Welcome to your bi-weekly newsletter from Connecticut Explored with the latest stories, the newest Grating the Nutmeg podcast, programs and exhibitions from our partners to see/watch this month, and more!
Summer 2022 — Outsider Perspectives
Welcome to the Summer issue. In this issue we’re exploring how people from outside of Connecticut viewed our state and its residents. We kick off the Summer issue Inbox series with a pair of stories: Pfeffer’s “A Southern View of Twain’s Hartford” and Tom Shuch’s “Frederick Douglass in New London.”
Grace King may have considered herself an interloper. Her Gilded Age Hartford hosts would surely have said she was most welcome in their homes and at their tables. But King, a writer from New Orleans, expressed “with a critical eye and a rapier wit,” writes historian Miki Pfeffer in her Summer 2022 story, observations of ‘“Yankee’ ways … from her perch as the houseguest of her literary mentor Charles Dudley Warner of The Hartford Courant and his wife Susan Warner and their neighbors Sam and Olivia Clemens.” What fun!
“King,” writes Pfeffer, “a New Orleans author renowned for her fictional portrayals of Louisiana Creole culture, filled letters to her genteel but impoverished family back home with spicy gossip that provide a frank and unvarnished view of life in Hartford in the 1880s and 1890s. King had remarkable access to the interconnected residents of the idyllic Nook Farm neighborhood. ‘You never heard in all your life such curious histories as these men and women have,’ she wrote, ‘—not scandals—but divergencies of religious, political and social opinions. I enjoy supremely seeing and studying them.’ In a charitable moment she wrote, ‘Dear me! these people were the quintessence of elegance,’ but resentment of their privileges also bubbled up from below her polite surface. She visited Hartford in 1887, 1888, and briefly in 1891.
That resentment bubbled over at a dinner hosted by Samuel and Olivia Clemens. Pfeffer writes on June 1, 1887 “she wrote to her sister Nan about that dinner honoring her and Union General Lucius Fairchild, a pompous ‘Blatherskite,’ in King’s opinion. During the meal, he glorified his Grand Army of the Republic and ranted about President Grover Cleveland. Politically, the two honorees were poles apart. Livy Clemens was appalled when she realized she had paired an outspoken ‘Radical Republican’ with an unreconstructed Southerner, but King was amused and held her tongue.”
There were cultural differences, too, in manners, food—both the menu and the amount served, but appreciation, too. And in these intimate letters to her family, we get a rare peek inside the lives of Hartford’s Nook Farm.
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Frederick Douglass in New London
In his first story for CTExplored, Tom Schuch, who was one of the movers and shakers behind New London’s new Black Heritage Trail, brings us the little-known story of Abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s visit to Connecticut in 1848. Douglass had famously escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838.
Schuch reveals a New London divided on the issue of slavery. As he writes in his story in the Summer 2022 issue, “New London’s Whig newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, published an announcement of Douglass’s appearance on Saturday, May 13, 1848, while the city’s Jacksonian Democratic paper, The Daily Star, was silent. No other press accounts of his speech have been found, nor has any record of the attendees.”
But the story does not end there, because Douglass wrote about it “in the May 26, 1848 edition of his newspaper, The North Star. He had just returned home to Rochester, New York from a speaking tour that included four lectures at Dart’s Hall in New London,” and in that story, he didn’t mince words. Schuch leads off with what Douglass wrote: “It is by no means a grateful task to abolitionize Connecticut. As a state, it will probably be the last to be reformed.” Still, he had something positive to say about his reception in New London. Find out more, including the Black New Londoners fighting for abolition (abolished that year in Connecticut), in Schuch’s story in the Summer 2022 issue.
Read the entire story with your print subscription. (Subscribe at CTExplored.org/Shop.)
Or, subscribe to CTExplored/Inbox PREMIUM to read full texts of stories online only, just $30/year.
Or try us out with our First One Free Offer.
