USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > New Haven, a book recording the varied activities of the author in his efforts over many years to promote the welfare of the city of his adoption since 1883, together with some researches into its storied past and many illustrations > Part 24
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Brown did not have the training that Austin and Stone had as carpenters and builders, and his designs, therefore, lack the solidity characteristic of their work. But his designs were graceful and generally in good taste. He did not understand the use of ornament. His aptitude, it might be said, was far superior to his equipment. The City Hall and County Court House are his notable designs, though the Church of the Redeemer does him more credit. The same hand is plainly apparent in these three designs. His initials, D. R. B.," may be seen in the keystone of the arched gateway uniting the City Hall with the County Court House.
In personal appearance he was tall, gaunt, and of fair color- ing. He had in his later years a faded indoors look. He was a quiet man, of few words-one pictures him as always bending over his drawing-board.
XX
ALEXANDER JACKSON DAVIS : 1803-1892 : PART- NER OF ITHIEL TOWN; DESIGNER OF THE HILLHOUSE AND HENRY WHITNEY MANSIONS.
A notice of Davis himself will not be out of place in this list of New Haven architects, since he was from 1829 to 1843 a partner of Ithiel Town and designed Alumni Hall for Yale College, the Manor House at "Sachem's Wood" (1828-30) for James Abraham Hillhouse, the poet, and in 1837 the Whit- ney house on Whitney Avenue for Henry Whitney, Esq. He also assisted Town, it is said, in designing our Old State House (1829). I transcribe the notice of him in Lamb's Biographical Dictionary of the United States.
DAVIS, ALEXANDER JACKSON, architect, was born in New York City, July 24, 1803; son of Cornelius Davis, editor and publisher of the New York Theological Magazine. He began to study architecture in the antique school in 1823, and opened an office in his native city in 1826. He conducted the business from 1829 to 1843 in partnership with Ithiel Town. He was founder of the American Institute of Architects, and sec- retary of the American Academy of Fine Arts, afterward known as the National Academy of Design. Noteworthy among the public buildings designed by him are the executive department and patent office, Wash- ington, D. C .; the capitols at Springfield, Ill. (1837), Indianapolis, Ind. (1837), Columbus, Ohio (1839), and Raleigh, N. C. (1840) ; the Univer- sity of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the Virginia Military Institute, Lexing- ton. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1827. He died at Llewellyn Park, N. J., Jan. 14, 1892.
Davis began life as an engraver, and an engraving in the col- lection of the New Haven Colony Historical Society of the "Residence and Library of Ithiel Town" is signed "A. J. Davis." Unfortunately, it is not dated.
The writer owns Davis' annotated and extra-illustrated copy of Dunlap's "History of the Arts of Design." 2 Vols. N. Y. 1834. Vol. 2 of this work contains an extended notice of Davis, for which he supplied the material. In this article, Town is given the credit with Davis of several designs not included in my list of Town's designs. On the other hand, it includes some designs the sole credit for which I have given to Town.
XXI
SUGGESTION FOR THE RELOCATION OF THE BUILDING OF THE NEW HAVEN COLONY HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
While I am in no wise advised of the purposes of the Presi- dent and Board of Directors of the New Haven Colony His- torical Society, I am informed that the natural desire on the part of the Sheffield Scientific School to acquire the site of the present Historical Society building and so complete the present square, has led the officers of the Society to consider other sites. The present building, presented to the Society by Mr. Henry F. English, as a memorial to his father, the late Gov- ernor James E. English, stands on the historic spot once occupied by the famous barn of Robert Newman, which the fathers of New Haven seem to have made use of as a town hall, and where on June 4, 1639, the assembled planters ratified and signed the "fundamental agreement" which determined the ecclesiastical and civil government of the plantation.
The subject of the removal of a public building in the lifetime of the donor is a delicate but by no means a novel one in this hustling country of ours. When the present site was chosen for the Historical Society building it was thought ideal. No one then dreamed that the Sheffield Scientific School would convert the square bounded by Temple, College, Wall and Grove Streets into a campus, nor that the University would acquire the Hillhouse place-the "domain of Sachem's Wood." But all this has happened, and the ultimate removal of the Historical Society to another location seems inevitable. Therefore, the sooner a new site is secured the better, since central sites are rapidly being taken up.
