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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.

Detective Work in the Archives

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Group photo of Sons of Veterans of the United States of America C. O. Belden Camp #31 Litchfield, about 1881

Project Archivist Leith Johnson is working on creating and enhancing descriptive records for the Litchfield Historical Society Photograph Collection funded by a Connecticut Humanities SHARP grant. He contributed the piece below about this photograph, which had no identifying information written on it or with it, and required some investigation.

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Finding Evidence of Underrepresented People in the Archives

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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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