Nellie and Pinocchio go a-roaming

The Wenham Museum in Wenham, Massachusetts is borrowing artifacts, sketches, and illustrations from the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection for their upcoming exhibit Picture This: 90 Years of Storybook Art (February 3- May 6, 2012).  Classic toy stories will come to life through more than 50 original illustrations, vintage toys, and antique books in a colorful display that is engaging for all ages. In the gallery visitors will be able to make their own picture book to take away after their visit, dress in costume to become part of the story, and use story cubes to create their own picture stories all while enjoying the illustrations and reading classics of children’s literature.

The NCLC is lending two artifacts from Nellie, a cat on her own, written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt and published in 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Ms. Babbitt was born in 1932 in Dayton, OH, the daughter of Ralph Zane and Genevieve (Converse) Moore. She received her B.A. from Smith College in 1954. That same year she married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, who also collaborated with her on her first book, The 49th Magician.

The Babbitt Papers hold the manuscripts, preliminary sketches, finished artwork and models for this and many other Babbitt titles, including her most famous work, the multiple award-winning Tuck Everlasting.   Seven paintings and two sketches by Ms. Babbitt will accompany Nellie and her hat to Wenham. Nellie a cat on her own written and illustrated by Natalie BabbittTo keep Nellie company, eight collages by Ed Young will be featured in the Wenham show as well.  These collages are the finished works of art for his Pinocchio, published in 1996 by Philomel.  Mr. Young, a children’s book author/illustrator and winner of many awards was born in Tientsin, China and raised in Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he was interested in drawing and storytelling from an early age.  He moved to the U.S. in 1951 to study architecture but quickly changed his focus to art.  Mr. Young has illustrated over eighty books, many of which he also wrote.

Pinocchio by Ed Young

The mission of the Wenham Museum is to protect, preserve, and interpret the history and culture of  Boston’s North Shore, domestic life, and the artifacts of childhood.  The Museum was established in 1922, making 2012 its 90th anniversary. It began as an historic house museum, but the first donor, Elizabeth Richards Horton – who also happened to be the last child to grow up in the house – donated nearly 1000 dolls to the museum that had been her childhood home, thus establishing the Wenham Museum as one of the premier museums of dolls, toys, and the artifacts of childhood from the 17th century to the present. Since then the museum has maintained a tradition of celebrating childhood and domestic life through its exhibitions of artifacts that have been a part of childhood for the past 400 years, including children’s books, toys and dolls of all kinds, electric trains, and textiles and objects of domestic life.

UConn Says Goodbye to an Inspirational Leader – November 1963

It was the New Frontier. Full of “vigah”, offering service programs like the Peace Corps, and stressing physical fitness and 50 mile hikes. Later it would be romanticized as Camelot and dampened by revelations of personal failings, but in 1963, many young Americans were still enthralled by the youthful President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.  It came to an end on a November morning in Dallas, and within minutes, television and radio news brought the word that the president was dead.  After receiving the Associated Press bulletin, WHUS, the student radio station, turned a monitor out a window so that those passing the Student Union Building could hear the latest news.  In a special Saturday edition November 23, the Connecticut Daily Campus reported on the scene in the Student Union Lobby: “The shock grew and so did the crowd. They were more hopeful and at the same time more fearful. Rumor said he was dying. Everyone took another glimpse at the AP or UPI wire services and waited and prayed … Then the television announcer said, ‘President Kennedy is dead.’ It took a while until the meaning of the words were felt. Then they wept.”

Memorial to John F. Kennedy, 1964 Nutmeg

–Mark J. Roy, University Communications (retired)

Documentation studies — a wealth of information about Connecticut’s historical properties

There are few sources as rich in information about the state’s historical properties as the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection (CHPC).  While its architectural surveys for about two-thirds of Connecticut’s 169 towns and over 1800 archaeological surveys are worthy of discussion, the documentation studies will be the focus of attention in today’s blog post.

Former White Tower Restaurant at 123 East Main Street, Waterbury, Connecticut. Photograph taken by Geoffrey Rossano, 2001.

Documentation studies are generated when a federal or state-funded project has to take into account its affects on historical archeaological resources. The studies document the “before” structure or when changes in the structure mitigate adverse effects of changing or destroying the building. If the building is considered irreplaceable or very important historically then the State Historic Preservation Office decides whether or not to allow the project to proceed. 