I desire to propose a site, recently twice suggested to me ; namely, the Eli Whitney property on the corner of Orange and Elm Streets. The suggestion is that this property be acquired if possible. The location is central (as close to our
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public square as any site that is ever likely to become available ) and fronts on Elm Street, which seems destined to become in the near future one of the leading thoroughfares of New Haven. The Whitney plot is amply large for the proposed purpose and desirable on account of facing south. It is, more- over, a corner plot and hence ensures for the buildings upon it an immunity from fire which no inside lot can offer. It is needless to say that a high degree of safety is indispensable to the building in which valuable collections are housed. . Nothing so draws gifts to a museum as a guarantee of security against fire. Furthermore, buildings on the Whitney plot would be ensured abundant light and air. The Whitney property is also peculiarly suitable as a site for a building designed to provide a sanctuary for the records and relics of New Haven's past, since it is the site of the great mansion built upon it, as is supposed about 1640, by Governor Theophi- lus Eaton, whose memory, it seems to me, has been greatly neglected.
The Governor Eaton house was the largest and the finest of the four great houses built in New Haven at the very beginning of its history, and believed to have surpassed any houses built in New England during the earlier days of our colonial period.
The other houses are those which were built by the Rev. John Davenport, Captain Isaac Allerton, Mayflower pilgrim and the foremost merchant of his time in New England, and Mr. Thomas Gregson, merchant, who was lost at sea in the "great shippe."
In Lambert's quaint and rare "History of the Colony of New Haven," published in New Haven in 1838, I find : "Gov- ernor Eaton built his house on the site which is now the north corner of Elm and Orange Streets. It was built in the form of a capital E, was large and lofty, and had twenty-one fire- places."
Lambert supplies a view of the house, but fails to state on what authority the cut is based.
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The Rev. William Hubbard of Ipswich, himself born in 1621 and therefore partly a contemporary of Eaton, saw fit in his "General History of New England" to criticize the found- ers of New Haven colony for building houses so much beyond their requirements. He says :
"They laid out too much of their stocks and estates in building far too stately houses wherein they at the first outdid the rest of the country, which had been much better reserved till afterwards when they could have found the matter feasible."
Isham, in his work on "Early Connecticut Houses" (Provi- dence, 1900), gives an interesting account (pp. 97-III) of the Governor Eaton house and reprints a portion of the gov- ernor's inventory which, on account of its particularity, has made a conjectural restoration of the house possible. From this inventory it appears that Governor Eaton's house was handsomely, and even splendidly, appointed. The governor had at times some thirty persons in his household. We are assured by Hubbard (and gratified to learn) that Eaton "maintained a port in some measure answerable to his place."
Governor Eaton was co-founder of the New Haven Colony with the Rev. Mr. Davenport, and was annually re-elected its chief magistrate from the arrival of the planters here in 1638 until his death in January, 1658. Eaton was a man of high character and force, and it is said that no one name appears on the early records as often as his. He has, more- over, no memorial in the city which he helped to found, and in which he died. His lady was extremely peeved at having to exchange London for Quinnipiac, and urged him to return. "You may go," he said (and she did), "I shall die here."
The Eli Whitney mansion, formerly occupying the site of Governor Eaton's house, was also of historic interest on account of its connection with Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, and in the front rank of American inventors. However, Whitney did not, as popularly supposed, ever live in the Whitney mansion. He lived for many years, and in
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1825 died, at No. 275 Orange Street, a house designed and built about 1800 by David Hoadley, the architect of the United Church, for Jonas Bowditch. This house, though of unassuming exterior, is quite spacious and contains exquisite interior woodwork, in designing which Hoadley excelled. Not long before his death Mr. Whitney acquired the Elm Street property and secured the plans for the present Whitney mansion, which was built immediately after his death by his express wish. In it Madam Whitney, his widow, lived until her death. She was a daughter of the Hon. Pierrepont Edwards.
