USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume II > Part 4
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Charles Noel Flagg (1848-1916), intimate friend of Mr. Bunce, was born to art. His father, Rev. Jared B. Flagg, was a painter of high repute, living in Brooklyn at the time of his artist son's birth. In 1882 the son returned from his studies in Paris and entered upon his career as a portrait painter and instructor. It could not be said that he threw his whole soul into his work at the easel, for he saved much of it to bestow upon young aspirants for fame, so many of whom he found to have talent but lacked opportunity to study. Drawing a few of them to his studio in the tower of what was then the Cheney building and is now the store of Brown, Thomson & Company, he offered to start a class if these few could get a few others, and no charge
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for tuition. Thus was founded the Connecticut League of Art Students in 1888, and never from the beginning did Mr. Flagg, through all the years he taught and advised these young men, allow a money question. Later the league had its room on the top floor of the Batterson building on Asylum Street, now a part of the Garde Hotel, and at present is on Main Street, for the league has been continued through the devotion of some of those earlier members. They included men now well known, like James Britton, Louis Potter, Albertus E. Jones, James G. McManus, Sherman Potts. Mr. Flagg also gave lavishly of his time in advancing all art interests in the city and the state. He was a member of the State Capitol Commission (succeeding A. E. Burr in 1889) and of the Capitol Commission of Sculpture till his death. He was president of the Municipal Art Society and of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, and a member of the National Academy of Design and of societies in New York and Paris. Most of his work was portraits, several of which won awards, including that of his friend, Paul Wayland Bartlett, the New Haven sculp- tor, at the National Academy in 1908. Many of the portraits of the governors in Memorial Hall are by him; three of them are by his father.
Robert B. Brandegee of Berlin and Farmington had long been a distinguished portrait painter and an idealist in landscape work. Edward S. Brooks and William R. Whitmore also were of Farmington. Victor Uberto had recently come here. Mrs. M. B. English was working quietly but with a touch that was getting stronger. Margaret Foote Hawley was preparing herself for a career as a miniaturist. J. W. Stancliffe had done good work. Kenneth P. Britton was beginning. Walter Sanford and Allen B. Talcott had made names for themselves and had entered upon careers of promise when they were cut down. The number improving the opportunities offered in their own community was to add materially to this list before 1928.
The Hartford Art Society, whose previous history has been traced, was occupying rooms in the Atheneum Annex before its removal to Prospect Street and then to its present home on Collins Street. The staff of teachers was being increased and pupils were benefiting by the scholarships made possible through the generosity of patrons. The Hartford Art Club, the Arts and Crafts and similar organizations were resultants of the spirit engendered.
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The Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts was organized in 1910 to further art interests here and around the state by holding exhibitions of paintings and sculpture by living artists. Prestige and atmosphere have been created by these exhibitions, which are the largest and most important of their kind in New England. There are now 200 members and the number of prizes is increas- ing each year. The president today is Daniel F. Wentworth, whose work in oils and water colors has kept him in the front rank for forty years. Of other local members whose names have not already been mentioned are Lillian Westbrook, who became the wife of Philip L. Hale, the eminent Boston critic; Thomas Bar- bazon, Russell Cheney of South Manchester, Margaret Cooper of New Britain, Alfred J. Eaton, Eleanor Ferguson, Charles Foster of Farmington, Dorothy Hapgood, Evelyn B. Longman Batch- elder (the eminent Windsor sculptor), Emmett A. Pratt of East Hartford, Ruel Crompton Tuttle. Mr. Bunce, Mr. Brandegee, Mr. Flagg, Albert Entress (the master carver), Herbert C. Ran- dall and Mrs. Alice C. Dunham were members at the time of their death.
The Municipal Art Society was organized in 1904, with a membership of 400 leading people, to promote the spirit of art in public buildings and all that goes to make a city beautiful. Mr. Flagg was the first president of it.
