of Massasoit in Plymouth, Mass. Massasoit was the sachem of the Pokanoket, part of the Wampanoag Confederacy, and his place in history is to be a hero of two opposing nations. It is a unique position, few men ever achieve the position of being hero to both sides, and he leaves a complicated, but equally important legacy to both.

This man visited Plymouth in 1621, with the allegiance of a handful of other Wampanoag sachems behind him, negotiated a treaty with the English settlers who were tenuously, and so precariously attemping to establish themselves in the tract of land they called New England. Their sea crossing on the Mayflower was hellish, and their first winter here even moreso.


In exchange for the promise of the English to ally themselves with the Wampanoags against the Narragansetts, Massasoit promied them security and land. He also prevented them from dying of starvation during those early years of settlement. There was peace, an often uneasy peace, but still peace, between the new Plymouth settlement and the Wampanoag all the remainder of Massasoit’s lifetime. After his death, the bloody King Philip’s War altered the political landscape, which is a subject for another time.

For now, between the rather classic Roman-like monument with its gates that shields Plymouth Rock from further damage by tourists, and the magnifcent Mayflower II, the replica of the ship that brought the English settlers, Pilgrims and non-Pilgrims, we have somewhere in the middle the statue of the man of the hour. He determined that his people, who had been descimated by smallpox in the handful of years before the treaty with the English, would not be left helpless. Because of him, they, and the English settlers survived, both for that day, and in history.