USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 33
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" She sang alone, ere womanhood had known The gift of song which fills the air to-day; Tender and sweet, a music all her own May fitly linger where she knelt to pray."
Unlike Brainard, Whittier proved an active and indus- trious political as well as literary editor, for he was a born
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Old State House, Hartford, now City Hall. Place of the sitting of the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812.
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The Lower Valley
politician. Forty-two of his poems first appeared in the Review. Of the existing newspapers, the Times is reminis- cent of Gideon Welles, who for the first thirty years of his long, active life was associated with it as its principal political writer. Welles was a native of the Valley, born in Glastonbury in 1802, and was in direct line from the colonial governor, Thomas Welles. The Courant is most pleasantly associated with Charles Dudley Warner, whose connection with it, in the ideal dual capacity of proprie- tor and editor, covered almost the whole period of his essays in literature.
Below the Square historical landmarks thicken. On the east side of Main Street the site of "Zachary Sanford's Tavern," where the affair of the charter in 1687 was enacted during the night session of Andros debating his demand with the Assembly, is covered by a church. The place where the Charter Oak stood, on the Governor Wyllys homestead lot, is seen on Charter Oak Place, east of Main Street, marked by a tablet. The tree survived till 1856, when its venerable trunk was prostrated in an August gale. It is said to have measured twenty-one feet in circumference at a height of seven feet from the ground ; and honest Hartfordians aver that twenty-one persons could stand together in its great hollow. The charter remains, a precious document. The " historical duplicate," as the term is, for there were two copies, may be seen in the State Library in the capitol, enclosed in a carved frame, part of which is of wood of the tree. The " his- torical original copy," with the original "charter box," is in the Wadsworth Athenæum, a possession of the Con- necticut Historical Society. The wood of the oak is preserved in countless small articles, and a few large ones. Captain Wadsworth, despite his valiant acts, seems
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afterward to have occasionally fallen under discipline, for it is recorded that in 1706 he was fined five shillings for " hot headed remarks in court and hasty reflections on the judges."
The castellated front of the Wadsworth Athenæum occupies the site of a famous Hartford house. This was the Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth mansion, where Wash- ington and Rochambeau had their first conference in September, 1780. The Atheneum was founded through the liberality of Colonel Jeremiah's son, Daniel Wadsworth. Established more than sixty years ago (1842), its scope has expanded to embrace the chief literary institutions of the city. Here, now under one roof, are gathered the Library and Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (founded in 1825), the Watkinson Library of Reference, the Hartford Public Library ; the Hartford Art Gallery and Art Society School; and a Bird Collection of the Hartford Scientific Society. The library of the His- torical Society ranks with the best in New England in early American history, and is the depository of many valuable manuscripts of historical material; while the cabinets are rich in objects illustrative of American history and prehistoric archeology. The Watkinson Library admirably supplements the Historical Library. It was founded by David Watkinson, a successful merchant, and an active member of the Historical Society, who died in 1857 leaving liberal bequests to these institutions. The rooms which they occupy have a delightful bookish atmos- phere. On the green in front of the Atheneum the statue of Nathan Hale, the young and comely American spy, whose last words of regret that he had but one life to give to his country are familiar, or ought to be, to every schoolboy, deserves a passing glance.
The Charter Oak, Hartford.
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The Lower Valley
The old Centre Church, nearly opposite the Athenaeum, is the lineal descendant of the first meeting-house. It dates from 1807, and in its interior design as well as its façade preserves the architecture of its day. Back of this meeting-house is the burying-ground of colonial times in which are the graves of Hooker, and of other governors, and a plain central monument to the memory of the first settlers. The site of Hooker's house is on Arch Street, below the Athenæum.
In Bushnell Park, with its crowning State Capitol, is the city's show of out-door art. Observe that this park of beautifully undulating territory, the central feature of a system of parks of unusual extent and variety for a city of Hartford's proportions, is in large part reclaimed from an unsightly waste, edged with dismal, unsavory buildings. Its creation and development, with its setting of to-day, are due to the foresight and perseverance of Horace Bush- nell, the great preacher and great citizen of Hartford, for whom it was named when he died in 1876; and it stands a very useful memorial of his quickening influences in civic matters through his forty years of lofty citizenship here. The work of the landscape architect here displayed is as worthy as that of the sculptor.
