Heroes & The Historical Society June 19

Dione Longley and Buck Zaidel will give an illustrated lecture at a reception being held Friday June 19 at 7 p.m. in The Inn at Middletown, 70 Main Street.  The purpose of the event is both educational and practical as the admission will go to to raise funds for the maintenance of the Middlesex County Historical Society’s headquarters, the General Joseph Mansfield House. As for the educational component, Longley and Zaidel are the co-authors of "Heroes for All Time: Connecticut Civil War Soldiers Tell Their Stories", recently published by Wesleyan University Press. The book presents the war straight from the minds and pens of its participants: rich passages from soldiers’ letters and diaries complement hundreds of outstanding period photographs, some from the Historical Society’s collection. Rare war artifacts pictured make a connection to the men and boys who once owned them. While so many books written about the Civil War feature the activities of generals and politicians, Heroes for All Time tells the stories of the men in the trenches and the families waiting at home for news of their loved ones.

Dione Longley is an independent historian and writer. For two decades, she served as the director of the Historical Society and curated a number of exhibits chronicling the history of Middletown, including the award winning Civil War exhibit, "Hard-tack, Salt Pork, and Faith." Buck Zaidel, a dentist and longtime Civil War enthusiast, collects objects and images related to Union soldiers’ daily lives. He has exhibited at Civil War and antique arms shows across the country and contributed items to museum exhibitions, including "Photography and the American Civil War" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

The price for the event, including a dessert reception following the talk, is $35.00 per person. The book will be available for purchase and inscription. Those wishing to purchase the book in advance and having it inscribed prior to the event for pick-up at the event may do so by purchasing a ticket for $80.00. To purchase tickets, call the Historical Society at 860-346-0746. Join us as we commemorate the end of the bloody conflict that took roughly 6000 Connecticut lives in the struggle to save the union and abolish slavery.

Logbooks, Slavery, Racism, Middletown & Loss of Memory

Anne Farrow, author of "The Logbooks: Connecticut's Slave Ships and Human Memory" (Wesleyan University Press), will speak this Thursday evening (12/040 at 7 p.m. in the small sanctuary of Congregation Adath Israel, 8 Broad Street in Middletown. The author conducted research at the Middlesex County Historical Society and the Society is sponsoring this event.

This from the press release: "In 1757, a sailing ship owned by Gurdon Salstonstall, an affluent Connecticut merchant, and captained by John Easton of Middletown, sailed from New London to the tiny island of Bence in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to take on fresh water and slaves. On board was the owner’s son, Dudley Salstonstall, on a training voyage to learn the trade. "The Logbooks" explores that voyage and two others documented by young Salstonstall. When writer Anne Farrow discovered the significance of the logbooks for the Africa and two other ships in 2004, her mother had been recently diagnosed with dementia. As Farrow bore witness to the impact of memory loss on her mother’s sense of self, she also began a journey into the world of the logbooks and the Atlantic slave trade, eventually retracing part of the Africa’s long-ago voyage to Sierra Leone. As the narrative unfolds in The Logbooks, Farrow explores the idea that if our history is incomplete, then collectively we have forgotten who we are—a loss that is in some ways similar to what her mother experienced. Her meditations are well rounded with references to the work of writers, historians, and psychologists."

Having read the book on my recent trip to Chicago, which happened to coincide with the grand jury decision in Ferguson, MO, Ms. Farrow touches on a number of issues that the United States is still coming to terms with, particularly how this country has treated and continues to treat African Americans in the years since slavery was banned.  Also, the book was researched and written during the time that the author's mother was slipping into dementia, totally losing her memory save for jumbled recollections from her childhood. In the book, the loss of personal memory is compared to the loss of "national memory", the ability or, perhaps, the desire to forget or ignore traumatic events or worse, trivialize them.  

The talk is free and open to the public - a good will donation is always welcome.  Parking is on the street and in the north side of the parking lot behind Adath Israel that is directly behind the former First United Methodist Church.  