White Tower Restaurant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ca. 1930 (as the Waterbury restaurant would have looked in its heyday)
 
Industrial historian Geoffrey Rossano conducted a historical overview and assessment of current conditions of the former White Tower Restaurant, built in 1935, in Waterbury, Connecticut, in August 2001.  The report gives extensive information not only about this particular property in Waterbury, but also shows how the property was significant to the formation of White Tower restaurants (a copycat from the more famous White Castle chain), and to the history of fast-food service in the United States.  The survey tells us about the history of the neighborhood of East Main Street, and how the structure, possibly the last surviving example in the U.S. when the study was done in 2001, was an example of  “the ‘kitschy’ vernacular commercial architecture that has appeared throughout the [20th] century.” 
 
My fellow librarian Norma Holmquist, who works at the UConn Waterbury campus library, verified for me that the old White Tower building at 123 East Main Street is no longer standing.  Thanks, Norma!  Located on that spot is the Coop bookstore for the UConn Waterbury campus library (that information is courtesy of Janet Swift, another Waterbury campus librarian — thanks, Janet!). 
 
This documentation study is just one of hundreds in the CHPC, with historical details about many properties that held a special place in their towns and cities across the state.  For more information about the contents of the collection, visit the listing at http://chpc.lib.uconn.edu/.
 
Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collection
 

Honoring and Remembering

Storrs Agricultural College football team, 1897. Willis Hawley is standing, second from the left.

The Ultimate Sacrifice Memorial at the University of Connecticut was dedicated at the Veteran’s Day observance in 2008, but it is not the first time that fallen alumni have been remembered.  Hawley Armory, built in 1915, was named in honor of Willis Nicholas Hawley, an 1898 graduate of what was then Storrs Agricultural College. Hawley was one of four SAC graduating seniors was joined the U.S. Army to serve in the Spanish-American War. On leave in late September while still in training, Hawley visited the campus in late September. Two months later, on Nov. 18, 1898, he died of typhoid fever at a Red Cross hospital in Philadelphia, the first graduate to die while in military service, and thus memorialized with the dedication of the new armory in 1915.

 

Memorial plaque in Student Union with the names of UConn students who died while in military service.

 

In the early 1950s, Hawley and alumni who died in wartime from 1898 to 1953 were remembered when a bronze plaque bearing their names was installed in the newly opened Student Union Building.  The list included 143 names of those who died after Hawley in World Wars I and II, and the Korean War. Replaced by a mural in 1957, the plaque was never re-installed, and its whereabouts remains a mystery.

 

–Mark J. Roy, University Communications (retired)

The History of the Railroad in Litchfield, Connecticut — photographs and a talk on Wednesday, October 26

Railroad station in Litchfield, Connecticut, ca. 1900

On Wednesday, October 26, at 7:00p.m. I will be giving a talk at the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield, Connecticut, about that town’s railroad history.  The story starts with the Shepaug Valley Railroad, which opened for business on January 1, 1872, and traveled from Hawleyville to Litchfield in this mountainous region of western Connecticut.  After financial difficulties in the 1870s and 1880s forced the railroad to restructure, the line emerged in 1887 as the Shepaug, Litchfield and Northern Railroad, only to come under the control of the massive New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, better known as the New Haven Railroad, in 1892.  From that time to its final demise in 1948 it was known as the Shepaug Branch of the New Haven Railroad.

As the Shepaug, Litchfield and Northern Railroad it was nicknamed the “slow, late and noisy.”   The route contained almost 200 curves, one tunnel, and several stiff grades.  It was known as the “second most crooked railroad in the U.S.” (the most crooked was the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway in Marin County, California), measuring 32 miles of track but was actually 17 miles as the crow flies.  Train speed could never exceed 20 miles per hour.

If you are interested in attending the talk at the Oliver Wolcott Library you can register at http://www.owlibrary.org/programs.php

You can find more photographs from Litchfield’s railroad past on Flickr, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/doddcenter/sets/72157627746164811/

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

73 years ago today…

…the Hurricane of 1938 slammed into southern New England. 

No Tweets, no IM, no text messages. To reach fellow students with news about a devastating hurricane, the Connecticut Campus (it wouldn’t add Daily to its name until 1954) put out a special edition on September 22.

Printing presses were not operating, so the editors used a hand-cranked mimeograph machine to publish the news.  The 1938 hurricane was a surprise. There wasn’t a week of watching and waiting as the storm neared by Connecticut shoreline as we had with Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.

