Connecticut

32 places with something worth saying about them.

• 1878 Wallingford tornado A paper receipt from Wallingford, Connecticut turned up sixty-five miles away in Rhode Island after the storm.
• Bank Street Historic District (Waterbury, Connecticut) Waterbury's most ornate commercial building was built for elite tenants and ended up housing a piano tuner and a billiards parlor.
• Blackledge River Railroad Bridge A three-and-a-half-mile branch line was leased out for nine hundred and ninety-nine years.
• Broad Street Historic District (Middletown, Connecticut) Middletown's river port was dying, so the town's leaders founded a university and turned their vegetable gardens into a neighborhood.
• Canterbury, Connecticut Connecticut's official state heroine was jailed overnight for teaching Black girls in this town.
• Central Connecticut State University Connecticut's oldest public university was shut down by the state legislature after eighteen years, and stayed closed for two.
• Connecticut Connecticut's original charter gave it all the land west to the Pacific Ocean, and it tried to collect.
• Connecticut River The border between Massachusetts and Connecticut was drawn because of an argument over river tolls that nobody won.
• Downtown New Britain New Britain became an industrial powerhouse without a river to power it.
• Downtown New London Historic District In 1781 Benedict Arnold led British troops into New London and burned most of the city down.
• Eastern Connecticut State University This university began with thirteen women taking classes on the third floor of a savings bank.
• Essex, Connecticut Essex, Connecticut throws an annual parade to celebrate the worst day in its history, when British marines burned its entire fleet.
• Florence Griswold Museum The boarders at this Old Lyme house paid their keep by painting directly on the walls and doors.
• Israel Putnam Monument Critics said the horse on this Revolutionary War monument looked like it had a leg disease.
• Lebanon, Connecticut Connecticut's whole Revolutionary War effort was run out of a house and a small office on this town's green.
• Lutz Children's Museum A Manchester museum's most famous resident is a woodchuck named Chuckles, who presides over its Groundhog Day celebration.
• Marion, Connecticut A hill in this Connecticut neighborhood is called French Hill because Rochambeau's army slept on it in 1781.
• Mount Hope River A herd of free-roaming cattle trampled the banks of this river until it grew too wide, and it took a restoration project to shrink it back.
• Naugatuck Trail 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.
• New Britain Museum of American Art A museum in New Britain bought a famous five-panel Thomas Hart Benton mural for five hundred dollars, less than the cost of the crane needed to move it.
• Newtown, Connecticut The game of Scrabble was developed in Newtown, Connecticut, by a man named James Brunot.
• Old Lyme, Connecticut A disease known around the world got its name from this small Connecticut shoreline town.
• Post University A school that started out teaching typing and bookkeeping in Waterbury counts a former president of Paraguay among its graduates.
• Prospect, Connecticut Prospect calls itself the best small town in Connecticut because a magazine once ranked it the worst.
• Quinnipiac University Quinnipiac won its first national championship in any sport ten seconds into overtime.
• Southbury Training School 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 In 1937, a farming town in Connecticut wrote a zoning law to stop the American Nazi movement from building its largest training camp.
• Southington, Connecticut In 1942 the War Department picked this one Connecticut town to represent all of America, and dropped the pictures over occupied Europe from airplanes.
• Wadsworth Atheneum A museum in Hartford sponsored George Balanchine's immigration to America, and got his first American ballet in return.
• Waterford Speedbowl Three weeks after opening in 1951, the Waterford Speedbowl shut down because it was choking its own spectators with dust.
• Wesleyan University A small Connecticut college keeps the personal papers of Martin Scorsese, Frank Capra and John Waters in its archives.
• West Branch Reservoir The aqueduct feeding this reservoir leaks thirty-five million gallons a day, and fixing it means a two billion dollar tunnel under the Hudson.