At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, it is estimated roughly 6,500 enslaved people lived in Connecticut–the most in any New England state.
While there were few large plantations in states like Connecticut as there were in the south, there were at least two multi-thousand acre plantations in New London and Naragansett, R.I., which required a huge number of enslaved people to work them. For the most part, however, enslaved people in New England provided a wider variety of skilled labor for their owners from medicine and soap making to weaving and dyeing and more– along with the usual household and farm work.
Unlike in the South, enslaved people most often lived in their owners’ households versus in separate quarters on the property. In Westport, wealthy slaveholders in the 1790 census include Ebenezer Coley, Thomas Nash and Ebenezer Jesup with five enslaved people in each of their households while John Hide and Sarah Banks had six and four, respectively.
Just as in the South, Connecticut enacted harsh laws punishing those fleeing slavery. Runaways were pursued with vigor and punished cruelly if apprehended. Like New York, Connecticut cooperated with the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 which mandated that escaped enslaved people must be returned to their owners even if apprehended in a free state.
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Names hold significance to the people who bestow them. The wall of names holds an even greater significance as many were given by fathers who owned their children as literal goods, parents who themselves were enslaved, or were never given a name at all. These are the records of African Americans listed in the records in the Greens Farms Parish of what is today Westport.
The names on this wall represent baptism, marriage, and deaths of 241 enslaved and 19 free people of color recorded in the Greens Farms Church record book from 1742-1822. Twenty five of the enslaved people were children as were seven of the free people of color.
Green’s Farms Church was established in 1711 as an independent parish within Fairfield called the West Parish. It comprised an area that today lies between Compo Road and the Sasco River, extending northward into Redding.
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The memorial wall in Remembered featured the names of the 241 enslaved and 19 free people of color who appear in the Greens Farms Congregational Church log book from 1742 to 1822 as births, marriages, baptisms and deaths. Throughout the exhibit’s one-year run, the public was able to purchase memorial bricks in order to install them in the WM brick walk as the Save Their Names Project. The brick walk was inaugurated on June 30th, 2019 in a ceremony attending by local dignitaries and three descendants of Tim & Lill who are among the enslaved people memorialized on the wall.
To celebrate Juneteenth the museum held a Live Author Talk on Zoom with theater professor and playwright, Kyle Bass who discussed his play “Possessing Harriet” the story of an enslaved woman Harriet Powell, traveling with her captors from the South to Upstate New York, who finds refuge in the home of abolitionist Gerrit Smith and there meets his young cousin Elizabeth Cady (later Stanton). Kyle discussed his play in progress about his ancestors Tim & Lill Bennett who were enslaved in Westport in a home on Compo Road South as well as taking questions from viewers.
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The “House on The Pond” is recognizable to many Westporters but from about 1919 to 1940, the lady who lived there – Lillian Wald – was even more famous still. A nurse and humanitarian most noted for her work among young people and with immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side, Wald was a noted pioneer of American public health.
Born 10 March 1867 in Cincinnati, Ohio to German-Jewish parents Miss Lillian D. Wald, got her first taste of nursing when she was eighteen years old assisting the nurse her elder sister Julia had hired after the birth of her first child. Lillian’s interactions with the independently helpful woman sparked in Lillian a passion that would last a lifetime. Lillian resolved to become educated as a nurse and was accepted to the New York Hospital School of Nursing in 1889. After her graduation in 1891 she spent a brief time working in the New York Juvenile Asylum on West 176th Street in Manhattan. After seeing deplorable conditions and suffering exceedingly ill treatment of patients by medical staff, she determined a medical degree would gain her the respect and abilities to effect change for the youth of the city. In 1892 she enrolled at the Women’s Medical College (WMC) in New York City.
While enrolled at the WMC, Lillian volunteered to teach a home-nursing course to immigrant women from the Lower East Side. One morning, the daughter of one of her students came to fetch Miss Wald to assist her mother. The child rushed her through a series of side streets and alleyways until reaching a tenement on Ludlow Street. Then Lillian was led across a court, past open toilets to a rear building. There, the family of seven and two boarders were living in two rooms and the sick mother was lying on a dirty bed, suffering from a two-day old hemorrhage. The sight of this woman’s plight and the shock of seeing how many humans lived in similar conditions were the catalysts to change Lillian Wald’s future life. After this experience, Lillian found that she could be useful without a medical degree and decided to leave WMC.