One who was to enrich the city, not only by his benefactions but by his inspiring influence as an art connoisseur with few equals, was Samuel Putnam Avery, who came to Hartford in 1902 to make his home at what had been the residence of Col. William C. Skinner on Woodland Street. He was the son of Samuel P. and Mary (Ogden) Avery of Brooklyn, where he was born in 1847. In 1886 he succeeded his father as head of the largest art business in America, located in New York. Each year he went abroad and his fame as a judge of art was as great in the European centers as in America. He became vice president of the Atheneum and was a member of over one hundred art and his- torical associations around the world. He founded the New York Zoological Society and contributed largely to the Harvard endow- ment fund. The Morgan Memorial shared with museums in several other cities in gifts from his wonderful collections. Of his income he gave away more than he kept. To Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee he gave $260,000 (and declined an
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honorary degree), and to Columbia he gave the Avery Architec- tural Library for the housing of books on architecture given by his parents in honor of their son Henry Ogden. Till his death in 1920 his greatest pleasure was in contributing from his means for the aesthetic and educational enjoyment of many institutions, among which, as is seen in these pages, those of Hartford were not overlooked, while at his death it was found that further large sums were bequeathed. The Young Women's Christian Associa- tion and the Hartford Seminary Foundation are among those which have benefited. In 1915, eighty of his friends gave him a gold medal in appreciation of what he had done for American art. He was a trustee of the Seminary Foundation. Mrs. Manfred P. Welcher was his sister. She had died three years prior to his coming here, and Rev. Mr. Welcher, her husband, and his three daughters made their home with him.
XL ARCHITECTURAL GROUPS: WATER SUPPLY
CULTURAL LIFE FEELS CENTURY'S IMPULSE-CITY AND STATE STRUC- TURES-OLD STATE HOUSE PRESERVED-Y. M. C. A. AND Y. W. C. A., MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL-RESERVOIR SYSTEM ENLARGEMENT-POW- ERFUL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.
If the opening of the era of great things in material science was marked by electrical power; in medical science, by the war against disease; in transportation, by the railroad feverishness; in civic affairs, by the stone bridge, and among the people of and by themselves, in the ways we have seen, it was almost simul- taneously marked in cultural life by the Morgan Memorial, the Colt Memorial, the Supreme Court, State Library and Memorial Hall Building, the Municipal Building, and soon after, in the realm of humble, everyday life, by the Nepaug Reservoir. Hardly more than their dates need be recorded; they will live to speak for themselves in history-a wonderful group for any era in any community.
The first of the buildings, the cornerstone of which was laid April 23, 1908, was given to be a depository for art treasures; that it also set a standard for architecture, in both public and private buildings, was soon to be manifest. Of classic design and in pink Knoxville marble, with the castellated Wadsworth Atheneum of rugged Glastonbury granite beside it, connected by the heavily carved Tudor memorial to Samuel Colt, the colonial columns of the First Church almost opposite it, the Municipal Building of Bethel white granite in Georgian style (like the Bul- finch State House) to the south of it, the Times Building with its dark gray columns in the background, the group speaks history every day to the passers on the street.
It has been shown on other pages that the Morgan family never forgot their Hartford associations; their contributions for the Hartford Hospital, the Atheneum and other institutions have been generous. When Junius S. Morgan died in 1900, his son,
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John Pierpont, sought to place here a fitting memorial to his father and at the same time do for the Atheneum what he had thought of doing in the early '90s, when he and his father gave liberally for the establishment of the free library and Atheneum Art Gallery. In the discussion over the location of a new City Hall and the effort to preserve the old State House, he looked far ahead. Such were the conditions to the immediate south of the Atheneum that in another five years he probably could not have done what he did-could not have made possible today's beautiful civic group at a spot conspicuous in the earliest annals but fast becoming commercialized. His first purchase of land to relieve congestion along the Atheneum's south line was supplemented by others till he had secured and given to the Atheneum property costing $200,000, extending almost to Arch Street and back to Prospect Street, part of it the original allotment to Rev. Samuel Stone of the founders. That portion not needed for the memorial to his father was given by the Atheneum to the city, which acquired enough more to make the site for the Municipal Build- ing, and the understanding was that the city should also even- tually obtain the narrow strip of property to the Park River. When the building, of which Benjamin W. Morris was the archi- tect, was completed in 1910, Mr. Morgan gave well over a quarter of a million dollars for maintenance and began putting in the treasures-sculptures, paintings, ceramics, tapestries and rugs from the great Morgan collections. In 1900, while making his collections, he had bought Benjamin West's "The Raising of Lazarus" and had brought it to the Atheneum; all Europe was agog, for since 1782 it had hung over the altar in Winchester Cathedral and had seemed to be an inseparable part of that renowned edifice.
