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pomfret conn.

Frederick Law Olmsted Plans A Cemetery or a Hundred

Chances are good you’ve encountered the work of Frederick Law Olmsted more than once in your lifetime. You’ve probably set foot in his parks or on his school campuses, or maybe you read his magazine. Quite possibly you also had some interaction with the Red Cross.

Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent

Olmsted was born in Hartford on April 26, 1822, to a modestly prosperous family. He worked as a seaman, a farmer, a surveyor, a social reformer and a journalist. Then he found his niche as a landscape architect. He also helped found the weekly magazine The Nation.

Olmsted co-designed Central Park, headed the first Yosemite commission and led the campaign to protect Niagara Falls. He designed the U.S. Capitol Grounds and planned both the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” of green space.

The list goes on. He designed Elm Park in Worcester, Mass., considered by many to be the first municipal park in America. He also designed the 735-acre Forest Park in Springfield, Mass.

Groton School, campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm

His firm designed dozens of academic campuses, including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, the Groton School, Berwick Academy, Pomfret School, the University of Maine and Phillips Academy. They also designed Shelburne Farms in Vermont, Providence Butler Hospital in Rhode Island, Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts and Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Conn.

Olmsted Goes South

Frederick Law Olmsted spent five years traveling the South for the New York Times (then the New York Daily Times), reporting on the slave economy.

He didn’t like what he saw. Olmsted concluded the cotton monopoly did more harm than good. He then reported that slavery made the slave states inefficient and backward. His observations had a big impact on the national debate about slavery.

Central Park in 1901, lower end of the mall

Then he co-designed Central Park with Calvin Vaux – the largest public works project in the country. When the Civil War broke out, Olmsted became executive director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He administered medical relief, setting up field hospitals and hospital ships. Olmsted also distributed food and hospital supplies along the entire battlefront.

He had an almost maniacal belief in system and organization, for which he received much criticism.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Planner

Witold Rybczynski credits Olmsted with pioneering the concept of planning in a big industrializing country. “This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood,” wrote Rybczynski. In A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, Rybczynski quoted Olmsted’s mentor.

“He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious,” wrote the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows.

“[His critics] think him impracticable, expensive, slow — when he is only long-headed, with broader, deeper notions of economy than themselves, & with no disposition to hurry what, if done satisfactorily, must be thoroughly.

Olmsted designed Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn.

Rybczynski also offered an anecdote that demonstrated Olmsted’s farsightedness. Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, wrote him a letter five years after the Civil War. Meigs, who respected Olmsted, asked his advice in landscaping national cemeteries.

Olmsted then replied the cemeteries should be designed to establish dignity and tranquility. He warned Meigs to avoid the current fashion for elaborate and artificial gardening because it would disappear.

To create a sacred grove for the war dead, he recommended just two things. First, building a simple wall to enclose the cemetery. Second, he told Meigs to plant trees indigenous to the cemetery’s region. To save money, he should plant nurseries next to the cemeteries. And if land weren’t available for nurseries, he suggested planting seedlings between the tiers of graves.

Olmsted died on Aug. 28, 1903, and is buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Central Park By …trialsanderrors – Lower end of mall, Central Park, New York City, 1901, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11159061. Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn., By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56543924.

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Isaac Bissell Electrifies Connecticut With News of the Battle of Lexington

Isaac Bissell electrified the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut with the news of the Battle of Lexington in April 1775.

He rode farther, faster and harder than Paul Revere, but is not so well-remembered. Unfortunately for the heroic messenger, ‘Bissell’ rhymes with fewer words than ‘Revere.’

Isaac Bissell

Isaac Bissell, born in 1749, lived in Suffield, Conn., at the time of the American Revolution. He married Amelia Leavitt on July 4, 1776, and they had two children, Isaac and Asaph.

He was one of a number post riders charged with telling the patriots the British army had killed people at Lexington and calling them to muster against the British regulars.

Immediately after the Battle of Lexington, and even as British reinforcements headed toward Concord, a militiaman, Joseph Palmer, scribbled a letter with the news. (Palmer later rose to brigadier general in the Continental Army.) He dispatched Bissell to take the letter to Connecticut:

Wednesday morning near 10 of the clock—Watertown.

