New Video: Long Lost Traces of Hartford’s Old Riverfront

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Hartford, Connecticut’s riverfront has gone through many changes over the years. Long before the highway came through, the Valley Railroad was built in 1871 through the warehouse district by the river. A number of old warehouses and fish markets, documented in photographs in the 1860s and 1870s, were demolished around this time. I talk about them in this video, as well as a sycamore tree that survived next to the river from Hartford’s earliest colonial days, through its great era commercial activity along the river, and into the 1890s.

New Video: More Old Wethersfield

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In this video I talk about the historic buildings on Main Street in Wethersfield from the intersection with Church Street north to Hanmer Park. I cover the Greek Revival-style John Williams House, the former home and office of Dr. Erastus Cooke, the former church that’s now Griffith Academy, the former Masonic Hall, the Simeon Belden House, Comstock, Ferre & Co., the Rev. James Lockwood House, Trinity Episcopal Church, the Charles C. Hart Seed Company, the site of the Stillman Tavern (where Rochambeau stayed in 1781), the Second Empire-style Edward Robbins House, the houses of Allyn, Timothy and Henry Stillman, the Lemuel May House, the former High Street School, the houses of Francis and Capt. John Bulkeley, Ebenezer Talcott and Maj. David Hills, the Mansard-roofed. Capt. Daniel Francis House, the Cape. Jesse Goodrich House, the Porter-Belden House (some of its paneling is now in the Brooklyn Museum), Hanmer Park and the impressive brick Samuel Woodhouse, Jr. House.

New Video on Mark Twain’s Hartford Neighborhood: Nook Farm

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Mark Twain lived for 20 years in the neighborhood of Nook Farm in Hartford, Connecticut, 17 of them in his own house, which is now a museum. This video is about Mark Twain’s house in the context of Nook Farm and the houses of his neighbors, who included Harriet Beecher Stowe, John and Isabella Beecher Hooker, the young William Gillette, Charles Dudley Warner and his brother George H. Warner, and many others. Katharine Hepburn later grew up in a house in Nook Farm.