The capitol occupies the original site of Trinity College which was removed to make way for it. Trinity's present seat is on as sightly a ridge about a mile distant. Here its range of buildings, of a refined architecture, occupy the side of a beautiful green. It is almost forgotton now that Trinity began as Washington College, which grew out of warm religious antagonisms and local rivalries when Connecticut had two capitals. When in 1823 the charter for the college was granted, Hartford celebrated the event with bell-ringing, cannon-firing, and bonfires, for it saw in
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the project a rival to Yale. By a prompt and generous subscription to its endowment fund Hartford secured the establishment of the institution from other competitors for it, and the new Washington College was duly set up as "a tower" of defence for the Episcopal Church then centered here, against "the inroads of New Haven heresy." It be- came Trinity College in 1845, upon petition of the alumni. All the antagonisms and rivalries long ago vanished. As President Hadley of Yale remarked at the installation of President Luther in 1904 : " We breathe to-day an atmos- phere which helps toward breadth of view and largeness of tolerance ; which makes us seek for points of contact and cooperation instead of for points of divergence and antag- onism." The Theological Seminary of the Congregation- alists, founded a decade after Trinity, remains in the heart of the city.
The walk from Bushnell Park westward up Asylum Hill and along Farmington Avenue, beautified its length by handsome trees, is a favorite with many visitors on ac- count of the association of this attractive part with the latter-day Hartford literary group, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, Warner, and Clemens, who dwelt for some years in close neighborhood here. The Warner and Clemens places, on the avenue, are easily recognized from the frequent published descriptions of them, - the Warner house in a frame of woodland, the "Mark Twain " house on a knoll backed by an oak grove; and the path between the estates worn by the two constant friends. The Stowe place also adjoined "Mark Twain's," on the farther side, facing Forest Street. Out of Forest Street was the "rambling Gothic cottage " of Isabella Beecher Hooker which Clemens first occupied when he came to live in Hartford in 1871. Opposite was Warner's earlier home, the "little red-brick
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Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch, Hartford.
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The Lower Valley
cottage embowered in green," associated with his My Summer in a Garden, and Backlog Studies.
Beyond and westward lies picturesque West Hartford, backed by the Talcott mountains, where the neat culture of market gardens is the chief industry. Across the River East Hartford is given more largely to tobacco-growing.
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XXIX
Hartford to the Sea
Down the River by Steamboat - Old Dutch Point - Wethersfield back from the Meadows-The Glastonburys-Rocky Hill and Cromwell - Port- land and Middletown at the Great Bend -The College City - Wesleyan University and Berkeley Divinity School -John Fiske in Middletown - The Straits - The Chatham Hills - Historic Mines - " The Governor's Gold Ring " -The Lymes and the Haddams-The Field Family - Brainard the Missionary to the Indians - Essex - At the River's Mouth.
T HE steamboats of the " Hartford Line," for lower-river landings and by the Sound to New York, sail from the site of the ancient Landing in Hartford, at the foot of State Street. On the way to the pier one will observe a few old warehouses suggestive of the West India trade of ships that have passed. But he must imagine the old wharves lined with vessels, " often three or four deep," when Hartford was the head of sloop navigation; the heaps of hogsheads of sugar, rum, and molasses covering them; the fleet of flatboats loading for the up-river voyage. Quiet now pervades the River front. Occasionally a fussy tow-boat or a string of slow-moving freight barges ruffles the river surface. A low-cut pleasure steamer for excur- sions may enliven the scene ; and gayety is added by trim naphtha launches. The Sound steamboat appears quite a leviathan among this river-craft. She glides off from her dock in the late afternoon with a gentle movement as if reluctant to disturb the prevailing serenity, and as gently proceeds on the down-river course.
From the vantage of the upper deck the eye takes in
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The Portland Quarry.