To all the friends of American liberty be it known that this morning before break of day, a brigade, consisting of about 1,000 to 1,200 men landed at Phip’s Farm at Cambridge and marched to Lexington, where they found a company of our colony militia in arms, upon whom they fired without any provocation and killed six men and wounded four others. By an express from Boston, we find another brigade are now upon their march from Boston supposed to be about 1,000. The Bearer, Israel Bissell, is charged to alarm the country quite to Connecticut and all persons are desired to furnish him with fresh horses as they may be needed. I have spoken with several persons who have seen the dead and wounded. Pray let the delegates from this colony to Connecticut see this. —J. Palmer, one of the Committee of Safety.

Bissell’s Ride

Isaac Bissell rode to Marlboro with the news, then to Worcester along the Boston Post Road. According to legend, his horse dropped dead in Worcester. He then rode to Hartford.

In each town where he stopped, a local member of the Committee of Correspondence copied the letter and gave the copy to Bissell. Each new copy had information about who had gotten the news and when.

Along the way, Bissell may have notified Israel Putnam, a patriot and veteran of the French and Indian wars. Here’s how the post rider appeared to Putnam, according to his biographer George Canning Hill:

A man came riding through the quiet town of Pomfret on horse-back, bearing a drum about his neck, and beating it and calling out to all whom he met, — “To arms! To arms! the first blood has been shed at Lexington!” Putnam was ploughing in the field, at some distance back from his house, at the time … Putnam had his little son with him in the field. He at once unyoked his oxen and took them out of the furrow they were ploughing, sent word to his wife by the boy where he had gone, took his fastest horse from the barn, and rode away at such a pace as we should have expected from a man of his well-known character.

A copy of the letter Bissell brought went to Silas Deane in Wethersfield, just south of Hartford.

Other post riders took copies of Palmer’s letter to Norwich, New London and New York City, where the news arrived by noon on April 21^st.

Afterward

After his long ride, Isaac Bissell went home to Suffield, and then enlisted in Erastus Woolcott’s regiment. He marched back to Boston, where he participated in the siege.

Sgt. Isaac Bissell mustered out in March of 1776, then mustered back in when the British invaded Connecticut in 1779. He returned home to Suffield after the war and worked as a blacksmith. Isaac Bissell lived until 1822, when he died at age 73.

Some people confused Isaac Bissell with Israel Bissell, but historians such as J.L. Bell and Lion G. Miles concluded that’s because of spelling errors in the haste after the battle.

This story about Isaac Bissell was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed reading it, you might also want to read about Sybil Ludington, the female Paul Revere, here.

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Israel Putnam Shows the British How to Settle a Fight – Connecticut Yankee Style

Israel Putnam stories abound, but one of the most entertaining dates back to his days in the French and Indian Wars.

Known as ‘Old Put,’ Israel was one of the most interesting and vigorous characters of the American Revolution. One of Connecticut’s Sons of Liberty, he was a reckless fighter who survived a shipwreck in Cuba, galloped down a rocky cliff to escape the British and risked his life to save a burning powder magazine.

Putnam was born on Jan. 7, 1718 in what is now Danvers, Mass., and moved to Pomfret, Conn., when he was 22. During the French and Indian War (1754-1763) he served with Rogers’ Rangers. Mohawk Indians captured him and came close to burning him alive until it rained and a French officer intervened.

Gen. Israel Putnam escapes British dragoons

During the French and Indian Wars, Rogers’ Rangers was attached to a British Army unit. There was a good deal of friction between the British and the Americans. The British, better trained and disciplined, felt superior to their American allies. Meanwhile, the Americans – right up to and including George Washington – felt disrespected for their second-class status. The sense of indignation would fuel the dislike many Americans felt for the British Army in the period leading to the Revolution.

On one occasion, the story goes, a British major felt slighted by Putnam and he sent him a message complaining. Putnam, then a captain, invited the major to visit him in his tent, where he found Putnam seated on a small keg smoking his pipe.

