The Litchfield Historical Society is thrilled to announce the acquisition of a previously unpublished letter from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall to Judge James Gould, instructor at the Litchfield Law School, in which Marshall provides feedback on Gould’s book about pleadings.
The Litchfield Historical Society will host a lecture by the Calder Foundation on June 5, 2021, in the Tapping Reeve Meadow. To celebrate that partnership and the life and work of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), we are going inside the collection to look at one of the Society’s most intriguing works of art.
Alexander Calder was born into a family of artists. His mother was a trained painter, and his father and grandfather were accomplished sculptors. Beginning his career with illustrations and paintings, Calder experimented with wire sculpture before moving to Paris in 1926. In France, he began work on the Cirque Calder, a body of articulated wire sculptures designed to be performed for an audience. Calder performed and evolved his Circus for a number of years in both Paris and New York. Many of Calder’s early kinetic sculptures were moved using motors—it was fellow artist Marcel Duchamp that first dubbed these moving sculptures “mobiles.” Soon, Calder stopped using motors and began creating sculptures that would move freely in the air.
In 1933, Alexander and his wife, Louisa, purchased a home in Roxbury, Connecticut. While they remained world travelers, the Calders left a rich legacy in their adoptive state.
Continue readingContributed by Leith Johnson, Project Archivist
Among the women and men who settled the Connecticut Western Reserve in the early 1800s were students of the Litchfield Law School. To get an idea of the impact these individuals had on the development of the territory, I selected one student more or less at random and researched his life and the lives of his children. What I am going to sketch out here is by no means comprehensive, but it does offer an illustrative case study. Much of what I am writing is taken directly from The Firelands Pioneer, a journal first published in 1852 by the Firelands Historical Society, that is an indispensable resource for information about the settling and development of the area farthest west in Western Reserve known as the Firelands.
Continue readingRecently someone on the “I Grew Up in Litchfield” Facebook group asked when the high school sports team adopted the nickname “the Cowboys.” We did some digging, and came up with roughly the same answer as another member of the group. We thought you might enjoy some of the wonderful sources we used to come to the conclusion that the name was in use by the 1920s, and possibly earlier.
It’s long been a challenge for those researching ancestors who may have been illiterate, poor, or marginalized to learn about their heritage. Institutions like the Litchfield Historical Society were founded and began collecting during the Colonial Revival, a time when there was tension over immigration and clashes between races, classes, and nationalities. Our founders were the descendants of wealthy white immigrants from Western Europe who wished to preserve their history by saving their ancestor’s decorative arts, artifacts, and papers, predominantly those of men.
While we continue working to make our collections more representative and inclusive of all the people who made Litchfield home, a lot of the town’s early history of women, minorities, and the natives displaced by the settlers was lost, or perhaps never documented at all.
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