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Hartford to the Sea
both sides of the River as the steamer placidly drops down stream. Old Dutch Point appears occupied by the yard and ways of the transportation company which operates the Hartford Line ; and where meadows were are the works of the great Colt manufactory of fire-arms and mur- derous guns. Leaving the city behind, the passage soon winds between low green banks with spreading meadows backed by highland. The steamer feels her way cautiously along the narrow channel, and approaches the long bend from Wethersfield Cove, on the west side, in Wethersfield, and Keeney's Cove, on the east side, in Glastonbury, which occupy portions of the old bed of the River in colonial times.
The Wethersfield Landing is one of the oldest on the River. The old town lies back from the meadows, a small community now, engaged somewhat in manufactures and more in agriculture. Its tranquil elm-shaded streets, broad greens, and numerous old houses of colonial types are its features that most charm to-day. Visitors a century and more ago were particularly impressed with its culture of the onion. Brissot de Warville in his New Travels in the United States of America Performed in 1788, Kendall in his Travels through the Northwestern Parts of the United States in the Years 1807 and 1808, and others, made note of the vast fields in Wethersfield uniformly covered with this pungent bulb, and cultivated almost entirely by women and girls. Kendall remarked that "Wethersfield has a church built of brick, and strangers are facetiously told that it was built with 'onions.' On explanation it is said that it was built at the cost of the female part of the com- munity, and out of the profits of their agriculture." Their labor was easy and was performed with feminine nicety. For, as Kendall further observed, " the fair onion-growers
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unite with their industry a laudable care of their beauty ; . .. in the field their dress, which is contrived for protect- ing them from the sun, often disguises every lineament of the figure." De Warville bore similar testimony, and remarked with true Gallic gallantry : "New Haven yields not to Wethersfield for the beauty of the fair sex. At their balls during the winter it is not rare to see an hund- red charming girls adorned with those brilliant complexions seldom met with in journeyings to the South, and dressed in elegant simplicity." And the mischievous Peters, in his romancing " history " of Connecticut, in 1781 wrote, " It is the rule with [Wethersfield] parents to buy annually a silk gown for each daughter above the age of seven till she is married. The young beauty is obliged in return to weed a patch of onions with her own hand." The culture of the onion continues, but tobacco, leeks, and garden seeds now contend with it for supremacy in the products of the Wethersfield farms. Of the colonial mansions still remain- ing, chief in interest are the "Webb " and the "Deane " houses. The former was "Hospitality Hall," where met the military council of May, 1781, when Washington " fixed " with Rochambeau their plan of campaign. The assembling of the important personages that comprised the council, - Washington, Rochambeau, Generals Knox, Duportail, and the Marquis de Chastellux, Jonathan Trum- bull, Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth of Hartford, and Colonel Samuel B. Webb of Wethersfield and a member of Wash- ington's personal staff, - was a great social as well as military event in Wethersfield. The sittings took place in the large parlor of this mansion. The host of " Hospi- tality Hall" was then Joseph Webb, Colonel Samuel's elder brother. The mansion was built by their father, Joseph Webb, a prosperous young merchant, in 1752 or
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Wesleyan University-"College Row."
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Hartford to the Sea
1753. He died a few years later, at only thirty-five, and his widow married Silas Deane. Four years after the lady died, whereupon Deane took a second wife, a granddaughter of Governor Gurdon Saltonstall. Then the " Deane house," which Deane had previously erected adjoining the Webb place, began its hospitable career. Here Deane was living in affluence when he entered public life. How he became a confidant of Washington and was sent out as secret diplomatist and commercial agent to France is familiar history. At that time he was one of the foremost men in the Revolutionary cause. Subsequently came his trouble and contentions with Arthur Lee, his losses through his ill treatment by Congress, and finally his melancholy death abroad, " a martyr to the cause of America." Washington was a guest at the Deane house in June, 1775, when on his way, with General Charles Lee, to take command of the army at Cambridge. In the Revolution Wethersfield vessels engaged in privateering, and one of the earliest privateers in commission was a brigantine built here and sent out by Silas Deane's brother, Barnabas. She carried a battery of eight guns and a crew of forty-four men.