A survey of the damage conducted in the days following the hurricane by two forestry students would find 1,762 trees were either snapped off or uprooted on the campus grounds. Sherman P. Hollister, superintendent of grounds, told the Campus it might take one hundred years for the campus to regain its former beauty.

On page 65 of the 1939 Nutmeg Yearbook, a sixteen-photograph montage shows some of the damage on campus. The only caption reads: Windy Wednesday.

 Decades later, Provost Albert Waugh, a faculty member in 1938, wrote in his diary:

 “How the wind blew! How the rains fell! And how the hug oaks were torn out by their roots or their great trunks broken in half! Thirty-five years later we have in our back yard a great swamp maple with a long spiraling scar once and a half around its truck where the tree was twisted like a corkscrew!”

[slideshow]

–Mark J. Roy, University Communications (retired)

Tariffville Dam on the Farmington River

Tariffville Dam on the Farmington River, ca. 1915

The last two posts of this week showed some photographs of Walter Atkin, an employee at the Tariffville Dam, who went fishing from an open window at the hydroelectric station.  Those photographs were just three of many interesting images of the dam that we find in the Hartford Electric Light Company Records, one of which includes this beautiful wide angled shot of the dam, taken circa 1915.  

The  Tariffville Dam hydroelectric station was built in 1899 on the Farmington River in Simsbury, Connecticut, by the Hartford Electric Light Company.  It provided electricity to the Hartford area until at least August 1955, when it was destroyed by flooding caused by back to back hurricanes in August 1955. 
 
Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

The Man With the Fish — Here’s the scoop

Here’s the deal about the man with the fish. 

This gentleman is identified on the photograph as Walter Atkin who presumably worked at the Tariffville Dam hydroelectric station on the Farmington River in Simsbury, Connecticut.  The date of the photograph is 1948.  This photograph is from the Hartford Electric Light Company Records, a collection of business records of this company that we have here at the Dodd Research Center. 

The collection has these photos of Mr. Atkin fishing directly from a window in the power station, something I personally think is hilarious.  I wonder if his employers were aware that he was spending his time in this manner while on the job.  Hmmm…I wonder if my supervisors would approve my fishing in Mirror Lake during work time. 

Hey, it worked for Walter…

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

Firsts for Women in UConn History (Part 6)

Women first served on the Board of Trustees in 1920, when Annie Vinton of Mansfield and Mrs. O. B. Robinson were named to the board. Robinson served two years, but Vinton, for whom one of Mansfield’s elementary schools is named, served a decade. A member of the Mansfield Board of Education, Vinton later served three terms as a member of the State House of Representatives, where she worked on issues relating to education and children.

-Mark J. Roy, University Communications (retired)

A Campus by the Shore

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One of the loveliest spots in Connecticut also happens to be a regional campus of the University of Connecticut.  In addition to serving as the home of UConn’s Connecticut Sea Grant College Program, Project Oceanology, National Undersea Research Center and Long Island Sound Resource Center, the Avery Point campus is situated on the site of what was the estate of Morton F. Plant, a wealthy businessman.   Built in 1903, Branford House and its grounds were lovingly documented in several hundred hand-colored photographs, some of which are shown above.  The photographs, colored by Blanche M. Osborne, were taken in 1917.  These, and earlier black and white photographs of the construction of the house, are available for viewing on the Connecticut History Online website.  Additional information about Mr. Plant and his estate can be found on the Avery Point campus website.

-Betsy Pittman, University Archivist

Firsts for Women in UConn History (Part 5)

The first woman to hold an administrative faculty position was Margaret Kenwell, who served as Lady Principal from 1894 to 1896. The first woman named as a dean was M. Estella Sprague, who headed what was then the Division of Home Economics. Sprague served as dean from 1920 to 1926. She had been a professor of home economics at Connecticut Agricultural College since 1917. During World War I, Sprague, who had been the first woman extension worker at Connecticut, was the state director of home economics for the Federal Food Administration.  Sprague Hall in the East Campus Residence Hall complex was named for her in 1942, two years after her death.

-Mark J. Roy, University Communications (retired)

M. Estella Sprague, Dean of Home Economics, 1920

Firsts for Women in UConn History (Part 4)

Elizabeth Rourke, Editor-in-Chief, 1939 Nutmeg

The Nutmeg Yearbook was first published in 1915, and its first woman editor-in-chief was Elizabeth Rourke, a member of the Class of 1939. Hers was the last graduating class of Connecticut Agricultural College. A month after her June graduation, her alma mater became the University of Connecticut.

-Mark J. Roy, University Communications (retired)