Till his death in 1913 Mr. Morgan always was eager to learn how much appreciation of his gift was shown by the people as a whole, and his gratification was apparent in the exhibitions he caused to be made here. In the railroad turmoil and bitterness of the 1900s the name of Morgan was conspicuous, but John Pier- pont Morgan calmly and successfully carried on the great trusts that had come to him at his father's death and passed them along, increased, to his son of the same name. Not his ability in handling the affairs of one of his father's concerns in London or those of J. P. Morgan & Company was so impressive as his work in re-
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WADSWORTH ATHENEUM (LEFT), COLT ANNEX (CENTER), MORGAN MEMORIAL (RIGHT), HARTFORD
With the Municipal Building close by, to the right, they form the Civic Center
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organizing embarrassed concerns after the panic of 1893, which especially affected railroads. The issue of bonds negotiated by Cleveland to protect the nation's gold reserve he boldly took over, and not pausing there he worked out plans for holding-companies in reorganizing industrial corporations. The United States Steel Corporation was an eminent example of his successful ideas. In his later years he worked for the consolidation of banking interests through the instrumentality of community interests. Particularly grateful was the result of his efforts to avert wide disaster in 1907. Possessed though he was of an insight that was so helpful, not all of his plans found approval in the eyes of other students of finance. Financial writers in retrospect question his judgment in the matter of shipping-combination and in the extension of control by the New York, New Haven & Hartford road over all competing or cooperating transportation concerns in southern New England, though he may have been nearer to an idea that in itself is gaining ground today. The popular move- ment against "interlocking directorates" was in a measure due to his insistence on the theory of putting bank men on railroad and industrial directorates with a view to gaining more stability ; not the idea so much as the character of certain men who took advantage of it should be blamed. He was generous in his giv- ings to the universities, to St. John's Cathedral in New York, and to many charitable and religious institutions. The bulk of his estate, with the art collection which was considered the most varied and most important of any belonging to a private indi- vidual, went to his son. For his books he built a library adjoining his New York residence; the chief part of the rest of his collection was placed at his death in the Metropolitan Museum, of which he was president, as a loan exhibit. Very choice selections from it were brought here. Mr. Morgan was born in Hartford in 1837.
His son was born in New York in 1867 and was graduated at Harvard in 1889. J. P. Morgan Jr.'s training in New York and abroad well fitted him to succeed his father. His power in the World war, when he was loaning billions to foreign governments, was saving New York City's credit, and his position as chief agent of the Belgian relief funds made him an imposing figure. He is true to the traditions of the "House of Morgan" and to the "old home town." Under his patronage, the Memorial has waxed stronger, and with the added collections of "colonials" of George
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Dudley Seymour and of Wallace Nutting and of what he himself has loaned and given, the beneficial influence is greater each year. A word more must be said on this feature of Hartford life in the summary for the closing of the town's third century.
The probating of the will of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, widow of Col. Samuel Colt, who died in 1905, revealed more of her benefac- tions. There already had been an understanding as to the loca- tion of the building in memory of her husband to house the won- derful collection he and she had made, including firearms and armor and bric-a-brac and curios from all over the world, in addi- tion to paintings and statuary. This, the Elizabeth Jarvis Colt Gallery, was opened to the public in November of 1910, a worthy portion of the exceptional civic group. In her early married life she and her husband had dreamed of an Armsmear which in course of time became a reality, their residence on Wethersfield Avenue; in her later days she had dreamed of an Armsmear which should be a home for widows of Episcopal clergymen and other ladies of refinement. She had built the Church of the Good Shep- herd in memory of her husband and the parish house in memory of her son Caldwell; afterward she erected at Armsmear the statue of the colonel, in bronze, by J. Massy Rhind, with bas reliefs commemorating important events in his life, including his address in the House of Commons, an honor which had been accorded to no other non-member. This stands with other statuary on the grounds given to the city for Colt Park, as already mentioned. For twenty-two years Mrs. Colt was president of the Union for Home Work and was constant in her endeavors in behalf of church and missions and of patriotic bodies, especially the Colonial Dames, of which for several years she was national vice president. She bequeathed nearly two-thirds of her estate to benevolent and public objects, including a total of $158,000 to the Atheneum, $1,250,000 for the preservation of the Church of the Good Shepherd and the parish house, and $800,000, with residue interest in the estate, as an endowment to the Armsmear home, which had been remodeled and dedicated in 1911.
