By Gypsy Meneses The Quinnipiac Indian Monument is a relatively new memorial sight, honoring the Native Americans that once called New Haven their home. Three individuals decided it was time to commemorate this Native American tribe: Doris Townshend and Harry Townshend, whose grandfather Captain Charles Hervey, was an early historian of the Quinnipiacs, and Priscilla Oliver. The memorial sight is located at Fort Wooster Park in New Haven on Townshend Ave, just below the oldest burial sites of the Quinnipiac tribe. Peter Horbrick from Bethany, Connecticut was the artist who carved the memorial depicting a father, mother, son, and their dog at the harbor walking up to greet five English Puritan settlers on April 24, 1638. The 9,000-pound black granite memorial has inscribed, “A Quinnipiac Indian family walks to the harbor to meet the Newcomers- April 24,1638 as their way of life changes forever.” Quinnipiac history has been difficult for New Haven historians to recover, since the descend...

By Zoey Reidy Imagine, for a moment, you are walking down Long Wharf Drive today. You would be right next to the highway watching cars breeze by on the interstate. In the present day, one would not find much along the Wharf, but that was not always the case. Historically, Long Wharf was the very heart of the city, a living, breathing place that had the lifeblood of New Haven pumping through it. Throughout the history of the city, many things have come and gone on Long Wharf. One of the buildings still present in the current day is Long Wharf Theatre, a critically acclaimed Theatre that has been a place for all sorts of performers to gather and perform since 1965. The Theatre was not around since the beginning of the city’s founding and is a rather recent addition to the Wharf, but it is still an important part of its history. The Theatre itself was built in an old warehouse that was no longer in use. The warehouse was transformed into a Theatre for a one time showing of a play. T...

By Jason W. Smith All that remains of Lieutenant Henry Eld, one of New Haven’s most significant military figures, is a disembodied uniform. In two grey archival boxes at the New Haven Museum rest Eld’s cocked hat, the mark of an early nineteenth-century American naval officer, and a buckskin coat, the garb of an antebellum explorer. In his short life, Eld was both. Born in New Haven on June 2, 1814 to the son of a prominent landowner in the Cedar Hill neighborhood and for whom New Haven’s Eld Street is named, young Henry, Jr. joined the Navy at seventeen in 1832, assigned to the 74-gun ship-of-the-line Delaware . Six years later, he departed as an officer on the United States Exploring Expedition, the nation’s most ambitious voyage of discovery to date. The Ex. Ex., as it was dubbed, circumnavigated the world, produced an extraordinary amount of cartographic knowledge of the South Pacific, explored the Oregon Territory, which at that time was jointly administered by the United States a...

By Josh Weizel   There was once a Great Ship that had been built in Rhode Island and was bought by the early settlers of New Haven. The ship was to sail to England and would have carried one hundred fifty tons of cargo to include everything from lumber, peas, wheat, and beaver skins. The successful voyage of the Great Ship was critical to New Haven's economic success.     In January 1646, the Great Ship set sail for England with about one hundred crew members and George Lamberton as its captain. Imagine the colonists hoping that the Great Ship would make New Haven a commercial success, and equally fearing that the dangers of North Atlantic doom the vessel's fate.  That winter, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop recorded that New Haven harbor was frozen over by ice and a ship passage had to be cut for three miles for the vessel's departure. According to the scholar Patrick Geoffrey, the mid-seventeenth century would see longer winters and more extre...

 By Marie Connors Where is Clamtown?  Would you consider an oysters a delicacy?  Why did the oyster business virtually die in the Quinnipiac River in New Haven? In her book on Fair Haven, Doris B. Townshend   explains that originally the town named “Dragon” was known colloquially as Clamtown. This was a hot spot on the Quinnipiac River (older spelling “Quinepiac”) where an annual oyster derby took place on September 1 .  For about ten years from 1820-1830 this was a  fun, exciting family-oriented event where muscular men raced in canoes and all kinds of boats to the oyster beds. Once there, they raked up and pulled up with large tongs as many oysters as they could. Then they paddled or rowed back to shore where wagons were waiting to deliver the loads to the oystermen's houses. This was one day of diversion for this little fishing village. By the late Eighteenth Century until the early part of the Twentieth, Fair Haven was a beehive of activit...

By Megan Mancarella Standing on the fading grass, looking out at the sea of graves and headstones in the Old Cemetery of East Haven, one encounters a deep divot in the land. The hollowed area spans wide and is barren of most graves, despite being located next to the cemetery. What meets the eye is a simple basin, but the history behind the geographical feature reveals a dwelling of Connecticut’s Quinnipiac Natives. Ezra Stiles and his friend, Reverend Nicholas Street, explored the area in October 1761 where they had encountered the remains of a Quinnipiac fort used for defense against Mohegan and Mohawk peoples; they estimated the fort existed until the late Sixteenth or early Seventeenth Centuries.  There is a forty-foot rectangular depression where the fort once stood, and the spring-fed pond that was once its water supply was drained in 1895 for cemetery renovations—the hollow of the pond can still be seen today and is referred to as the “Indian bowl.” Stiles’ drawn map shows a ...