With the help of Mary Brewster, a friend from nursing school, she acquired an apartment in a Jefferson Street tenement. The two began going about the neighborhood to help with the sick regardless of their religion or their ability to pay.
Lillian Wald with former UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, his daughter Ishbel and Lillian’s dog, Ramsay at her home on Round Pond Rd, Westport, CT, 1929; WMHC Collections
Soon, however, Miss Wald and Miss Brewster found that they had more work ahead of them than just the two ladies could handle, and so they increased their number to four and in 1895 moved to a house at 265 Henry Street which was donated by Jacob Schiff and would eventually become the Henry Street Settlement and Visiting Nurse Service.
Twenty years after Miss Wald initially arrived on the East Side, the Henry Street Settlement housed two kindergartens, carpenter shops, dancing schools, gymnasiums, debating classes and literary societies, as well as having three summer homes in the country for patrons to visit, a convalescent home, a library and study, and a place set aside for a sewing school. They offered lectures on subjects which ranged from government to sex hygiene, and there were clubs for boys and girls.
Over the years, Miss Wald became involved with numerous humanitarian efforts. She worked with the Board of Health to post nurses in schools and by 1914 had succeeded in having 374 school nurses city wide. Also, she and others formed the National Child Labor Committee in 1903. In 1905 Lillian met with President Theodore Roosevelt and suggested the idea of creating the Federal Children’s Bureau which would help educate and protect children in the workforce. The Bureau was eventually formed, but not until 1912 by President Taft.
Lillian also helped to establish the Nurses Emergency Council during the influenza Epidemic when it struck in the fall of 1918, at a conference of nurses called by the Red Cross Atlantic Division. Perhaps one of her most well-known contributions to society was her suggestion to Dr. Lee Frankel of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to send trained nurses to the family of every policy holder where insurance representatives had reported illness. This visiting nurse service was approved by the Met Life board and speedily implemented not only in New York City, but to all policy holders throughout the United States and Canada.
Toward the end of WWI, Lillian rented a home for her ill mother to convalesce in during the summers on a small pond near the Saugatuck River in Westport. After her mother’s death in 1923, and after her own health began to decline in 1925, Lillian continued to summer at “her house on the pond” which she then purchased. Lillian retired from active work at the Settlement in 1933 and relinquished the presidency in 1937. However, her retirement was not spent quietly as she entertained many of her famous friends at her Compo home. Chief among them were Jane Addams, Albert Einstein, Former Mayor of New York City Fiorello LaGuardia (a fellow Compo resident), Governor and Mrs. Herbert Lehman, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald with his daughter Ishbel, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
For her 70th birthday in 1937 and the 20th anniversary of her residence in Westport, a book of words, signatures and illustrations was compiled by the members of the community. 1200 of Westport’s men, women, and children signed the book or provided illustrations. Each contributed $0.25 to make up a check for the Henry Street Settlements.
Lillian Wald with Jane Addams in Washington, D.C., 1916; Library of Congress Photo Collection
This unique book was cherished by Miss Wald and its pages were preserved at her request. Local artists who contributed to this book were James Daugherty, Charles Prendergast, Robert Lambdin, George Wright, Alice Harvey, Kerr Eby, Karl Anderson, Beulah Allen Northrup and Joe King. This book is now on display at the Henry Street Settlement and a facsimile copy was made and bound which can be viewed at the Westport Library.
Miss Wald remained active while in Westport, willing to help with local relief programs, and she maintained a phone on her bedside table so that she could be in constant contact with welfare and relief organizations. And in her last months, although she was quite ill, she instructed workmen to install flood lights around the pond so that the children who were apt to skate there in the evenings would be able to see.
Lillian Wald passed away September 2, 1940. Westport mourned her passing and many of her friends and neighbors pushed and eventually succeeded in her election to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York University in 1970.
You can learn more about Lillian’s life and work by reading her books, The House on Henry Street and Windows on Henry Street or by visiting the Henry Street Settlement in New York City or by viewing their online exhibit at TheHouseOnHenryStreet.org.
A whole host of cultural illuminati have lived or worked in Westport for a time. Famously, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wrote, and Desi loved Lucy. More recently, Lynsey Addario and Justin Paul graduated from Staples High School and went on to do amazing things. We can lay claim to talented residents in myriad fields.