At the end of the long bend the steamer makes the Glastonbury Landing. This old town, dating from 1680, and taken from Wethersfield's territory, lies back from the River with a fringe of hills. Several of the estates along " The Street," lined by noble trees planted before the Revolution, are held by lineal descendants of the first set- tlers. The founders coming from the neighborhood of Glastonbury in England gave the place their old home name. It is a town now of varied manufacturing interests, with tobacco the chief agricultural staple. The manufac- tories utilize the water-power of several brooks that course through the town, contributing to its scenic attractions.
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Connecticut River
South Glastonbury, the next landing, at the end of another bend of the River, is as fair as the upper village. Here Roaring Brook, most picturesque of the town's streams, empties into the River. Once the Glastonburys were ship- building places, and had their part in the West India trade. An old-time ferry connects South Glastonbury with Rocky Hill on the west side, which also was originally a part of Wethersfield.
From the Glastonburys and Rocky Hill the steamboat follows the River's graceful windings between green banks, in a charming region, with the townships of Cromwell on the west side, and Chatham and Portland on the east. Then the broad sweep is made to the Portland Landing, and to Middletown opposite, at the upper turn of the Great Bend. Below Rocky Hill the banks become more perma- nent in appearance, showing less of the river's wash than above. Cromwell has the hills from which brown stone is quarried. Portland is the quarrying place particularly of freestone. From the hills here freestone has been taken out since early colony days. The first quarry was opened on the water's edge where the stone rose high and hung shelving over the River. Portland was then a part of the territory of Middletown, as were Chatham (from which Portland was taken) and Cromwell. Once shipbuilding was a gallant industry here as well as quarrying. During the Revolution and the War of 1812, the Portland or Chatham shipbuilders launched some fine frigates and pri- vateers. Later they turned out packets. The first packet to sail from New York for Texas was built here in 1836. Afterward all the packets of the New York and Galveston line, begun in 1847, came out of Portland shipyards.
As the steamer draws up to the Middletown Landing the little city rises pleasantly to view in the twilight.
Wesleyan University-North College. Destroyed by fire March 1, 1906.
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Hartford to the Sea
Beauty of situation is but one of the charms of Middle- town. John Fiske's delineation of a decade ago holds good to-day. "In the very aspect of these broad, quiet streets with their arching trees, their dignified and hospitable, sometimes quaint households, we see the sweet domesticity of the old New England unimpaired." In the social life of the place, as he says, there has always remained " some- thing of the courtliness and quiet refinement that marked the days of spinning-wheels and knee-buckles." Much of this has been due to its institutions of learning, “much also to the preservation of old traditions and mental habits through sundry strong personalities the saving remnant of which the prophet speaks." If the visitor on a radiant summer morning ascends by gently rising cross-streets from Main Street parallel with the River, to High Street on the terrace a hundred and sixty feet above, and bends his gaze riverward, an enchanting landscape opens to his view. An amphitheatre of rare natural beauty spreads out before and around him. The River with its graceful bend, and broadening in front of the city to perhaps half a mile, appears a silvery stream sweeping eastward, and presently in a narrowing course, framed in delectable hills. And if later one drives northward from the city's centre up the Valley, the spectacle which John Fiske has so felicitously pictured may be enjoyed :
" About eight miles north of Middletown as the crow flies, there stands an old house of entertainment known as Shipman's Tavern, in bygone days a favorite resort of merry sleighing parties, and famous for its fragrant mugs of steaming flip. It is now a lonely place ; but if you go behind it into the orchard and toil up a hill- side among the gnarled fantastic apple-trees, a grade so steep that it almost invites one to all fours, you suddenly come upon a scene so rare that when beheld for the twentieth time it excites surprise. I have seen few sights more entrancing. The land falls abruptly away
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Connecticut River
in a perpendicular precipice, while far below the beautiful River flows placidly through long stretches of smiling meadows such as Virgil and Dante might have chosen for the Elysian fields."
