We’re here to celebrate archives month with a few features on the holdings of the Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library. PBS is airing a new documentary on Prohibition. One of the first images you’ll see is from our collection, as shown above, of the first page of the first of Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance. Beecher gets a lot of credit for starting the movement but his sermons, delivered in Litchfield in 1826, came some 37 years after the first Temperance Association was formed in Litchfield. Jedediah Strong, a local attorney who once showed great promise, became notorious for intemperance. Strong’s situation is supposed to have been the driving factor behind the organization of the first temperance society.  The organizers, including such notables as  Ephraim Kirby, Julius Deming, Benjamin Tallmadge, Uriah Tracy, Moses Seymour, Tapping Reeve, and John Allen, signed a temperance pledge that year.  Strong also signed, but his resolve lasted less than a year. In 1790 he became embroiled in a scandalous divorce case in which he was accused of drunkenly beating his wife (the daughter of Connecticut’s Secretary of State). It is interesting to note that Allen, a congressman who was instrumental in the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, also violated his pledge and lost his wealth and business. Though Beecher left Litchfield the year he delivered his sermons, the temperance spirit remained. Other evidence of activity in this area can be found by searching our online finding aids, including the record book of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1878.

This brochure, from the Hawk-Hurst hotel, continues to extol the virtues of Litchfield.  The next page reads as follows:

It is true, as a well known newspaper writer has recently said, that “all the poor wretch” has to do “who is languid with the luxuries of Lenox, stuffed with the satieties of Saratoga, nettled by the noodles of Newport, sick of the snobberies of Southampton, riled at the rigidities of Ridgefield, or piqued at the pretensions of Pittsfield,” all that this poor wretch has to do is to “come and bask for a while in the lithsome light of Litchfield.” He will leave a better and a happier man. But he will leave only to return the next season. It is an invariable rule that a person comes, sees, and is conquered. Once in Litchfield he is always a Litchfielder.

Special June rates for the season of nineteen hundred and six- $12.50 to $20 per week.

Judson Canfield by Ralph Earl, 1796

We’ve noted our available Western Reserve Collections before (see http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org/blog/?s=western+reserve) In addition to the Judson Canfield Papers and the Samuel Flewwelling Papers, the Benjamin Tallmadge Collection, the Seymour Family Papers, and several others all document the population of the Western Reserve. We are happy to add a new publication to our holdings related to this topic, The Peopling of New Connecticut: From the Land of Steady Habits to the Western Reserve, edited by Richard Buel, Jr. It includes an excerpt from the Litchfield Monitor, an article published by Uriel Holmes, a former Litchfield Law School student, in the Carlisle Gazette, and a speech by Oliver Wolcott to the legislature. Thanks to Chip Spencer for this new addition.