The Latest from Grating the Nutmeg
142. The Institute of Living at 200
The Hartford Retreat for the Insane was chartered in 1822 as one of the first mental health centers in the United States, and the first hospital of any kind in Connecticut. In 2022 the Connecticut Historical Society is exploring the story of mental health in our state with the special exhibition Common Struggle, Individual Experience on view through October 16, 2022 (and the subject of a story in our upcoming Fall 2022 issue). In this talk held at the CHS, Dr. Harold (Hank) Schwartz spoke about the history of the Hartford Retreat, renamed the Institute of Living in the 20th century. His presentation takes us through the state of mental health care in the early 1800s, the reasons for the founding of the Hartford Retreat, and its place in the development of modern psychiatry. Read our story here: “The Institute of Living,” Feb/Mar/Apr 2004
To learn more about the CHS’s exhibition Common Struggle, Individual Experience: An Exhibition About Mental Health, go to chs.org. You can view a 3D, virtual tour of the exhibition here.
Programs and Exhibitions to Enjoy This Month
31st Annual Juneteenth
The Amistad Center for Art & Culture invites you to its 31st annual Juneteenth celebration—one of the first and longest-running Juneteenth events in the state. An outdoor family day on Saturday, June 11, and city-wide celebration with special guest performances on Sunday, June 19, bring the diverse Greater Hartford community together in celebration of this important day in America’s history. Visit the center’s special exhibition, Anika Noni Rose, which celebrates the achievements of the Bloomfield-born actor and singer.
The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, AmistadCenter.org
Summer in the City
Celebrate summer at Connecticut’s Old State House! The Summer Concert Series is back along with the 2022 Farmers Market, which will bring the freshest produce and local products right downtown for easy shopping. The museum is open for visitors all summer long. Get out of the sun and come inside to learn more about the intersection of history and civics by touring restored historic rooms alongside a 21st-century underground exhibit space and the one-of-a-kind Museum of Curiosities.
Connecticut Democracy Center at Connecticut’s Old State House, ctdemocracycenter.org
Masonic & Odd Fellows History
Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury invites you to see Mystery & Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art, a special exhibition on view through September 4 revealing the hidden histories of the Freemasons and the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows—two fraternal brotherhoods with deep roots in American history. Visitors will see more than 100 carvings, sculptures, textiles, and regalia that convey the secretive practices of fraternal organizations through their rich symbolism and unusual imagery.
Mattatuck Museum, mattmuseum.org
Views of the Connecticut Shoreline
The historic waterfronts and picturesque landscapes of Mystic, Connecticut have long made the town a destination for artists and visitors. Picturing Mystic: Views of the Connecticut Shoreline, 1890 – 1950, on view through September 4 at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, focuses on the art and artists of Mystic, Noank, Mason’s Island, and Stonington, with more than 60 varied landscapes dating from 1890 to 1950. Historic maps, photographs, and postcards contextualize the works on view and trace how the village and the landscape have endured and changed over the last 130 years. Featuring art from the private collection of Jonathan C. Sproul and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum.
Lyman Allyn Art Museum, lymanallyn.org
You’re Invited June 11
Join Preservation Connecticut for the debut of its Picturing History: Historic Landscapes of Connecticut photography exhibition, inspired by the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted and his legacy as a landscape architect, author, and conservationist. You’re invited to the opening reception on June 11 at the Art League of New Britain. Picturing History will be on view at the Art League through the end of June before it tours the state. Please visit the art league’s website, alnb.org, for location and gallery hours.
Visit preservationct.org/events and olmsted200.org/join-the-celebration/events/ for more information.
Read all Summer 2022 program announcements HERE.
Editors’ Picks
Stories we love from back issues to read now.
“Where Mr. Twain and Mrs. Stowe Built Their Dream Houses,” Summer 2011
“Benedict Arnold Turns and Burns New London,” Fall 2006
“Slavery in Connecticut,” a compendium of stories from across our issues
“James Pennington: A Voice for Freedom,” Winter 2012/2013
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