Newtown, Connecticut

Connecticut

The game of Scrabble was developed in Newtown, Connecticut, by a man named James Brunot.

historicalculturepeople

Scrabble came out of this town. A resident named James Brunot developed the game here. Newtown made a strange assortment of things over the years. Furniture. Tea bags. Combs. Fire hoses. Folding boxes. Buttons and hats. There was farming, and there was mining for mica and feldspar. A village called Hawleyville briefly became a railroad center, back when the town sat on an important crossroads. The population climbed past four thousand around 1881, then slid backward for decades, bottoming out at about twenty-six hundred people in 1930. After the Second World War the highways arrived and the suburbs followed, and Newtown became a place people commuted from. The local paper, the Newtown Bee, has been printing since June of 1877. One family bought it in 1881 and has run it ever since.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The game of Scrabble was developed here by James Brunot.

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

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Southbury Training School 3.9 mi In 1976, John Lennon gave away his Oscar to raise money for a state school in Southbury, and it brought in six hundred dollars.
  • Southbury, Connecticut 5.7 mi In 1937, a farming town in Connecticut wrote a zoning law to stop the American Nazi movement from building its largest training camp.
  • Post University 14.6 mi A school that started out teaching typing and bookkeeping in Waterbury counts a former president of Paraguay among its graduates.
  • Naugatuck Trail 14.6 mi This hiking trail is a leftover: postwar housing cut it down to a fraction of its old length, and orphaned pieces of it still carry the name in four other towns.
  • Bank Street Historic District (Waterbury, Connecticut) 16.9 mi Waterbury's most ornate commercial building was built for elite tenants and ended up housing a piano tuner and a billiards parlor.
  • Prospect, Connecticut 18.3 mi Prospect calls itself the best small town in Connecticut because a magazine once ranked it the worst.