Wethersfield Historical Society
History Happens Every Day
Rocky Hill: A History By Rafaele Fierro It was only a matter of time. Rocky Hill citizens since the 1820s had been petitioning the Connecticut General Assembly to become a separate town. Now in 1843 the residents of Wethersfield’s “Lower Community,” known since 1722 as Stepney Parish, took up the …
From the pages of Connecticut’s 1790 census spring the names of Wethersfield’s 5 free black families. From this same document comes the enumeration of 87 other people listed simply as slaves. Slaves in Wethersfield? Most assuredly. The earliest known record of slave ownership in Wethersfield appears in the 1662 will …
Gary “Pops” Goldberg-O’Maxfield of Hartford is a member of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and he has been researching baseball in Connecticut for over a decade. He has written numerous articles on baseball and is writing a Connecticut baseball book for Wesleyan University Press. Goldberg-O’Maxfield is also co-founder …
Continue reading “About the Author: Gary "Pops" Goldberg-O’Maxfield”
The Strange and Ancient Yankee Game Called Wicket, the Old Broad Street Grounds, The Life and Death of Charley Onions and Other True Stories from Wethersfield’s Glorious Baseball History Copyright 2011 by Gary “Pops” Goldberg-O’Maxfield SABR Member, Baseball Historian and Commissioner of the Friends of Vintage Base Ball, Inc. Wethersfield’s …
by Jim Meehan “We’ll take the house. Honey, the chances of another plane hitting this house are astronomical. It’s been pre-disastered. We’re going to be safe here.” Such was the logic of T.S. Garp in the John Irving novel, “The World According to Garp” immediately after a single-engine prop plane …
“I wonder if they know at home of our real condition here.” When Sergeant Major Robert H. Kellogg described the first night in Andersonville Prison he said that “there were ten deaths on our side of the camp that night. The old prisoners called it ‘being exchanged,’ and truly it …
The membership of Wethersfield Historical Society is passionate about the town’s history, often inspiring individuals to conduct research on their own about topics of particular interest. The “Articles from the Community” section of this website includes research and writing of the Wethersfield community representative of their interest and enthusiasm for …
The following article, written by John C. Willard in December 1968, is from the archives of Wethersfield Historical Society. Not many years ago the presence of great cathedral arches of greenery along New England streets in towns and even cities was as common and as distinctive a feature as white …
Greg Cunningham spent the greatest moments of his life in Chicago, IL. He was born and 6 months later he moved. See I have a good sense of humor. Yes that was the first of over 20 moves. When my dad took a promotion it was not in the same building, but …
The first thing I learned as an amateur genealogist is that working on your family history is a work in progress. Missing documents, contradictory information, unreadable dates, faded records, missing pages, wrong assumptions, bad leads, fading memories of relatives, and other missing links may hamper your progress towards compiling a …