October 29: The Nation’s “Oldest” Newspaper’s Very First Issue

  In October of 1764, 29-year-old Thomas Green, a fourth-generation printer, suddenly found himself out of a job working at the Connecticut Gazette print shop in New Haven. The Gazette, Connecticut’s very first newspaper, had been established several years earlier by the enterprising Benjamin Franklin, who had just sacked Green in order to install his…

October 27: Yankee Division Doughboys Honor One of Their Own

  Born in 1898 to Irish immigrants living in New Haven, Timothy Francis Ahearn was still a teenager when he enlisted in the 102d Infantry Division — famously known as the Yankee Division owing to the New England origins of most of its men — and was deployed overseas to fight the Germans during World…

October 25: The Fateful, Fatal, and Final Voyage of the Bounty

  The HMS Bounty is undoubtedly one of the most famous and storied sailing vessels in history, capturing the world’s imagination ever since the original British ship was the site of a famous mutiny against Captain William Bligh in 1789 in the South Pacific. Even though the original HMS Bounty was destroyed in 1790, a…

October 24: Baseball Legend Jackie Robinson Dies in Stamford

  Today in 1972, baseball legend Jackie Robinson passed away at his longtime home in Stamford, Connecticut. Today, Robinson is a household name, best known as the first African-American to play Major League Baseball and as one of the greatest all-around players of the game in American history. In 1947, when he was drafted by…

October 23: They Met, Married, & Became the First Protestant Missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands – All in 24 Days

  During the first quarter of the 19th century, the tidal wave of Protestant Christian revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening transformed Connecticut’s social and cultural landscape. New Protestant denominations finally gained a foothold in the once exclusively Congregational state, church attendance among all sects dramatically increased, and scores of young Connecticut men and…

October 22: A Poor Yankee Peddler from Harwinton Becomes a Railroad Tycoon

  Collis Potter Huntington was born today in 1822, the sixth of nine children born to William and Elizabeth Huntington of Harwinton, Connecticut. The Huntington family, owners of a farm in a section of Harwinton fittingly known as “Poverty Hollow,” constantly struggled to make ends meet, forcing Collis to set off on his own as…

October 21: 1892 – When Columbus Stood For Inclusion & Columbus Day Came 9 Days Late

  At a time when immigrants – many from Italy – were pouring into America in numbers that seriously alarmed the “old stock” descendants of the original Puritan settlers, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s even-then-disputed “discovery” of America proved an ideal time for Connecticans to assess the contributions of newcomers while expressing a common patriotism….

October 20: A Monument to the State’s Founding Minister

  On October 20, 1950, a crowd of several hundred Connecticans gathered in front of the Old State House in Hartford to observe the unveiling of a new, eight-foot-tall statue of Thomas Hooker, the Puritan minister and “founding father” of Connecticut who founded the settlement of Hartford in 1636. Born in England in 1586, Thomas…