Category Archives: Litchfield’s History

Blog posts about Litchfield’s history, from town settlement in 1719 through to modern day Litchfield.

Found In The Stacks: “Reports of Cases in the Superior Court of Connection 1785-1788” by Ephraim Kirby

By Bill Bucklin

Ephraim Kirby must have been a fascinating person to have a drink with during his service as a lawyer in Litchfield in the 1780s and 1790s.

Born in Woodbury, Kirby volunteered for Revolutionary War service just after the battle of Lexington and was wounded thirteen times. After the war he attended Yale University, leaving without a degree. After apprenticing to become a lawyer he was admitted to the bar and settled in Litchfield. Kirby’s son attended Tapping Reeve’s famous law school, where Reeve was teaching students to transpose English common law for the needs of America’s emerging legal system.

Kirby recognized the need for a written record of court decisions and began to compile any reports he could find. When the Connecticut legislature passed a law in 1785 requiring judges to prepare their decisions in writing, Kirby realized he had struck legal gold. Kirby spent three and a half years in a different form of service to his country, collecting every single Superior Court case report.

*Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut, from the year 1785, to May, 1788.*

In 1789 Kirby visited Thomas Collier, Litchfield’s first printer, and left him with the manuscript of Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut, from the year 1785, to May, 1788. Collier set the 425 pages of type, and in 1789 America’s first-ever volume of law reports was published.

Recognizing the volume’s significance, the Connecticut legislature ordered 350 copies which were sent to all Connecticut towns. It’s easy to imagine Tapping Reeve’s delight at adding this treasured volume to the Litchfield Law School’s expanding law library.

Found In The Stacks: “The Lady of the Lighthouse” by Helen Smith Woodruff

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Written by Bill Bucklin

When you think of famous authors from Litchfield, CT, of course Harriet Beecher Stowe comes to mind. The works of a second Litchfield author, once famous, also reside in the stacks of the Litchfield Historical Society. Helen Smith Woodruff wrote 11 novels between 1912 and 1921, some of them completed while summering in Litchfield with her husband Lewis B. Woodruff of New York City, descendant of one of Litchfield’s founding families.

Helen Smith Woodruff was a society woman with a remarkable social consciousness. After undergoing a short period of blindness from scarlet fever she wrote the novel The Lady of the Lighthouse, published in 1913. The lighthouse in the title is misleading, because Woodruff’s focus is on the main character’s mission to brighten the world of a young blind boy in New York City, one of many blind children at a rehab facility known as the Lighthouse. Woodruff donated the proceeds of all her books to charity. The $300,000 in royalties from The Lady of the Lighthouse went to the New York Association for the Blind, the equivalent of ten million dollars today.

Helen Smith Woodruff died in New York City in 1924 as the result of a fall from a second-story window in her New York home after a long period of illness at the age of only 36 (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/helen-smith-woodruff/). One imagines summers in Litchfield were darker without her.

Litchfield School Records

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By Cecelia Hooper, Intern

The recent merging of Litchfield Public Schools and Region 6 into Region 20 has given the Litchfield Historical Society the opportunity to ensure the old district’s memory will be preserved for future generations. A generous donation by the new region of office records, sports paraphernalia, and other academic items of no longer existing schools reveal the workings of an older scholastic administration and give insight into the lives of students over the past century.

Trophies on display in Liggett Gallery, 2025-11-1-5

Donated student handbooks from Litchfield High School dating from the 1964-65 school year up to 1989-90 included school policies, club descriptions, possible awards, sport schedules, and the school song. Information was added and removed over the years, such as course descriptions and Title IX. Trophies show wins in baseball, basketball, and tennis, along with the names of the winning team. The trophies and sports jerseys are currently on display in the Liggett Gallery.

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Eric Hatch Portrait

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By Cecelia Hooper, Intern

The museum recently acquired a portrait of the acclaimed author Eric Stowe Hatch (1902-1973) through the generous donation of his son, Eric K. Hatch. This portrait will be on view Litchfield History Museum’s Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library (7 South Street, Litchfield). Depicting Hatch at seven years old, the painting was completed around 1909 and painted either at his parents’ house on Park Avenue in New York City, or at their secondary residence in Cedarhurst, Long Island.

Oil Painting–Eric Stowe Hatch (1902-1973) by John Wycliffe Lowes Forster, circa 1909; Litchfield Historical Society, 2025-13-1

The artist of the piece was John Wycliffe Lowes Forster (1850-1938), a well-known portrait painter from Canada. He began his apprenticeship at nineteen, and a decade later studied for three years in Paris. A member of the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy, his body of work includes multiple prominent subjects, including the Emperor and Empress of Japan in 1920. The museum holds four other of his paintings.

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Miss Jones Letter

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1847 Litchfield CT stampless folded letter red CDS and 5 rate [H.3508] - Picture 1 of 3

Letter, Julia Henrietta Jones to Laura Boardman Lane, March 31, 1847

As noted before, we have alerts set up for eBay and various auction sites to notify staff when Litchfield-related items and collections appear. A few weeks ago, I added this item to my watchlist on eBay. Individual letters are often bought and sold by stamp collectors who care little about the contents as was the case with this. Although I had requested an image of the contents, the seller did not comply. Instead, I received an offer to buy the letter for $8.49. Noting that it had a return option, I decided to take a chance- the name Laura Lane was familiar from my work on the Boardman papers, and the 1841 made me wonder whether the author was a former Litchfield Female Academy Student.

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