Without a strictly fireproof building, such as the Connecti- cut Historical Society is soon to have in Hartford, owing to the interest and munificence of the late J. Pierpont Morgan, the New Haven Colony Historical Society cannot expect con- siderable accessions of supreme historical interest or high intrinsic value. Such things will naturally gravitate into places where the protection from fire is as complete as the modern art of building can secure. The most approved prac- tice at present is to plan buildings designed for museums so as to secure numerous small rooms for special collections. A great number of ill-assorted objects cannot be well arranged and studied in one or more large rooms, for they inevitably produce a confused and distracting appearance.
I see no reason why a building on the site proposed might not be made to constitute a fitting and worthy memorial of the late Governor James E. English, whose genius was a prac- tical one and who brought a sort of triumphant common sense to the consideration of any problem. He would, I think, have been very sensible of the advantages of the site now proposed - for the building of the New Haven Colony Historical Soci- ety, and sensible also of the opportunity which may now be present, of thus utilizing the homestead of the first and great- est governor of the New Haven Colony.
If the project herein discussed is favorably received, I think it would be a good plan to ask the architect selected for the
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work to consider the modeling of a new building upon the design of Governor Eaton's house. If he found that feasible, I conceive that the interest of the whole project would be immensely heightened. The project, then, in its ideal form is a fireproof building for the collections of the New Haven Colony Historical Society upon the homestead of the first and greatest governor of the Colony and reproducing his mansion as far as consistent with the highest degree of safety and the greatest measure of utility.
I am conscious that in writing the foregoing I may be thought to have placed too much emphasis on Theophilus Eaton and Eli Whitney in this connection, but they are figures of historic interest, and are not to be separated from the matter in hand, which concerns itself with our local history from the planting of New Haven in 1638 down to to-day.
I do not, however, lose sight of the fact that the building is a memorial to the late Governor English and his wife. The proposition in its essence is the removal of the English memo- rial from one historic spot to another historic spot. In case a new building should be erected on the proposed site, of course the large memorial tablet placed over the fireplace in the main room of the present building would be given an equally prominent place in the new building. My project, in a word, is to place a memorial to a distinguished governor of Connecticut on a site where lived a distinguished governor of the New Haven Colony.
NOTE. This article, now reprinted from the Saturday Chronicle of May 22, 1915, was prepared for publication in a New Haven daily paper, whose editor was constrained to decline it with appropriate thanks. The article was timely, but the spectacle of an "interloper" laying hands upon an institution so revered, so integral, as the New Haven Colony Historical Society, was not to be borne. Some time afterwards the editor of the Chronicle, hard up, as I remember, for "copy," printed the article with some changes, about which I was not consulted. The original MSS. was never returned to me, and so I am unable to print the paper as written. G. D. S., 1921.
XXII.
NEW HAVEN IN THE FORTIES: HOW WE APPEARED TO A DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIST, SIR CHARLES LYELL.
(Published in the Saturday Chronicle of February 10, 1917.)
Dear Mr. Editor :
It has occurred to me that your readers might be interested in the following description of New Haven as it appeared seventy-five years ago to one of the most distinguished and trustworthy of English travelers who has ever visited our country and written about it. I refer to Sir Charles Lyell, the geologist, who traveled in this country in 1841-2. Sir Charles seems to have been agreeably impressed by New Haven, as well he might have been, since he saw it under the guidance of such men as Professor Silliman, the elder, and James Gates Percival, chiefly known as a poet, but one of the best geologists of his time in this country. If Sir Charles were to visit us to-day, I suppose that he would be shown around by Professor Gregory, who has been recently talking to the women of the New Haven Saturday Morning Club on the "Geology of New Haven and its Environs." The fact that Sir Charles, who was a Scotchman, should have found so much in New Haven to remind him of Scotland, is rather amusing. He writes :
"The city of New Haven, with a population of 14,000 souls, possesses, like Springfield, fine avenues of trees in its streets, which mingle agreeably with the buildings of the university, and the numerous churches, of which we counted nearly twenty steeples. When attending service, according to the Presbyte- rian form, in the College chapel on Sunday, I could scarcely believe I was not in Scotland.
