Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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9. In Connecticut, as in the rest of New England, the term “town” refers first to a geographical/political division, not necessarily a built-up settlement. In other regions, the less-confusing term “township” is used. Built-up settlements within a town may be called villages (although that term has no legal meaning) or, more vaguely, sections or areas, with the principal one referred to as the town center. In the nineteenth century, boroughs and cities were established as legally incorporated areas within a town that have special taxing privileges in order to supply services not required in less densely settled areas. Today, a few towns still have boroughs (Litchfield and Stonington, for example), while most cities have been expanded to have coterminous boundaries with their towns. For settlement history see Anthony N. B. Garvan, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951).
10. James Sexton, “Not a Park or Mere Pleasure Ground: A Case Study of the New Haven Green,” documents, www.towngreens.com.
11. For more on town greens in general, as well as specific Connecticut greens, see www.towngreens.com.
12. For English timber framing and its adaptation in Massachusetts see Abbott Lowell Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979). Note, however, that Massachusetts information does not always apply to Connecticut.
13. Ross K. Harper et al., Highways to History: The Archaeology of Connecticut’s 18th-Century Lifeways (Connecticut Department of Transportation, 2013); Ann Y. Smith, “A New Look at the Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut,” Connecticut History 46, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 16–44.
14. Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Connecticut and Its First Period Houses,” Connecticut Preservation News 16, no. 1 (January/February 1993): 1, 8–10.
15. Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Connecticut and Its Building Traditions,” Connecticut History 35, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 192–233.
16. Peter Benes, Meetinghouses of Early New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).
17. “Late 19th-Century Immigration in Connecticut,” ConnecticutHistory.org; “Early 20th-Century Immigration in Connecticut,” ConnecticutHistory.org; Bruce Clouette, “‘Getting Their Share’: Irish and Italian Immigrants in Hartford, Connecticut, 1850–1940” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1992).
18. Vincent Scully et al., Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), especially Paul Goldberger’s chapter, “James Gamble Rogers & the Shaping of Yale in the Twentieth Century.” See also Patrick Pinnell, Yale University: An Architectural Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) and Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).
19. James F. O’Gorman, Henry Austin: In Every Variety of Architectural Style (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 7–8, 179–186.
20. Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).
21. Richard Longstreth, Looking beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), chap. 5, “The Extraordinary Postwar Suburb.”
22. In later seasons of I Love Lucy, the Ricardos moved to Westport. Eric Hodgins’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946) spoofs his own experience in building a house in New Milford.
23. Christopher Wigren, “Keeping History on the Map,” Hartford Courant, September 13, 2009, page C5. See also Mary Hommann, Wooster Square Design: A Report on the Background, Experience, and Design Procedures in Redevelopment and Rehabilitation in an Urban Renewal Project (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Redevelopment Agency, 1965).
Part One
SHAPING THE LANDSCAPE
All architecture begins with the land. Historically, the shape of the land determined where people settled, how they made their living, what materials they had to build with. In Connecticut, the fertile soils and open meadows of the Connecticut River Valley supported farming, while the swift-flowing streams of the Quinebaug-Shetucket and Naugatuck-Housatonic river systems powered mills and factories. Cities grew up on harbors or rivers at points where navigation was promising, and agricultural towns on hilltops away from the dangers of flooding or what settlers believed was unhealthy lowland air. At the same time, Connecticut builders haven’t merely built on the land. They altered the land itself to meet their needs and desires, to ease their work or give pleasure. They divided it into fields and towns, dammed streams and rivers, excavated hillsides, filled valleys, created parks and gardens: asserting, for better or worse, their mastery over their environment. But nature has ways of reasserting itself.
1
THE FIRST BUILDERS
MOHEGAN HILL, UNCASVILLE
The common image of Native American building in the Northeast is of temporary structures such as the wigwams recorded by English colonists: ephemeral structures of bent saplings covered with bark. However, the modern environmental historian William Cronon has shown that native peoples also shaped the landscape in more wide-ranging ways. They cleared fields for crops, managed woodlands to attract game and make hunting easier, and built weirs to catch fish. Some of the rock piles and stone cellars hidden in Connecticut forests are believed to be Indian structures.
How can traces of the first builders be located today? The Mohegan Congregational Church, on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, part of the town of Montville, is one starting point. It was established in 1831, at a time when governmental agencies were forcing Indians from their ancestral lands. Building a Christian church demonstrated that the Mohegans had been “civilized” and posed no threat to their white neighbors. The strategy worked. After the Mohegan reservation was broken up in the 1860s, the church was the only property still owned by the tribe and became a focus for Mohegan identity.
The site for the church was chosen for specific, significant reasons. Mohegan Hill had been meaningful to Mohegans long before 1831. All around the church are features important to the tribe, including Moshup’s Rock, bearing an indentation identified as a giant’s footprint; formations where the Makiawisug, or “little people,” lived; and Uncas’s spring, associated with the man who was the leader of the Mohegans when they split from the Pequot tribe in the early 1600s.
In the 1860s Mohegan Hill became the site of the Mohegans’ annual Green Corn festival, an event of spiritual significance revived to cement tribal identity. The festival is a thanksgiving for the harvest and an expression of hospitality to the Mohegans’ neighbors. Tribal members build a large brush arbor, known as the Wigwam (derived from a word meaning “welcome”), in which to serve food and display crafts. This structure gave the celebration its alternate name, the Wigwam Festival. Since 2003 the festival has taken place at Fort Shantok in Montville, another sacred Mohegan site, but Mohegan Hill remains central to the life of the tribe.
Also on the hill is the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum, established in 1931 by John Tantaquidgeon and his children Harold and Gladys. The small building is constructed of local fieldstone, with arrowheads and stone mortars and pestles embedded in its walls and a diamond-shaped protective symbol on the chimney. Outdoor displays include examples of traditional wigwams and longhouses. The versions of these on view in 2017 were erected in 2011 and reflect current research in historic materials and construction methods.
Remembered, visited, celebrated, and sometimes reinterpreted, Mohegan Hill is central to the tribe’s identity. But although the Mohegans have constructed