When the town graciously selected me as its first Poet Laureate, a question arose about which famous poetic forebears (I am decidedly not famous) might have lived or written in Westport. A subsequent search yielded surprisingly little. A rumour that I plan to research had it that Robert Frost may have alit here for a while, but that is as yet as unconfirmed as a Yeti sighting.
Never mind, I thought. What about everyday poets and poetry? Part of my mission as inaugural Poet Laureate of our hamlet is to make poetry less mysterious and inaccessible, and to create community through what we can all share through words. So I decided to dig a bit into Westport’s more quotidian poetic life. It turns out that we have a rich and quirky history of verse, created by many little-known, but homegrown, bards.
My research has been neither exhaustive nor scientific, but I have found a great deal of poetry in some unexpected places. The Westport Museum for History and Culture and the Westport Library both yielded quite a few surprising finds:
Autograph Books
Back in the day, graduating seniors would bring small autograph books to school prior to the end of the term, and get friends to sign them. We often do this now with big, heavy yearbooks, but these fragile pages in the Westport Museum’s archives hold sentimental and endearing gems within their bindings.
In 1925, Marie Durner wrote: “When rocks & hills divide us/And you no more I see/Just think of the name ‘Midgie’/A school pal dear to thee”. F.W. Dunn philosophized: “When everything seems rotten/And the outlooks [sic] very bad/Just think of SHS/And then you’ll have to be glad”. And ‘Dint’ Maurer quipped: “Merrily we trot along/O’er the future ‘o path/But take heed! Don’t fall/For every fall means a step/Nearer to your grave.”
Image Courtesy Westport Museum Collections
Christmas Cards
For some neither the brief “happy holidays” nor the more voluminous ‘our family’s year in words’ would do. When some Westporters sent holiday greetings, they did it in verse. In 1946 Adelaide and Jack Baker wrote: “Far-flung adventures? None this year/Those who are building cannot roam/Shingles and brick and plumbers are/Elusive, so we stayed at home/And, as we made new homes for others/Found that our own was still more dear”. The Sanford Evans family sent this Christmas greeting in 1925: “Our chimney pots/Are good and big – and our/Yule-logs burn with cheer/For all that/We’re expecting – Are they/Big enough this year?” And in 1933 The Steinkraus Family put out Ye Westport Primer, with a seasonal abecedarius printed in red and green, beginning with “A is for artists you see all around;/This is the town where they do abound/ B is for the beach, a fine place to swim;/We loll on the sand to get vigor and vim”, and ending with “Z’s for the zassafrass in our backyard,/(You’ve got to admit that Z’s very hard.)” Christmas illustrations, including Santa in his reindeer-pulled sled flying across a red full moon, abound.
Town Clerk
In the 1867-1886 volume “Births Marriages Deaths for Westport, a creative Town Clerk included some lovely verse in the blank spaces of the ledger where he recorded the quotidian events that made up our townsfolk’s lives. He harkens back to the eighteenth-century poet George Crabbe who had, a century earlier, also recorded the lives of his fellow villagers in rural England, and shares his words, perhaps to reflect his own emotions, on several pages of his recordings. One, from 1834 is an excerpt from Crabbe’s The Parish Register and, reads: “To Muse, I ask, before my view to bring/The humble actions of the swains I sing/How pass’d the youthful, how the old their days;/Who sank in sloth, and who aspired to praise/Their tempers, manners, morals, customs, arts/What parts they had, and how they employed their parts/By what elated, sooth’d, seduc’d, depressed/Full well I know the records give the rest.”
Gravestones
Poetry comes to us from beyond, or more precisely from, the grave in some cases. While most of the headstones in the numerous cemeteries around town provide the most basic information – names and dates – some loved ones memorialized those they lost with verse. While these poems may not have been penned by locals, they were placed by locals, where they have served to sprinkle lasting poetry around town. In Willowbrook cemetery, in a quiet corner overlooking Main Street, a stone book lies atop a large column memorial for Julia Snowdon Hotchkiss. Its open pages reveal an anonymous quote often referred to by revered rabbis: There is no death/What we call death/Is but surcease/From strife/They do not die/Whom we call dead/They go from life/To life. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s words from The Little Prince grace Marla Seigel’s pink granite marker: “In one of the stars I shall be living/In one of them I shall be laughing/And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing/When you look at the sky at night.” Hilaire A. Roth rests beneath Robert Burns’ verse from his poem A Red, Red Rose: “So fair you were, my bonnie lass/So deep in love was I/And I will love thee still my dear/Till all the seas go dry.” It surprised me to find so much poetry nestled amongst the much older and less crowded together, albeit virtually unreadable, headstones in the Greens Farms lower cemetery. Time, wind, water, and moss have erased or obscured much of the script, but some remains clear. For instance, Dorothy Z. Thompson’s family laid her to rest beneath the first lines from Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight: “This is thy hour O soul/To fly free among the stars/And ponder the themes/Thou lovest best.” Ghosts of poetic lines adorn, too, the headstones of Betsey Smith and Eliza Whitehead.