"In an expedition to the north of the town, accompanied by Professor Silliman, his son, and Mr. Percival, a geologist to whom the execution of the State Survey of Connecticut was
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entrusted, I examined the red sandstone (New Red) and intrusive volcanic rocks (basalt and greenstone) of this neigh- borhood. Dykes of various sizes intersect the stratified rocks, and occasionally flow in great tabular masses nearly parallel to the strata so as to have the picturesque effect of cappings of columnar basalt, although Mr. Percival has shown that they are in reality intrusive, and alter the strata in contact both above and below. The East and West Rocks near New Haven, crowned with trap, bear a strong resemblance in their outline and general aspect to Salisbury Crags, and other hills of the same structure near Edinburgh.
"We saw in Hampden parish, lat. 41 degrees, 19 minutes, on the summit of a high hill of sandstone, a huge erratic block of greenstone, 100 feet in circumference, and projecting II feet above ground. Other large transported fragments have been met with more than 1,000 feet above the level of the sea, and everywhere straight parallel furrows appear on the smooth surface of the rocks, where the superficial gravel and sand are removed.
"In a garden at New Haven (August 13, 1841) I saw, for the first time, a humming bird on the wing. It was fluttering round the flowers of a gladiolus. In the suburbs we gathered a splendid wild flower, the scarlet Lobelia, and a large sweet- scented water-lily. The only singing bird which we heard was a thrush with a red breast, which they call here the robin. The grass-hoppers were as numerous and as noisy as in Italy. As we returned in the evening over some low marshy ground, we saw several fire-flies showing an occasional bright spark. They are small beetles resembling our male glow-worms (Lampyris Linn., Pyrolampis scintillans Say).
"Aug. 13 .- A large steamer carried us from New Haven to New York, a distance of about ninety miles, in less than six hours. We had Long Island on one side, and the main land on the other, the scenery at first tame from the width of the channel, but very lively and striking when this became more contracted, and at length we seemed to sail into the very sub-
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urbs of the great city itself, passing between green islands, some of them covered with buildings and villas. We had the same bright sunshine which we have enjoyed ever since we landed, and an atmosphere unsullied by the chimnies of count- less steam-boats, factories, and houses, of a population of more than 300,000 souls, thanks to the remoteness of all fuel save anthracite and wood."
(Pp. 10-12, Travels in North America, by Charles Lyell, Esq., F.R.S. in the years 1841-2, with Geological Observa- tions on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. )
Sir Charles was so much pleased with New Haven and New Haven hospitality, that on his second visit to the United States (1845-1846), he came again to New Haven and was enter- tained by Professor Silliman, the elder, and by his son, almost as well known, Professor Silliman, the younger. Of his second visit he writes :
"We had no reason to boast of our speed the next day, for we were twelve hours in going sixty-two miles to New Haven [from Springfield]. The delay was caused by ice on the rail and by our having to wait to let the New York train pass us, there being only one line of rail. A storm in the Sound had occasioned the New York cars to be five hours behind their time. We saw many sleighs dashing past and crossing our road. It was late before we reached the hospitable house of Professor Silliman, who with his son gave me many valuable instructions for my southern tour. Their letters of introduc- tion, however, though most useful, were a small part of the service they did me both in this tour and during my former visit to America. Everywhere, even in the states most remote from New England, I met with men who, having been the pupils of Professor Silliman, and having listened to his lectures when at college, had invariably imbibed a love for natural history and physical science.
"In the morning, when we embarked in the steamer for New York, I was amused at the different aspect of the New
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Haven scenery from that which I remembered at the autumn of 1841. The East Rock was now covered with snow, all but the bold precipice of columnar basalt. . The trees, several of which, especially the willows, still retained many of their leaves, were bent down beneath a weight of ice. I never saw so brilliant a spectacle of the kind, for every bough of the large drooping elms and the smallest twigs of every tree and shrub were hung with transparent icicles, which, in the bright sun- shine, reflected the prismatic colors like the cut-glass drops of a chandelier. As we sailed out of the harbor, which was crowded with vessels, we saw all the ropes of their riggings similarly adorned with crystals of ice. A stormy voyage of nine hours carried us through Long Island Sound, a distance of ninety miles, to New York."