The major confronted him and Putnam noted that a duel with pistols would give the major an unfair advantage. He proposed an alternative:

“Here are two powder kegs; I have bored a hole, and inserted a slow match in each! If you will be so good as to seat yourself there, I will light the matches, and he who dares to sit the longest without squirming, shall be called the bravest fellow.”

The tent was full of officers and men, who goaded the major into taking up the challenge.

At Putnam’s signal, the matches were lit and Putnam continued smoking quite indifferently, without watching at all the progressive diminution of the matches—but the British officer, though a brave fellow, could not help casting longing and lingering looks downwards, and his terrors increased as the length of the matches diminished.

The spectators withdrew, one by one, to get out of the way of the expected explosion. As the fire drew dangerously close to the kegs, the Major could take no more and jumped up.

Drawing out the match, he shouted, “Putnam, this is willful murder; I yield.”

“My dear fellow,” cried Putnam, “don’t be in such a hurry, they’re nothing but kegs of onions.” At that, the major stepped outside, the fight resolved.

Hat Tip to: The Rural Repository. This story was updated from the 2015 version.

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Whistler’s Mother Poses for Her Bad Boy

When bad boy artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s mother first came to live with him in London in 1864, he had to hide evidence of his bohemian lifestyle – including his mistress. “General upheaval!!’ he wrote to his friend Henri Fantin-Latour. “I had to empty my house and purify it from cellar to eaves.”

Whistler’s Mother

But her visit would help make his dream come true.

One day when a model didn’t show up, he asked his mother to sit for her portrait. That portrait would hang in the Louvre and become one of the best known works of art in the world.

Whistler’s Mother

Much has been written about the painting formally titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, but better known as Whistler’s Mother. Critics have called it enigmatic, bewitching, disturbing mysterious. Whistler insisted it shouldn’t be viewed as a portrait but as an assembly of line, form and, color and tone.

Anna Whistler in the 1850s

Whistler himself later wrote,

Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an “Arrangement in Grey and Black.” Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public do to care about the identity of the portrait?

But it is impossible to look at the pious, stalwart woman in the picture and not see a mother who has put up with a lot.

Whistler’s Father

Anna McNeill was the second wife of George Washington Whistler, a prominent civil engineer who invented the locomotive whistle, designed the Boston & Providence Railroad and started the Boston & Lowell Railroad.

George Whistler was chief engineer for the Proprietors of Locks and Canals in Lowell, Mass., on July 11, 1834, when James Abbott Whistler, their oldest son, was born. He had three younger brothers, two of whom died young. His brother William became a Confederate soldier and surgeon during the Civil War.

Whistler by William Merritt Chase

He was an insolent child, given to fits of temper. His parents encouraged him to draw, because it calmed him down.

As a boy he spent six years in St. Petersburg with his family while his father worked on the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway.

When his father died in 1849 he moved with his mother to her hometown of Pomfret, Conn.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler by Etienne Carjat. Courtesy National Gallery of Art Library.

He enrolled in West Point but got kicked out for bad behavior and poor marks — by Robert E. Lee, then commandant. He moved to Paris at the age of 21, never to live in the United States again.

Whistler cut quite a figure in London as a publicity hound and bon vivant. He gave extravagant brunches he couldn’t afford and made enemies of his friends. The great artist Edgar Degas once said to him, “Whistler, you behave as if you have no talent.”

His religious mother put a damper on his lifestyle when she came to live with him in 1864. She gave religious tracts to his decadent poet friend, Algernon Charles Swinburne, She also destroyed some of her son’s drawings because they disgusted her.

Painting Whistler’s Mother

He painted her seated in 1871 because she didn’t have enough stamina to stand for hours on end. He worked hard to get the painting just right, and he did capture his mother’s expression of patient forbearance. She was, in fact, praying while she posed. Perhaps she prayed for him.

Despite their differences, Whistler was devoted to his mother. After she died on Jan. 3, 1881, he took her maiden name as his middle name. He said he saw in his mother’s face, ‘grace wedded to dignity, strength enhancing sweetness.’

