Connecticut River Museum at 50
June 1, 2024During the 1970s the increasingly decrepit Steamboat Dock building at the foot of Main Street in Essex, Connecticut, was a topic of conversation for visitors and residents alike....
The Deadliest War in the Connecticut River Valley
December 1, 2023Odds are that most hikers who traverse Connecticut’s Metacomet Trail along a spectacular trap rock ridge west of the Connecticut River have little idea that both trail and ridge are named after the Native American chief who in 1675 started a resistance that—if it had been successful—could have emptied New England of English colonists....
Migratory Bird Act
September 1, 2023On September 1, 1914, at 1:00 p.m., the last passenger pigeon on Earth, Martha (named after Martha Washington), died at the Cincinnati Zoo....
The Art, Architecture, and Landscape of Hill-Stead Museum
June 1, 2023The Tunxis Indians were the among the first people to utilize the land and the waters along the Farmington River, which were rich in wildlife, for hunting and fishing. In the early 1600s, the English settlers arrived....
An Island Treasure
December 1, 2022Selden’s shoreline bristles with looming hardwoods and a thorny understory. Surrounded by a natural moat, this verdant fortress, the largest island along the Connecticut River, is easily mistaken for the mainland....
Geology of the Connecticut Valley
December 1, 2022For such a small area, New England, Connecticut, and the Connecticut River Valley have an amazing diversity of geology....
Practical Beauty
August 31, 2022On a fine spring day in May, a morning mist rises as snowmelt from the peaks of Vermont and New Hampshire spills over the long slope of Holyoke’s granite dam....
Charter Oak
August 31, 2022It’s hard to believe that a tree could save a democracy, but according to legend, that’s exactly what happened when Sir Edmund Andros arrived in the Connecticut colony in 1687 to collect the royal charter given to the Puritan settlers by King Charles II in 1662....
Hetty Green
May 31, 2022Queen of Wall Street, Witch of Wall Street. Whichever sobriquet you use, Henrietta (Hetty) Howland Robinson Green was one of the richest Americans—ever....
The Lost Continents of the Connecticut River
May 31, 2022Spattered with glacial detritus, it is an area of rocky dells and ridges, cut by Roaring Brook as it tumbles down toward Whalebone Cove on the Connecticut River. Red Oaks and White Pines march up the hill, with patches of hornbeams and black birch....
Worlds Apart
May 31, 2022The Connecticut River cradles the city of Middletown (f. 1653) at a modest bend in its course, a place originally called Mattabesset, Algonquin for “end of the carrying place.”...
Gamboling on the Frozen River
December 1, 2021It was always colder way back when, back in the day, at least according to the ancient ones—generations of parents and grandparents. It turns out they were correct....
My Ride Down Hog River
December 1, 2021I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the minute I got the call—a chance to go where few people have been before without leaving Connecticut....
A Man’s Home is His Castle
September 1, 2021From the deck of the Aunt Polly, William Gillette watched the passing green hills of the lower Connecticut River. It was 1913, he was sixty years old, and he had been thinking about retirement....
Mabel Osgood Wright
September 1, 2021Three miles from the Connecticut River, we stood in a circle under a tree in the garden of Emily Dickinson’s home, reading poems, passing a book around, no more than two or three feet from each other. The 1813 Amherst home built for her grandparents stood proudly in the sunshine, and the voices of another tour group filtered out....
Lydia Sigourney
May 29, 2021Three miles from the Connecticut River, we stood in a circle under a tree in the garden of Emily Dickinson’s home, reading poems, passing a book around, no more than two or three feet from each other. The 1813 Amherst home built for her grandparents stood proudly in the sunshine, and the voices of another tour group filtered out....
The Forgotten Flood of 1936
March 1, 2021On March 11, 1936, rain began to fall on the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire. The next day it didn’t stop, nor the next, depositing at least five inches of water over New England. The snowfall had been heavy that winter, and as snowbanks washed off the hills, people stared nervously at the rapidly rising levels of their local streams and rivers....
