Broad Street Historic District (Middletown, Connecticut)

Connecticut

Middletown's river port was dying, so the town's leaders founded a university and turned their vegetable gardens into a neighborhood.

historical

These streets were vegetable gardens. Middletown had grown rich in the seventeen hundreds as a port on the Connecticut River, and by the eighteen thirties the port was fading. Community leaders answered by founding Wesleyan University in 1831 and putting money into textile mills and machine shops. The campus went in west of High Street. The open land between the new college and Main Street, used mostly for gardening, suddenly had a reason to be built on. Between 1830 and 1850 the amount of housing here tripled. What went up was Greek Revival, column after column of it, and this remains the largest concentration of Greek Revival houses in the city. By 1900 the neighborhood was essentially finished, and very little has changed since. One house on College Street dates to 1765, older than the building boom around it. It used to stand on High Street. Around 1830 someone picked it up and moved it here.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
Community leaders revitalized the local economy by founding Wesleyan University in 1831, and investing in textile and machine industries.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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