Early Middletown comprised two hamlets separated by wide stretches of meadows and designated respectively the "Lower Houses " and the "Upper Houses." The present city, in its central part, constituted the "Lower Houses," and the olden part of what is now Cromwell the " Upper Houses." These quaint terms held for more than a cen- tury and a half from the first settlements, or until 1851, when the " Upper Houses " became Cromwell. The point where Middletown was begun by the original settlers of 1650 is near the heart of the present city. The spot is seen marked by a rough boulder, a bronze plate in the stone's face recording the data of the town's beginnings. It overlooks the River and the nearer railroad, and is over- shadowed now by a Catholic institution which fronts the ancient burying-ground where the Puritan settlers sleep. The boulder placed close to the graveyard fence marks the Green of the first town centre. In the burying-ground, with its memorials of the early settlers, is seen the monu- ment to Commodore Macdonough, the "hero of Lake Champlain " in the War of 1812, whose associations with Middletown were through his marriage and home here after his laurels were won. His death occurred at sea.
Among modern structures on the Main Street a plain stone building of official aspect with the sign "Custom House " on its front is the relic of Middletown's departed commercial importance. At one time in the lattereighteenth century Middletown outran Hartford, and was the principal port on the River, much engaged in foreign trade. Early in that century in had begun shipbuilding, and the " cheer- ful music of the adze and hammer" were heard in its
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Wesleyan University-Wilbur Fisk Hall.
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Hartford to the Sea
shipyards for long after. At the opening of the Revolution it is said that more shipping was owned here than any- where else in Connecticut. John Fiske recalls a distinct nautical flavor about the place so late as the decade before the Civil War. Meanwhile manufacturing had become permanently established. By the middle of the nineteenth century mills were numerous on the brooks and streams tributary to the River, producing various small wares, - ingenious and very useful " Yankee notions " peculiar to Connecticut manufacture, - with machines and machin- ery. Then Middletown, at its bi-centennial, was described invitingly as a rural city where "wealth, satisfied with objects that impart refinement and rational enjoyment, must ever delight to dwell." Now its industrial statistics show a broader variety of manufacture, yet it remains the wholesome rural city with the added refinements of riper years, where all of its community as well as "wealth " must find is good to dwell.
Wesleyan University, which with the Berkeley Divinity School gives the city the academic atmosphere, has been identified with Middletown from the foundation of the institution in 1831, the first established college of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the country. Its career started in the buildings of Captain Partridge's " American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy," which had removed to Middletown from Norwich, Vermont, in the Upper Valley, in 1824. Designed to "educate the mind and body together," under military discipline, the academy had given a certain tone to the town, with its soldierly instructors and uniformed cadets, many of whom came from the South. But after five years it returned to Nor- wich, and its buildings were for sale when the projectors of Wesleyan were looking about for a location. This
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opportunity to acquire ready made college halls, together with a liberal endowment fund which Middletown citizens subscribed, brought the institution here. As time went on, and the college expanded to university proportions, new buildings were added, and along the broad college green on beautiful High Street, College Row arose fair and stately as it appears to-day. The Protestant Episcopal Berkeley Divinity School, although founded in Hartford, has also been identified with Middletown from its estab- lishment as a chartered institution. Credit for its exist- ence and its growth to its present proportions belongs and is generously given to Bishop John Williams (of the Deer- field Williams family), fourth bishop of Connecticut, who organized it as the theological department of Trinity after he had become president of that college in 1849, and who was its active head from the beginning till his death in 1899. The main building, once a commodious mansion house, constitutes a dignified central piece to the college plant.
Other mansions pleasantly placed along the River banks disappeared or were despoiled with the occupation of the water-front by railroads and its consequent trans- formation. One of these was the boyhood home of John Fiske. From his study window the view that " used to range across green pastures to the quiet blue waters " became obstructed by an embankment and a coal-wharf. This was the house of Fiske's maternal grandmother, where he lived from less than a year after his birth in Hartford (March, 1842) till at eighteen he entered Harvard in the sophomore class. It was in this old family mansion, browsing much in its excellent library, that he exhibited that marvellous precocity which astonished his tutors : at six, taking up the study of Latin ; at seven, reading Cæsar,
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Wesleyan University-Orange Judd Hall of Natural Science.
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