For more information, call the Historical Society at 860-346-0746. To learn more about Ms. Farrow's book, go to www.upne.com/0819573056.html.

The old leatherman returns

I wish Dan DeLuca the best. For now, his are the shoulders upon which the legend of the Old Leatherman rest. It's partly a joy, and partly a curse, but DeLuca has taken on the robe of leather, and will bear it until someone else becomes obsessed with a mad old hobo who didn't know better than to come in out of the rain.

DeLuca just published a handsome, and definitive set of primary research materials on the Leatherman. His book, The Old Leatherman, has just been released by the Wesleyan University Press. It's chockablock with news accounts, some as early as the 1850's, about a man, dressed all in a handmade suit of leather, who wandered a regular route through New York and Connecticut for three decades in the 19th century. DeLuca has obviously spent hours and years in dusty archives, attics and hunched over microfiche readers, rooting out these news accounts which detailed the comings and goings of a minor celebrity on the backroads of local towns.

He lived out of doors, in rock shelters throughout the area (there's one on Higby, and one in Maromas). He lived on handouts, and traded, consciously or not, on his status as an omen of luck, and his minor celebrity.

I know about Dan's obsession, because for a few years, I too was lost in those same archives searching for material that might unlock the secrets of this wanderer for me. In 1984, with some willing friends, produced a documentary called "The Road Between Heaven and Hell" (you can watch it in installments, on Youtube, here). The title is line from an old folk song written contemporaneously with the wanderings of the Leatherman.

For me, it began with a photo of the Leatherman posted in the local newspaper, with a short article about a rock shelter in which the wanderer spent a few days waiting out the great blizzard of 1888. That rock shelter was just around the corner from where I was living at the time in Southington.

So I started digging. And I was lucky enough to meet Leroy Foote, the last person as obsessed as I had become with the old wanderer. And I met the last living person to have seen the Leatherman. And I met dozens of other people who had some material, or some connection, or some old photo that helped me piece an incomplete story together. But, alas, that story would remain incomplete, as it does today.

DeLuca has done a much better job than I in his research. He has found very early news accounts which make it clear that the Leatherman spoke, farmed and worked to make his way in the early days before he settled into a routine of grunting and begging. DeLuca has also ferreted out some amazing, never-before-seen or published photographs of the wanderer, which, amazingly, except for an obvious decline in weight, health and vigor, show a man, a lost soul, whose age and identity is indistinct because of the clothing he chose to wear. I remember writing in my script that "only a handful" of photographs of the Leatherman remain. Reflecting now, I think it's amazing that so many photos were taken, with the consent of the Leatherman, since in 19th century America, if you had even one photo taken of yourself in a lifetime, it was a memorable and rare event.

DeLuca's research also seems to prove, in these early accounts, a version of the legend that was to follow the Leatherman to his grave. According to those early reports, he was involved in the leather trade, as a tanner, and he was driven mad when he lost his business and the woman he loved, almost simultaneously. This madness drove him to his wanderings, and to wear the rough leather outfit he created for himself.

For me, at some point, I realized I would never uncover the fact of the poor, old Leatherman's life. He was nearly mute on the topic of his biography, and the accounts left behind were contradictory, inflammatory and not entirely helpful. I think DeLuca has come closer to the truth, for what it's worth. But the near truths are less interesting than what this story says about all of us, all these generations, who, as Nick Shoumatoff says in the documentary, remember the Leatherman when most of his contemporaries, even notables, have been forgotten.

The real interest is how communities form myths, and how those myths have power, and are passed from one generation to the next.

I dispelled my own obsession by writing a long novel about the Leatherman. I decided to make it a set of parallel stories - that of Jack Conroy, a boy who was raised at the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane, and Jules Bourglay, the man who would become the Leatherman. I never submitted it to anyone for publication, and only a few people have read it, but I decided this weekend to start a blogpost where I'll attempt to put up a chapter each week, starting today, here.