By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored, Inc. Spring 2019 SUBSCRIBE/BUY THE ISSUE Call this a fish story. It’s about two rivers, one governor, an Irish fish, and a Hollywood legend. It took place a long time ago—back in 1965. That’s when John Dempsey, the only foreign-born Connecticut governor since the colonial era, returned to

by Walter W. Woodward As state historian, I begin each day excited about building greater awareness for the history of our state. Helping more people better appreciate all the important, curious, fun, unique, profound, strange, and (insert your favorite adjective here) _________ things that happened in our past is what I live and breathe for.

Listen to Grating the Nutmeg Episode 61! State historian Walt Woodward interviews Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzergerald about traditional holiday recipes. Find the recipes here! Savory Connecticut Thanksgiving Chicken Pie Mince Pie Roast Venison Roast Capon Sweet Apple Pie English Plum Pudding Marlborough Pie Pippin Tart Plumb Cake Puff Pastry Pumpkin Pie Short Pastry

State historian Walter Woodward’s column is expanded to a full story in the Fall 2018 issue. Read it HERE. Listen to his Grating the Nutmeg podcast on this topic, “Trouble in the Land of Steady Habits,” HERE.

By Walter W. Woodward  (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. Spring 2018 With all the recent talk about removing offensive statues from public view, it is instructive to realize this phenomenon is nothing new. More than one Connecticut statue has a long history of provoking heated controversy and demands for its removal. Consider, for example, the statue

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. Winter 2017-2018 Subscribe/Buy the Issue! In the fall of 1858, William Ransom was really homesick. Like tens of thousands of Connecticans affected during the first half of the 19th century by such issues as tapped-out farmland, economic downturns, high taxation, climate change, and political repression, he had

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. Fall 2017 Thanks to John Winthrop Jr., the colony of Connecticut could rightly be called America’s first scientific research laboratory. One of the leading figures in early New England settlement, Winthrop totally confounds the stereotype of the stern, bigoted, anti-enlightenment Puritan. He was outgoing, tolerant, and passionately

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. Summer 2017 At last summer’s Democratic national convention, delegates introduced Connecticut as “the home of the pizza and the hamburger.” They might more appropriately have praised us as the home of the Connecticut Election Cake. From the earliest days of the republic until the late 19th century,

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored, Spring 2017 SUBSCRIBE! On June 4, 1921, a German army of 150,000 troops under General von Kluck invaded Connecticut, quickly establishing a line from Bridgeport to Danbury to the town of Washington. Its target was the state’s vast industrial resources and arms manufactories. New York City had capitulated

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored, Inc. Winter 2016-2017 Many people know that Connecticans became pioneers of manifest destiny through their late-18th-into-early-19th-century emigrations west to Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley and Ohio’s Western Reserve. Fewer are aware that before Connecticans went west, many thousands migrated north, following the Connecticut River to what became the states of

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored. Fall 2016 On September 2, 1772, thousands gathered in New Haven’s First Congregational Church to watch a rare encounter between two Native Americans. One represented the stereotype many colonists believed most Indians in New England had become—dissolute, drunken, prone to violence; the other symbolized what colonists hoped Indians

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. Summer 2016 In early 1735 the village of Lebanon Crank (now Columbia) was looking for a new minister. The previous minister, hired fresh out of Yale a decade earlier, displayed too much fondness for drink and had been forced to resign. His replacement, another fresh Yale graduate,

by Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. Spring 2016 It had been a terrible winter. Jedediah Strong, clerk of the Connecticut General Assembly, called it “the severest hard winter within the memory of man,” marked by an “abundance of snow and frequent storms,” and “the extreme degrees and long continuance of the cold.” The

By Walter W. Woodward (c) Connecticut Explored, Inc., Winter 2015-2016 Connecticut’s most enduring brand is unquestionably our state seal. While nicknames come and sometimes go—the Provision State, Nutmeg State, Constitution State, Land of Steady Habits, and Arsenal of Democracy (all except the last of which I’ve written about in this column)—the state seal, with its catchy

By Walter W. Woodward FALL 2015 In our image-saturated world, nothing is missed more than the picture not taken. Who among us has not regretted—on many occasions—that a particular moment, event, or place wasn’t captured in an image, so we could remember it by eye as well as by mind. Historians know pictures are worth

By Walter W. Woodward SUMMER 2015 Last December, in a move that surprised many members of the state’s museum and history communities, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center closed its doors, laying off 45 of its 55 employees. Fortunately, the hiatus was seasonal, a wintertime shutdown to allow the 16-year-old museum to reorganize, strategize, and

By Walter W. Woodward Spring 2015 (c) Connecticut Explored Inc.  In the early 1700s cemeteries in Connecticut’s Puritan towns took on a new and vital role in community social and cultural life and gravestone carvers became our earliest “rock stars.” Where once the houses of the first settlers, clustered around village greens, had been the source of

By Walter Woodward Winter 2014-2015 (c) Connecticut Explored Inc. This image, taken at Bradley Airfield in Windsor Locks on September 9, 1943, gives one pause. It shows happy school children signing a 4,000-pound blockbuster bomb—the same kind as was used so effectively against German cities and civilians in World War II—under the approving glances of both teachers

By Walter W. Woodward, Fall 2014 Volume 12 Number 4 Rarely is the pen more powerful than when it expresses a majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court. Sometimes eloquent, sometimes tediously legalistic, the decisions of the justices often turn words into history, even as they shape our futures. In surprising and unforeseen ways,

By Walter W. Woodward, Summer 2014 Volume 12 Number 3 Almost all Connecticans have at least one significant encounter with the underground. It comes at the end our lives, when the earth itself becomes our final resting place.  When Henry Green was buried on June 17, 1911 in Hartford’s Cedar Hill Cemetery, he became the