Whistler was perennially broke, and the painting was in hock when his mother died. He borrowed money to get it back. His friend Degas arranged to have it exhibited at the French Salon, where it won a prize. Some of his other friends lobbied to have it purchased by the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.

Like a Dream

Whistler was thrilled to see it hanging in the museum. He wrote,

Just think — to go and look at one’s own picture hanging on the walls of Luxembourg — remembering how it had been treated in England — to be met everywhere with deference and respect…and to know that all this is … a tremendous slap in the face to the Academy and the rest! Really it is like a dream.

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2 (Thomas Carlyle)

When the historian Thomas Carlyle saw the painting, he agreed to sit for a similar portrait, one with much warmer tones. Whistler called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2. That’s how Whistler’s Mother came to be Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. It is one of the most famous paintings in the world.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Legend of the Israel Putnam Wolf Den

Gen. Israel Putnam famously left his plow in the ground when he heard about the Battles of Lexington and Concord and immediately rode the 100 miles from his farm in Brooklyn, Conn., to Cambridge. That plow became something of a local attraction. Years earlier, he created another local attraction, one still around today: The Israel Putnam Wolf Den.

Israel Putnam

Known as Old Put, he was one of the most interesting and vigorous characters of the American Revolution. A reckless fighter, he survived a shipwreck in Cuba, galloped down a rocky cliff to escape the British and risked his life to save a burning powder magazine. During the French and Indian War he served as a Rogers’ Ranger. Mohawk Indians captured him and came close to burning him alive until it rained and a French officer intervened.

The Israel Putnam Wolf Den

Israel Putnam was born on Jan. 7, 1718 in what is now Danvers, Mass. His birthplace still stands, now owned by his descendants.

Israel Putnam birthplace

At 22, he then moved to Pomfret, Conn., attracted by the town’s cheap land for sale.

According to legend, Israel Putnam killed Connecticut’s last wolf in Pomfret two years after he arrived.

Putnam had a substantial home by then, cleared fields and a flock of sheep. But a she-wolf kept attacking his and his neighbors’ flocks. Finally, Putnam and his neighbors got together and decided to pursue the wolf until she was dead.

They spotted her one winter night and followed her to a stream six miles away. Then she turned and entered a cave. The men set up a guard, gathered a crowd of men and boys with guns and dogs and lit a fire at the mouth of the cave.

Hours passed and the wolf remained inside. Finally, Israel Putnam persuaded his neighbors to let him go into the cave with a torch. They tied a rope around his ankle and prepared to pull him out when he kicked.

Israel Putnam Wolf Den

Dead Wolf, Live Farmer

The den’s narrow passageway sloped down fifteen feet, then ran horizontally about 10 feet more and rose gradually 16 feet. Putnam crawled into the cave – you couldn’t stand up in it — and saw the she-wolf’s eyeballs three yards away from him. He kicked the rope, and was dragged out so quickly he lost his shirt.

Putnam then crawled back into the cave with a gun and shot the wolf. His neighbors dragged him out again, nearly overcome by smoke. He revived and crawled back into the cave a third time, where he found the dead wolf, seized her by the ears and kicked the rope. The dead wolf and the live young farmer were dragged out together.

The story was told many times during Putnam’s military career.

Gen. Israel Putnam escapes British dragoons, another of his famous exploits

Putnam’s Wolf Den is on the National Register of Historic Places, and can be found in Mashamoquet Brook State Park.

At the turn of the 20^th century, author Clifton Johnson visited Old Put’s old stomping grounds in Pomfret. In his 1915 book Highways & Byways of New England, Johnson tells of visiting the Wolf Den and of meeting an old New Englander.

“We had that plough of Putnam’s on exhibition here once,” said the old man. “And by gosh! When I saw it I didn’t blame Putnam for leaving it in the field. It was nothing but a crooked stick shod with iron, and I’ll be darned if I’d put it in the barn if it was mine.”

Images: Israel Putnam Wolf den By Ehkastning – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35801371. Cartoon image of wolf https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

This story last updated in 2023.

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