Local Authors
If it’s too chilly or muddy or buggy to tramp through local graveyards in search of bards’ words, head to the library and make your way downstairs to the poetry section where ‘local author’ stickers affixed to certain books’ bindings will lead you to homegrown balladry. Westporter Steven Herz composes paens to a painful time in his Marked: Poems of the Holocaust, and our town features prominently in Jonathan Towers’ Westport Poems. And although Regan Good may now reside in Brooklyn, her second collection of poetry, The Needle, harkens back largely to her childhood here in Westport. In the Westport Museum for History and Culture you will find a poem by Robert B. Northrop’s grandfather Robert DeWitt Allen dated March 30, 1900, describing a treacherous schooner trip up the Saugatuck. Captain Sam Allen piloted the Henry Remsen with a steady hand in this excerpt:
With all aboard and under way,/White water in her scuppers lay./Then stood her in around the bluff./He got her in near Eno’s dock,/But could not get by Judy’s rock./That night the wind came in nor’west,/But Sam just raved and could not rest.
— Robert DeWitt Allen
Sara Krasne, the Museum’s Archivist, reports that “Judy’s Rock probably refers to Judy’s Point which was originally called Judah’s Point after David Judah (the first Jewish person to live in Westport).”
Local Newspapers
Not far from the poetry section you will find several immense, heavy black leather-bound tomes, in no particular order, stacked on the bottom of one of the metal shelves. Open these to travel back in time to the mid-century past and thumb through the yellowing and fragile pages of Westport’s local newspapers. Features like “Pupil Patter”, “Poems by Pat”, and most prolifically, “Town Pump”, feature original verse by poetic locals.
You will also find news stories about local elementary school poetry competitions, observations of poetry month, and even a poetic letter to the editor of the Westport Town Crier and Herald (July 5, 1957).
Poetry Box
One local resident in particular does her part to promote Everyday Poetry every day. Donna Ryzinski, who holds an MFA from Goddard College in Vermont, has for the last decade participated in a poetry reading group. Every other week these poetically inclined women congregate and recite a preselected poet’s verse. Each member, the oldest of whom is ninety-five, selects the featured poet and hosts the gathering on a rotating basis. But Ryzinski has taken this love of verse one step – or about three to be exact – further. Roughly that many paces off Sturges Highway in front of her home stands a small wooden box atop a matching post. Her husband fashioned this “best Christmas gift ever” from the door of an Upper West Side brownstone door. About the size of a large toaster oven, a front door of glass faces the street. Since 2015, she has placed a poem inside for all passers-by to stop and read. She prints off and changes the contents roughly once a week, and chooses from a wide variety of poets, as does her poetry reading group. The day I visited it featured a poem by local, well known poet Sophie Cabot Black. Ryzinski says that the poetry box brings her as much joy as she hopes it brings her visitors. She has witnessed two women scale a steep snowbank to access the verse within. One person approached with the reverence of a walking meditation and stood in tadasana (mountain pose) before accessing the words. A woman left tulips and a note: “Thank you for making my walks that much better”. And a gentleman stood in the driveway shouting, “I love this! Never stop doing this!”
It seems that while no wildly famous poets have made Westport their permanent home, many of their words have alighted here through our many poetry-loving residents. Moreover, many of them have created their own “words, words, words” (Hamlet, II.ii) of their own which, while may not have reached the audience of a Dickenson or Whitman, nonetheless imbue our little hamlet with the spirit of poetry.
In my role as Westport’s inaugural Poet Laureate I hope to tease out, encourage, and spread poetry around, knowing that it creates connection and community.
Special thanks to Sara Krasne for her assistance in researching this article.