By Walter W. Woodward, Spring 2014 Volume 12 Number 2  Recent history has not gone easy on Connecticut. The state whose innovation and manufacturing ingenuity made it a leader in the industrial revolution, has, in recent decades, found more to celebrate in historic achievements than future prospects. Since the 1990s, the Land of Steady Habits

By Walter W. Woodward, Winter 2013 Volume 12 Number 4 This is a story about a house. Not just any house, but a house with long, deep roots—roots that wind through time, cross through space, and wrap themselves around my consciousness. It is a house that affects in the most primary way my sense of

By Walter W. Woodward, Fall 2013 Volume 11 Number 4 All Connecticans, from the first indigenous settler to the state’s most recent arrival, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. The Laurentide ice sheets that covered our state with a mile-high wall of ice 22,000 years ago made sure of that. Immigration has, for most

By Walter Woodward, Spring 2013 Volume 11 Number 2 For the better part of a century, history in Connecticut benefited from the generous mind and spirit of Shepherd M. Holcombe. Scion of several of Hartford’s founding families, a decorated World War II veteran, and founder of the actuarial firm Hooker & Holcombe, Shep managed to crowd

By Walter W. Woodward, Winter 2012/2013 Volume 11 Number 1 As Connecticans reflect on the meaning and importance of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it might be good to consider our state’s own history regarding emancipation. It presents a record that is both mixed and sobering. After American independence, Connecticut, like many Northern

By Walter W. Woodward, Fall 2012 Volume 10 Number 4 Why has “The Land of Steady Habits” endured as a moniker for Connecticut for more than two centuries? One reason is that its meaning has proven to be remarkably elastic, capable of changing with the times, the issues, and the attitudes of its users. When it

By Walter W. Woodward, Summer 2012 Volume 10 Number 3 Subscribe! © Connecticut Explored, Summer 2012       For most Connecticans, the War of 1812 was as much a war mounted by the federal government against New England as it was a conflict with Great Britain. More precisely, they saw it as a politically

By Walter W. Woodward, Spring 2012 Volume 10 Number 2 The key document mapping out Connecticut’s original boundaries wasn’t in fact a map. It was, instead, a royal charter. The Charter of 1662—arguably the most important document in Connecticut’s history—contains among its other provisions a written description of the colony’s boundaries that served the same

By Walter W. Woodward, Winter 2011/2012 Volume 10 Number 1 Of all the Connecticans who have left their mark in distant places, perhaps none made a more lasting—or more controversial—impression than Hiram Bingham III. Born in 1875, this scion of two generations of New England missionaries to Hawaii accomplished much in his 81 years. He

By Walter W. Woodward, Spring 2011 Volume 9 Number 2 Except for an occasional descendant in search of lost roots, visitors to the old Phoenixville Cemetery in Eastford these days are few, and very far between. But 150 years ago, on September 5, 1861, thousands of men, women, and children ringed the hillside surrounding this

By Walter W. Woodward, Fall 2011 Volume 9 Number 4 Everyone who reads this has lived through some of them.  Some of us have lived through many of them. They are events of such profound impact that they are seared into our memories the instant we hear about them. They change our world, and the

By Walter W. Woodward, Summer 2011 Volume 9 Number 3 As a professional historian—not to mention the state historian of Connecticut—one might expect that I would have read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After all, this is one of the few books that actually changed history. Stowe’s panoramic study of antebellum slavery as seen

By Walter W. Woodward, Fall 2010 Volume 8 Number 4 On a cold afternoon last February, Governor M. Jodi Rell stepped out of the State Capitol accompanied by the Governor’s Foot Guard, legislative leaders Don Williams, Chris Donovan, and Denise Merrill, some 50 school children, invited state officials, and a military honor guard. To the

By Walter Woodward, State Historian For the last 30 years, virtually every history program of substance produced in Connecticut could have carried the credit line, “Brought to you in part by Bruce Fraser.” His June 13 death after a hard-fought battle with cancer leaves an unfillable void in the history community. It also marks the

By 
Walter 
W.
 Woodward, Winter 2007 Volume 6 Number 1 ©Connecticut
Explored State 
historian 
Walt 
Woodward 
tells 
us 
the 
story 
behind 
the
 state’s 
association
 with 
nutmeg 
and
 sheds some 
light 
on 
an
 unusual 
object 
in 
the 
collection 
of 
the 
Museum 
of
 Connecticut 
History: 
a
 wooden 
nutmeg
 carved
 from
 a 
piece 
of 
the 
famous 
Charter 
Oak. Of all

By Walter Woodward, Winter 2006/2007 Volume 5 Number 1 A once-fallen angel will again soar above the skies of Hartford, providing an object of inspiration to gridlocked citizens on Interstate 84 and to our governmental leaders. The “Genius of Connecticut,” the Randolph Rogers sculpture that stood atop the summit of the state capitol from that

CREATIVE LICENSE, OR FUNDAMENTAL FACT?  By Walter W. Woodward, Spring 2005 Volume 3 Number 2 In 1973, in a fit of pre-Bicentennial fervor, the state legislature mandated that Connecticut ‘s license plates should display the state slogan the assembly had adopted 14 years earlier. Since the blue tags with white lettering declaring Connecticut the “Constitution State

By Walter Woodward, Summer 2005 Volume 3 Number 3 How do we in the 21st century come to honest understanding of the Puritans, those influential culture shapers from the 1600s? Answering two questions helps us not only get at the heart of Puritan beliefs but also understand why Puritanism in Connecticut differed in at least