Snapshots! Summer 2023

(c) Connecticut Explored, Summer, 2023

Long Island was once considered part of Connecticut.

Between 1640 and 1664 both the Connecticut Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony claimed jurisdiction over Long Island. Connecticut exercised jurisdiction until the conclusion of the Anglo-Dutch War in 1664, when King Charles II granted Long Island, with what had been New Netherland, to his brother, James, Duke of York. While Connecticut exerted some claims until 1674, when the Second Anglo-Dutch War ended, it never succeeded in reclaiming Long Island.

Charles Island in Milford has been cursed three times.

To learn more, listen to the Amazing Tales podcast episode “Curses, Buried Treasures, Ghosts: Milford’s Charles Island Has it All.”

amazingtalesct.podbean.com

Notable and Quotable

On assignment for The Sacramento Union, Mark Twain spent four months in Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands. The experience stuck with him. Twenty-three years later, in 1889, while living in Connecticut, he recounted his experience:

“For me the balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its wild land solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”

Summer Issue Trivia Challenge

Test your island knowledge! Stumped? Scour this issue of Connecticut Explored for all the answers.

1. What commodity made up the majority of goods shipped from Connecticut to Caribbean islands between 1768 and 1772?

• a) Horses
• b) Sugar cane
• c) Rum
• d) Onions

2. What is the meaning behind the word “menhaden,” the boney, oily fish native to Connecticut waters?

• a) It is named after a famous sea captain who lived on Pine Island.
• b) It comes from an Algonquian word for “fish.”
• c) It comes from an Algonquian word for “fertilizer.”
• d) It comes from the Dutch word for “hat.”

3. Pine Island served as all of the following during its long history except…

• a) a summer retreat.
• b) a fish oil company.
• c) a quarantine station during the typhoid epidemic in 1823.
• d) a gun battery during World War II.

4. What did Elizabeth Hird, owner of Outer Island, decide to do with the land in 1995?

• a) She donated it to the people of the United States.
• b) She held a music festival on the island called “Outer This World.”
• c) She built a small neighborhood of seven houses.
• d) She turned it into a solar farm.

For answers, see the bottom of Hog River Journal.

Locate It!