In 1998, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots pro football team, was seeking a new home for his franchise, which had outgrown their small and outdated stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. After failing to secure stadium deals in South Boston and then Rhode Island, Kraft set his sights on Connecticut. His quest for…
Tag: hartford
April 21: Rumors of His Death Were NOT Greatly Exaggerated
Today in 1910, Mark Twain, one of America’s most famous authors and Connecticut’s most famous residents, died at his home in Redding. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he grew up in Missouri and traveled extensively, working as a newspaper reporter and fiction writer, until settling with his family in 1871 in the wealthy “Nook Farm”…
April 17: The “Robber Baron” Who Saved the U.S. Economy — Twice
Today in 1837, John Pierpont Morgan, one of the most famous businessmen and financiers in American history, was born in Hartford. Born into a wealthy and influential Connecticut family, J. P. Morgan was groomed to be a successful financier from an early age. He quickly moved up the ranks of his father’s banking companies…
April 16: Frederick Douglass Deploys Social Media in Hartford, 1864
Carte-de-visite photographs were the hot social media of the mid-nineteenth century. These small portrait photographs, mounted on cards, were some of the first such images to be commercially reproduced, and they created a craze for collectible photographs. People collected carte-de-visite portraits of family, friends and celebrities and then mounted them in photograph albums. Celebrity…
April 7: WWI War Fever Heats Up Hartford
Today in 1917, citizens of Hartford thronged the streets in a mass patriotic meeting to show support for America’s formal entry into World War I. The Great War had been raging in Europe for three years, but the United States had been extremely reluctant to join the fight against the Germans. American resistance to…
March 24: Joel Barlow, The Popular Poet Who Died A Distant Death
Joel Barlow, American poet and one of Connecticut’s most ambitious — albeit not always successful — learned men of the late-18th century, was born today in 1754 in the western Connecticut town of Redding. As a member of the Yale class of 1778, the bright young man found himself surrounded by an impressive crowd…
March 14: A Gem of a Man Known as the “King of Diamonds”
Few people did more to shape twentieth-century popular culture in Connecticut than the man they called “the King of Diamonds” – the jeweler and marketing genius Bill Savitt, who died today in 1995, at age 94. Savitt combined a P. T. Barnum-worthy sense of marketing possibilities with a passion for sports and philanthropy to…
March 11: She Taught a Man’s World How to Build a Business
When Beatrice Fox Auerbach became president of Hartford’s G. Fox & Company in 1938, in an era where there were scarcely any female retail executives in the United States, neither she nor any of the popular department store’s board members expected her to remain in the position for very long. But instead of stepping…
March 5: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Connecticut
Today in 1860, sectional tensions over slavery and its expansion into the country’s newly formed states and territories was nearing the breaking point. It was a crucial election year, and members of the nation’s political parties were actively trying to decide who would be their standard bearers in the upcoming presidential campaign. For the…
March 2: A Great and Deadly Accident Finds a City Unprepared
Around 2:00pm on March 2, 1854, a deafening blast rocked the Dutch Point neighborhood of Hartford following the explosion of a massive steam boiler at the Fales & Gray Car Works factory. The force of the explosion blew out the eight-inch-thick brick walls encasing the factory’s boiler room, causing the roof to cave in…
February 25: Samuel Colt Finally Gets His Shot at Success.
Today in 1836, Hartford inventor Samuel Colt — after being expelled from school, sailing the seas, and touring as a showman demonstrating the unusual effects of nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas” –received a U.S. patent for the first revolving chamber percussion pistol. This was a dramatically new type of firearm, which would revolutionize the…
February 24: Hartford’s First Black Policeman Also Became the First of the Famed Tuskegee Airmen.
The Tuskegee Airmen are celebrated today both as war heroes and as the first Black aviators in American military service. With American involvement in World War II looming, 13 men entered training at Tuskegee air field in Alabama, and five survived the rigorous training program to earn their silver wings on March 7, 1942….