A Small Bead Called Wampum
March 1, 2021We all like to visit the beach in warm weather. We like to stick our toes in the sand, wade in the water, maybe collect a few shells. The Native Peoples of the Connecticut shore and estuaries did just that hundreds of years ago. For them, certain shellfish not only fed the body but sustained the spirit as well. Quahog clams and large whelks were of particular importance for the creation of a small bead called wampum....
Crossing the Bar
November 29, 2020There’s a sailor superstition about changing a boat’s name. State of New York, largest and costliest steamer ever to run on the Connecticut River, was to be called Vermont....
Qwannitucket
November 29, 2020Qwannitucket, the Long Tidal River land known as the Connecticut River Valley, is the living pulse of this region currently known as New England. This article, which focuses on the lower valley of the Connecticut River, is intended to raise awareness in modern society about the beautiful resource that connects north to south, mountains to ocean, the swimmers, winged, four-legged, two-legged, and all the living beings known and unknown that dwell here....
The Hartford Wits & the World They Made
November 29, 2020On the west shore of the Connecticut River, the town of Hartford bustled in the morning light. People gathered at the market on the town green, in taverns, and in coffeehouses, where a few years earlier the local secret society might have planned a revolution, spurred on by the demon caffeine....
VENTURE SMITH’S LONG STRUGGLE
November 29, 2020In 1776, at the dawn of the American Revolution, Venture Smith stood on the banks of the Connecticut River a free man. He had his own farm, his wife and child lived with him, and he had a prosperous 130-acre farm in the village of East Haddam. It had taken him a long time to get there, and the journey was not of his own choosing....
From the Publisher:
November 29, 2020This issue of Estuary contains our first article by a descendant of Indigenous people. These people inhabited North and South America for thousands of years, maybe 12,000 years, long before the word “America” existed....
A Witch Hazel Winter
September 1, 2020Walking through the Connecticut River Valley woodlands in the autumn, you might happen upon a large understory plant with gentle golden star-flowers and few leaves, a strange anomaly this late in the year. This is witch hazel, sometimes called spotted alder or winterbloom, and grows throughout New England, appearing to be a large, irregular shrub or small tree....
John Ledyard’s Journey
June 1, 2020The year 2020 notches a notable anniversary in the annals of the Connecticut River. It is the centennial year of Dartmouth’s Ledyard Canoe Club. Each spring their cadres of collegiate canoeists replicate the legendary paddle their progenitor took in May of 1773. His adventure is the most famous canoe journey in the long history of the River....
Lady Fenwick
June 1, 2020One May morning in 1638, a ship slipped down the Thames River in England bound across the Atlantic Ocean. The doughty craft’s destination was the Connecticut River. Deep in her hold were boxes and barrels packed with seeds, cuttings, and saplings. The cargo comprised a formal English garden to be transplanted where only a short time prior the blood of English colonists and their indigenous enemies seeped into loamy Connecticut soil. Below decks, in a cramped cabin shared with her husband and infant son, an extraordinary free-spirit who was to become “the most magical and mysterious woman in Connecticut River history” planned her plantings and battled mal de mer....
Who Owns the Connecticut River?
June 1, 2020Our Connecticut River has a storied past—especially the struggles between contenders for who owned the River. As one of our most discernible landmarks flowing down the center spine of New England, the River was referenced as a boundary of the various states beginning as early as 1644 with kerfuffles lasting nearly 300 years....
The Connecticut- Meet the River
March 1, 2020The word “Connecticut” stems from a French corruption of the Mohegan word “Quinetucket,” which means “beside the long tidal river.” Adriaen Block, the Dutch explorer and first European to chart the River in 1614, called it the Fresh River. The English first settled the area in the 1630s and referred to it as the Great River....
Ferries of the River
March 1, 2020The Connecticut River connects us up and downstream. It also separates us from bank to bank. For thousands of years, indigenous people used dugout canoes to get from one shore to the other. The dugout could easily carry the people, meat, plants, tools, and fish around which their foraging lifestyle revolved. Trees transformed into boats were powered by paddle, wind, current, and tide. These organic craft were totally sustainable....