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  • Connecticut River Valley Awakening
  • Alice Azure (bio)

Fruit cocktail. In all my childhood years, I had never tasted anything as wonderful as this dessert at my first meal in the Cromwell Children’s Home. The golden chunks of pineapples, peaches, grapes, and pears, along with the bright red maraschino cherries, were new to my eyes. Mom had never fed us anything like this. I lifted the bowl to my lips in order to slurp every drop of the sweet juice. This action brought a swift, disapproving look from the counselor to whose care I had been assigned after our mother left us that afternoon.

It was the summer of 1951, just a short time before my eleventh birthday on July 30. My sister and brother, Carol and Freddie, would soon turn ten and nine. Our mother had reluctantly committed the three of us to the Children’s Home in Cromwell, a town on the Connecticut River between Hartford and Middletown. She had little choice. Our father had been sent to prison due to his violence and abuse against all of us. Our house, part of Nim’s Village, a World War II veterans’ housing project built in West Springfield, Massachusetts, was slated for demolition, and she was unable to find another place for her little family. During the months that followed our first day at the home, we were of the hope our mother would soon take us back. She never did. Several months later Joanie, our sister, barely four years, joined us.

The home was an enormous brick building of four stories that sat atop a high hill close by the Connecticut River to the east. The Hanging Hills of Meriden were way off to the west. Built in 1914, the home’s complex stood in the midst of fifty-plus acres. At that time [End Page 115] the only way up to the formidable building was by Missionary Road, which ran up the east side of the grounds, between cow pastures and an apple orchard. As the road curved left, you would pass a chicken coop, a pig house, a barn and its silo, and long tool sheds. Many big trees were all over the grounds, covered with nice lawns.

The East Coast Conference of the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church of America owned and operated the home. This denomination also ran a summer camp located on the same grounds as the home. The camp included an enormous hangar-like worship center with a wall-to-wall stage to accommodate a large choir and the central pulpit. To the west of the home’s building, the camp’s screened-in dining hall overlooked the beautiful Hanging Hills of Meriden. Dormitories for campers, small staff houses, and a large tennis court completed the complex of buildings associated with the camp.

From my young point of view, the tour de force of my new home was a pond at the end of a gritty pathway that rolled downhill from the west side of the hilltop, curled between the tennis courts and baseball field, past cornfields, and continued down through a thickly wooded area. At the end was the pond, with its little beach, raft, boat, and diving board by the deep end, where there was a dam. This is where I learned to swim, to dive, and to row a boat. One summer, I even discovered crawdaddies up in the little stream that emptied into the pond. I was afraid to hold them. In wintertime we spent many hours ice skating or warming up by a big bonfire. I liked to be the person who could “crack the whip,” using my considerable strength to snap a long line of ice skaters, testing the ability of the end kids to stay connected.

My father, a child of the north woods, spent his formative years in a similar environment. Joseph Alfred Hatfield was born in 1913 in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. His cultural background was French and Mi’kmaq, in spite of the English sounding name, which was actually Dutch in origin. It has taken me many years of genealogical research to learn that he descended from families whose lineages were Acadian or M...

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