(A Second Visit to the United States of North America by Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. pp. 179-180. )
Professor Gregory assures me that to-day we do not at all realize how intensely interesting the geology of this region was to foreign students of geology. I, for one, should like to see, as did Sir Charles back in 1845-6, our harbor "crowded with vessels."
G. D. SEYMOUR.
Feb. 6, 1917.
THE DISCRIMINATING MR. DINSMORE
Nat. Willis did not hesitate in 1838 to characterize New Haven Society as "one of the most elegant and highly culti- vated in the world." Mr. Dinsmore admitted no rivals in lauding the beauty of the town. In Dinsmore's Guide (March 1848) I find :
"New Haven, Connecticut, is situated at the bottom of New Haven Bay, about 4 miles from Long Island Sound and is one of the principal towns on the railroad lines between New York and Boston. It is the handsomest city in the United States."
XXIII.
NEW HAVEN IN 1850.
(A paper prepared in 1910 and read before "The Dissenters"; now mainly printed for the first time.)
One does not have to be antediluvian to remember the Civil War, though most of the men who are now bearing the burdens of the day were born after the War was over, and have no memories of it except those of gradually diminishing ranks of veterans marching the streets, or riding in carriages on "Decoration Day." Most men born after the close of the War, look upon the year 1850 as belonging to the far and fading past, but to the antiquarian, the date 1850 wears a decidedly modern air, and to students of American Colonial history, anything after 1800 seems rather recent. I suspect that one reason for this is, that the War of the Revolution bulks so large in the consciousness of native-born citizens, that it dwarfs everything down to the Civil War. It must be admitted that on this side of the Atlantic, the first part of the Nineteenth Century was rather featureless, despite the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, (1846-1849) ; the long gap between the close of the War of the Revolution and the breaking out of the Civil War is not filled with historic mile- stones of sufficient prominence to impress the imagination with the lapse of time.
In his delightful and informing brochure, entitled "New Haven in 1784," Professor Dexter was happy in giving to his picture that air of vernal freshness that really belonged to it. New Haven was then just assuming the role of a city, and shared the morning hopes of the new Republic. I cannot expect to do as much for my picture of New Haven in 1850, when New Haven was a small self-contained and self-satisfied community, nearly homogeneous in stock, with its roots still deep in the Old England many of its citizens affected so much to despise.
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I shall base my sketch almost entirely upon the New Haven Directory of 1850. Published only sixty odd years ago, this little book brings to view the tremendous and varied changes the intervening years have wrought in the life of the place. A well printed volume of 16mo size, it contains 4,294 names; the population of New Haven, according to the census of 1850, was 22,529. The proportion of names in the Directory of 1850 to the entire population is strikingly high. The number of names listed in city directories instead of keeping up with the increase in population, grows steadily smaller ; at what rate I do not know.
The New Haven Directory of 1850 contains an excellent map, and has about the same make-up as the New Haven Directory of to-day. The surnames show that the population of New Haven was then of almost pure New England stock. Our first Irish immigrants came here about 1825, with the building of the Farmington Canal, though the great emigra- tion from the "Green Isle" did not take place until after the terrible famine of 1842. Many "wearers of the Green" came to New Haven in the late "Forties" to work on the railway, but the tide of Irish immigration did not reach its full height until a few years later. Celtic names do not figure to any great extent in the Directory of 1850, and do not occur in the lists of city officials. The few Irishmen then here had not had time to make themselves greatly felt. In such a conserva- tive New England community as they found here, they had not won much recognition as citizens.
It is significant of the great changes that have taken place, not only here but elsewhere throughout the country, since 1850, that we do not commonly think of our citizens of Irish ancestry as foreigners, so completely have they become assim- ilated. Their places as foreigners have now been taken by Italians, Russian Jews and Poles, whose unpronounceable, though picturesque, names we trip and stumble over in our daily papers. The police columns of the papers bristle with them; and what is far more significant, the columns recording
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transfers of realty. Within the decade even, these last acces- sions to our polygot citizenship have begun to figure very largely in the life of the city. When they, too, shall have become assimilated, who, in turn, will take their places as our foreigners ?
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