In 1909 George E. Hoadley (1837-1922), son of William H. and Harriet L. Hillyer Hoadley of Simsbury, collector of rarest antiquities and historical relics and, as has been said, contributor to the beauty of Christ Church, was giving the graceful stone arch bridge across Park River into Bushnell Park at the foot of
J. PIERPONT MORGAN
THE COLT LIBRARY IN THE COLT ADDITION TO THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM, HARTFORD
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Mulberry Street, with a tablet inscribed in memory of his grand- father Jeremy Hoadley : "Branford, 1776; Hartford, 1847. Select- man twenty-four years, mayor, judge of the City Court, repre- sentative, high sheriff."
Mr. Hoadley's mother died in 1905 at the age of ninety-five. Her father, Col. Andrew Hillyer of East Granby, was a soldier in the old French war, a graduate of Yale (1770) and one of the few Episcopalian whigs in the Revolution. She was descended from Elder William Brewster, Matthew Grant of Windsor and George Hayes, ancestors of Presidents Grant and Hayes. She also was the mother of Charles E. Hoadly (1828-1900), state librarian, who reverted to the orginal way of spelling the family name.
This was a name to be intimately associated with the next worthy monument to progress-that which is popularly called the "State Library." Of the library itself Mr. Hoadly had much to do in the making. From the day he won the valedictory in the class of '51 at Trinity, he continued to delve among the re- markable collection of books at the college and was to bring it to a still higher standard as the years ran on. He studied for the law but his love for books brought him back to Trinity in 1854 as librarian and the year following he succeeded J. Hammond Trumbull as state librarian. Doctor Trumbull may well be called the father of the institution because of his early work and also because of all that he did after resigning formal office ; his under- taking in editing the earlier volumes of the Colonial Records alone was enough to preserve his memory, but while doing this he was driving home for the Legislature the very great importance of supplementing its meager 3,000 volumes of reference books. Doctor Hoadly-Trinity gave him his LL. D. and Yale the M. A. -took hold where Trumbull had left off, in the editing and in the collecting. His sense of what was wanted was remarkable, and often in traveling about and finding something that was needed, or when his invaluable friend Judge Sherman W. Adams would bring it in, Mr. Hoadly would buy it with his money. Thus requirements were being met whether or no, and as the library gained renown for having certain complete sets of reports from sundry states and other dominions, along with portraits and colonial relics, the Legislature voiced approval; it agreed that
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there must be more. A still greater task, historically, he was performing in compiling and publishing the volumes of the New Haven Colonial Records and then the rest of the Colonial Records of the state from 1868 to 1890, a task of forty years. By request of the Legislature he continued his task and was upon his third volume of special papers at his death.
