Westport Historical Society

Thursday, June 17th, 4pm
Ceremony to Honor the 100th Anniversary of Westport’s Minuteman Statue,  by H. Daniel Webster.
Town of  Westport, Westport Historical Society,
Westport Woman’s Club Yankee Doodle Fair.
The statue is on Compo Road South past Longshore on the way to the beach.
Check out Lucille Ball’s scene that made our own Minuteman Statue famous!

Photo by Laurence S. Untermeyer

Lucille Ball as the statue!

For more information on Lucy in Westport, visit     

http://www.lucyfan.com/lucyinwestport.html

“Yankee Doodle Meets the Minute Man, June 17″

It happened once before, on the May 6, 1957 television episode of I Love Lucy. After Lucy & Ricky (and Ethel & Fred) move to Westport, former home of Bob Weiskopf, one of the show’s writers, they join the Westport Historical Society, and Lucy becomes Chair of “Yankee Doodle Day”. The episode involves Lucy, after an accidental beheading of the Minute Man Statue an hour before its dedication by Ricky, portraying the sculpture in a tableau vivant. In real life, Lucy and Ethel would have joined the Westport Woman’s Club and chaired Yankee Doodle Fair.

This time, on June 17, 2010, the Westport Historical Society and the Westport Woman’s Club join forces with the Town at Compo to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of H. Daniel Webster’s Minute Man sculpture at 4 pm, then, at 5 pm, move to 44 Imperial Avenue to open Yankee Doodle Fair, the signature fundraiser of the 103-year-old Westport Woman’s Club.

What do “Yankee Doodle” and the “Minuteman” have in common? Lots of local history, as it happens. This year, as Westport celebrates its 175^th Anniversary of Township, formed from parts of western Fairfield, eastern Norwalk and lower Weston that flanked the Saugatuck River, two defining events of the Colonial era are worth noting.

First, “Yankee Doodle” has origins with an East Norwalk colonial militia during the French & Indian War (1755-61). When Elizabeth Fitch saw the unmatched, homespun uniforms of the company commanded by her brother, Captain Thomas Fitch, Jr., before they journeyed to Albany to support their magnificently outfitted allies, the British troops led by Lord Amherst, she worried that the locals needed some sort of unifying military emblem. Inspired, she made, for each man’s hat, a cockade of chicken feathers. When Capt. Fitch’s company arrived in Albany, British army physician, Richard Schuckburg, was so amused that he wrote a song, “Yankee Doodle”, to ridicule them. Fitch went on to command 16 regiments and become a colonel.

By 1776, as the American Revolution began, the disdain in Schuckburg’s “Yankee Doodle” ditty continued to sustain a new generation of Colonial militia, the Minute Men, and their families, as they made the economic, political and deeply personal sacrifices required for independence.  Commissioned in 1775 by order of the Provisional Congress, these Minute Men, especially in coastal New England, trained as expert shooters. What they lacked in numbers, they made up with abundant local field knowledge and Gen. George Washington’s strategy of selective sabotage. Thus, when 26 British warships delivered 2,000 troops to Compo Beach (then, Fairfield, just across the river from East Norwalk) at dusk on April 25, 1777, the Minute Men began their selective response, culminating on April 28, 1777, at the foot of Minute Man Hill.  Learn more at 4 pm at Compo on June 17, 2010!

–Dorothy E. Curran, President, Westport Historical Society (www.westporthistory.org)

Westport’s Minute Man Sculpture Commemorates Patriots’ Heroism

By Mollie Donovan & Dorothy Curran

At dusk on April 25, 1777, when 2,000 British troops under General William Tryon, the New York governor, landed at Compo Beach, in what then was Fairfield’s West Parish, local Patriots were not expecting them. Tory Loyalists, however, were ready, and the plan to guide the troops in their march up Compo Road to Cross Highway, across to Redding Road, then north through Redding and Bethel  to Danbury, to burn a major munitions depot, began to unfold.  After a brief exchange of shots in the moonlight, led by Captain Disbrow, by the corner of the Post Road and Compo, Patriot resistance also began to unfold.

The British did reach Danbury, and did achieve their objective of destroying the Continental Army’s munitions, but, on April 27—as they moved south through Ridgefield to begin their return to the waiting ships at Compo—they met hastily assembled Patriot forces, both soldiers and local “minute man” militia, equipped with artillery, who hit the returning English “ball for ball behind each fence and farmyard wall,” in the fierce Battle of Ridgefield. Led by Brig. General Benedict Arnold, Major General David Wooster, Colonel Abraham Gould, Colonel Henry Ludington (of Dutchess County, NY), Brig. General Gold Selleck Silliman, Lt. Col. Alexander Gold, Col. Jedediah Huntington and Col. Lamb (of Southington, CT) and Lt. Elmore (of Sharon, CT), yet outnumbered three to one, the Patriots deployed hit-and-run swarming, a strategy of selective engagement. Realizing that more Patriots were en route to the battle, Gen. Tryon continued on April 28 to push his troops back to the shore.

The final encounter occurred on April 28, 1777 at Compo Hill, known now in Westport as Minute Man Hill. There, waiting Patriot marksmen, though outnumbered, waited for the arriving British troops as they marched downhill.  Graves of some of the fallen minute men from that day are marked along Compo Beach Road, across from the Minute Man Statue.

Although Tryon returned in to burn Norwalk and Fairfield, never again during the American Revolution would British troops venture inland in Connecticut.

For Damon Douglas’ full accounting of this battle, see his book, The Bridge Not Taken: Benedict Arnold Outwitted , published by the Westport Historical Society and available in the WHS Remarkable Gift Shop. Prints of Al Wilmott’s portrait of the Minute Man statue also are available.

In 1835, Westport, including Compo Hill, became a separate town.  After the Town secured title to Compo Beach in 1902, the town fathers, William H. Burr among them, decided that a memorial should be erected where the battle took place. For Burr and others of his generation, the “minute man” was the ideal symbol of the ever vigilant patriot. Not regular soldiers, but charged to be ready at “a minute’s notice”, these militia members were local farmers and business owners. Burr asked the Connecticut Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution for help raising the money for a suitable memorial. The Chapter raised $2,100 and the State Legislature allocated an additional $700. In 1908, Harry Daniel Webster, received the commission for the memorial.

Webster was born and raised on a farm in northeastern Iowa, then came to Philadelphia in 1900 to study art. In 1905, he was commissioned by Tiffany & Co. to model bronze portrait busts of Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay. Other commissions included busts of Ethel Barrymore, Andrew Carnegie, the marble statue of Genearl Beadle at the state capitol building in Pierre, South Dakota, and the bronze doors for the American National Bank Building in Austin, Texas.

In 1907, he moved to Westport, purchasing “Nine Hearths”, the Christofson house on North Sylvan. He restored the farmhouse and added a studio. There, he modeled the Minute Man in clay, then had it cast in bronze by Tiffany & Co. in April, 1910.

Notably, to ensure the authenticity of the Minute Man’s features, Webster invited descendants of old Westport families to pose for him, and the Minute Man’s face is a composite. Models included Judge Joseph Adams and Lewis P. Wakeman (an early Westport First Selectman). The tunic and powder hor belonged to the Horace Staples Wakeman family, and legend has it that Webster never returned them to their owner, a fact recalled by Horace Wakeman on his death bed.

A century ago, the date chosen by the Sons of the American Revolution for the statue’s unveiling—June 17, 1910—was the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.