Just after 8 a.m. on the morning of February 4, 1864, as the Civil War was nearing the end of the third year of the nation’s most violent and divisive conflict, the loud, sharp, incessant tones of a steam whistle pierced the air in Hartford, alerting city residents to danger. As men and women…
January 24: A. C. Gilbert, the Greatest Generation’s Greatest Toymaker
Today in 1961, A. C. “A. Co.” Gilbert, the man whose hands-on-learning toys were the foundation of the American toy industry during the first half of the twentieth century, died at age 76. A gifted athlete and pole-vaulting gold medalist at the 1908 London Olympics, Gilbert was also a talented illusionist who financed his…
January 4: Connecticut’s First Woman Pilot’s Final Flight
In the heady days of early American aviation, when tales of plucky pilots and ingenious innovators were a dime a dozen, few pilots stood out from the crowd as much as Mary Goodrich Jenson, the first woman to earn a pilot’s license in the state of Connecticut. Born in Hartford in 1907, young Mary…
November 25: Hartford’s Puerto Rican “Godmother”
María Colón Sánchez arrived in Hartford at the age of 28 in 1954, one of thousands of Puerto Ricans who moved to Connecticut in search of better economic opportunity during the mid-20th century. Within a few years, she had saved up enough money to open a convenience store, Maria’s News Stand, on Albany Avenue,…
June 25: The Hollywood Superstar & The Roxbury Writer
Today in 1956, the small, rural, western Connecticut town of Roxbury was swarmed by reporters who had learned that the internationally famous starlet Marilyn Monroe was there visiting her fiancé, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller. The couple had been dating for months, and they had announced their plans to marry the week before. Miller,…
June 20: CT Resident Helen Keller Honored by President Kennedy
Today in 1961, Easton resident Helen Keller received a birthday greeting from President John F. Kennedy containing high praise for her lifetime’s worth of hard work and advocacy for people who, like herself, were blind and/or deaf. In it, he wrote: “You are one of that select company of men and women whose achievements…
June 19: Connecticut Troops At the Mexican Border
In June 1916, while the horrors of the Great War in Europe remained an ocean away, President Woodrow Wilson confronted a more immediate threat along the United States’ border with Mexico. Earlier that year, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had led a deadly raid into New Mexico that left an American town destroyed. In response,…
June 8: The Man Whose Songs the Soldiers Sang Dies in Hartford
Henry Clay Work, one of the most popular songwriters of the Civil War era, died today in 1884 at age 51, while in Hartford visiting his mother. Work, who composed such still-sung songs as “Marching Through Georgia” and “Kingdom Coming” (you know the tune), was born in Middletown in 1832 into an activist family…
June 6: In the Skies of France, A D-Day Message From Mom
In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, Private Robert C. Hillman became one of over 13,000 American paratroopers to leap out of a plane over Normandy as part of the “D-Day” invasion of occupied France — one of the largest offensives of World War II. A member of the legendary 101st Airborne…
June 4: America’s First “Lemon Law”
Today in 1982, in response to an increasing number of consumer complaints about seriously defective new automobiles (colloquially called “lemons”), the Connecticut legislature passed the nation’s first “Lemon Law.” Introduced by freshman representative John J. Woodcock III of South Windsor, the law was loosely modeled on a set of consumer protections for automobile buyers…
June 3: A Historic & Presidential Commencement at the Coast Guard Academy
While the commencement ceremonies at the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) are always filled with a dazzling degree of pomp and circumstance, the Academy’s 78th commencement, on June 3, 1964, was especially memorable. For the first time in history, the President of the United States delivered the commencement speech. Plans had been made…
June 1: America’s First Public Art Museum
Today in 1842, Connecticut Governor Chauncey Cleveland signed an act formally incorporating the Wadsworth Atheneum, creating the first public art museum in the United States. Construction immediately began on the iconic, castle-like building in Hartford that remains the centerpiece and most recognizable feature of the Atheneum campus, and the institution officially opened two years…