Doctor Hoadly's resignation in 1898 was withdrawn by de- sire of Governor Cooke and as an associate George S. Godard was engaged. Mr. Godard was a son of Harvy Godard of Simsbury, where he was born in 1865 and where he had been librarian at the Cossitt Library. With degree of B. D. at Yale (1895) in addition to his academic degree at Wesleyan, he was honored with M. A. at both Wesleyan and Trinity and in the world of librarian associations and patriotic sccieties he was selected for high posi- tions. He has been president of the National Association of State Libraries and for many years was president of Jeremiah Wadsworth branch, as now of the Connecticut Society, of the Sons of the American Revolution. The opportunity to indulge to the full his nature to arrange, perfect and compile all kinds of historical and reference data was to come to him easily. Doctor Hoadly's collection had been scattered in rooms on five floors of the Capitol, with the main room where the Senate chamber now is. In 1906 Mr. Godard in his report merely expressed a hope that the collections could be assembled in some proper way, paint- ings be cared for and vaults be provided for records. A commis- sion had been appointed in 1903 to procure a building for state officials and in 1905 purchase of the land across the avenue from the Capitol had been authorized. In 1907 the committee was directed to contract for a building for the library and Supreme Court and for a memorial. The committee was composed of Hon. Morgan G. Bulkeley, W. O. Burr, H. Wales Lines of Meriden, Charles C. Cook of West Hartford and L. W. Robinson of New Haven. Donn Barber of New York and E. T. Hapgood were the architects.
On May 25, 1909, the cornerstone was laid of the large build- ing of white granite-adapted Italian renaissance in architecture, the Supreme Court room and offices in the west wing, the library in the east wing and the Memorial Hall in the southern extension between them. In his address Chief Justice Simeon E. Baldwin said: "Set by itself, in all the majestic dignity which architec-
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS, BY BENJAMIN WEST Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan in Morgan Memorial
TAPESTRY HALL, MORGAN MEMORIAL, HARTFORD
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ture can command, is rising before our eyes the splendid home which Connecticut has prepared for her highest court of justice and for the books that teach what justice is and give it form." The imposing court room, with its alcove-painting by Herter of the drafting of the Constitution in 1639, the hall with its portraits of the governors and also Stuart's Washington, its original char- ter and historical exhibits of all times, and the library with its noble reading room, its steel stacks, alcoves, vaults and its wealth of material, especially the manuscripts and records which have been assembled from towns where they could not be absolutely protected against fire, altogether make this one of the most not- able structures of its nature in America.
Here, then was being established a state group for all towns to take pride in. But a day back and the Capitol had seemed to promise space enough for the upper and lower houses, for com- mittee rooms, for departments that required quarters and for the executive offices. In the rapid period of transition, this structure was not to escape the rush. Even with the military department removed to the armory, there was coming to be scant space for the old boards for educational work, for insurance, for agricul- ture and for banks, along with offices for treasurer, comptroller and school-fund commissioner, when in came tax commissioner (Andrew F. Gates, a leading Hartford lawyer, being the first to hold that office), labor commissioner, the Tuberculosis Commis- sion, Department of Health, dairy and food commissioner, bank commissioner, Public Utilities Commission, Board of Fisheries and Game, the highway commissioner, commissioner on domestic animals, Park and Forest Commission, Board of Finance, Teach- ers Retirement Board, Athletic Commission, and the State Police and Motor Vehicle Departments, either of which last named soon (and significantly) was five times as large as any department known in the '90s. Nowhere was there so typical an illustration as the Capitol itself of the dazed condition of public and authori- ties as the rush increased. Following the purchase of the mag- nificent library site and the providing of a home where the Su- preme Court might sit in dignity once more-it is noteworthy that it was thought of first,-parcels of land began to be picked up year by year in the vicinity of the Capitol; and when the famous old Washington Street, place of mansions for more than a century, began to give way to automobile salesrooms coming on
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from the south, and the county bought there the land for a new County Building, while a majestic Scientist church was checking the same kind of an approach on the companion street named after Lafayette, there could be no stinting of appropriations. It was no time to stop to build; the Capitol must be relieved from attack and from congestion. Senator Bulkeley's mansion became the headquarters of the state police; brick apartments, wooden build- ings ancient and modern, from the senator's former home to Capitol Avenue and along Capitol Avenue east and west, were changed in short order from choicely located dwellings into office quarters with, of course, the purpose of building appropriate and harmonious structures in the near future. Barely in time has the opportunity been improved to keep Capitol Hill up to the standard that was set when the Capitol alone was placed there. And, as will be seen in the pages for 1928, Hartford will have its share in the glory, while the name of Horace Bushnell will be still further honored. The Capitol itself will cease to bear that resemblance to a combined garage and accounting room, presided over by Lafayette, Governor Buckingham and Nathan Hale, which the change in times has forced upon it.
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