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10 TheBoyfromBridgeport  W hen Charles Stratton was born in 1838, Bridgeport, Connecticut had been an official reality for less than two years. Wedged between the successful colonial boroughs of Fairfield and Stratford, the small village of Stratfield had hugged the shore of a shallow bay, hemmed in by a triangular island and a reef. It was not nearly as desirable for large ships as the protected bays elsewhere along the coast of Long Island Sound, and boasted no other obvious geographical advantages. Its inhabitants gathered around the small Congregational church, farmed the broad flat meadows and gentle hills, and built wharves to run a limited coastal trade. Then, when Fairfield was burned by the British in 1779, the untouched town of Stratfield took up some of its trade. Thus began the transformation from a small Puritan community into the commercial powerhouse of Connecticut. For the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the borough technically remained part of Stratford, alternately called Bridgeport or Newfield by its inhabitants. It grew more quickly than any other community in the state, from two hundred settlers to a few thousand, while the small village center became a small business district, complete with modest hotels and dry goods stores. But it was still far behind its neighbors in some ways. Muddy streets and gravel sidewalks ran with sewage during rainstorms and cows roamed the streets freely. Travelers from New York often passed quickly through, heading east from the border of Fairfield past straggling houses to the bustling downtown by the bay, then turning north along the Pequonnock River to avoid the salt marshes, through open farmland and forest up to the giant elm tree on Old Mill Green. From here they could turn southeast toward Stratford and the coast or northeast to Hartford and Boston. A large arrowhead peninsula south of this road had escaped colonial settlement for the most part, until in 1835 a toll bridge was built from the business district near the wharves to this marsh-­ hemmed farmland. 11 T h e B o y f r o m B r i d g e p o r t By now all the townsfolk called their community of a few thousand “Bridgeport,” and that was the official name when the state of Connecticut granted their borough its own charter in 1836. Despite protests from the turnpike companies, the Housatonic Railroad was chartered that same year to build a railway from the docks north along the river valley. By 1840 the line reached to New Milford, and the first train, garlanded with flags, left Bridgeport Station at 9:00 a.m. to a rousing performance by the local brass band. The schedule was coordinated with the ferries to New York, making the growing city an important junction on the way to the mines and factories of western Massachusetts. Charles’s grandfather, Seth Sherwood Stratton, was born in the wilds of North Stratford in 1782, to a family that had settled in Connecticut a hundred years earlier. He moved south to the growing village of Bridgeport, and married Amy Sharp of Oxford.Their son, Sherwood Edwards Stratton, was born in 1811, and he married Cynthia Thompson of West Haven, bringing her to Bridgeport and living in a two-­ chimney house at the intersection of Main and Arch Streets, on the edge of the village two blocks from the Pequonnock River. The black-­ bearded Sherwood served as a private in the 2nd company, 4th regiment, of the Light Artillery of Bridgeport and worked as a local carpenter, and apparently was less affluent than his brother Samuel or the rest of the Stratton clan. Cynthia seems to have worked part-­ time as a cleaning woman at Daniel Sterling’s hotel a few blocks away at Main and Wall Streets. In their plain salt-­ box home they had three children who lived past childhood, two girls, Frances Jane and Mary Elizabeth, and one boy, Charles.1 The latter was born on January 4, 1838, and baptized at the nearby St. John’s Episcopal church. He was a large baby, as he joked years later: “I weighed nine pounds when I was born, within half a pound of one of my sisters, who has since attained a weight in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds; so you can see how the gap has widened between us.”2 At five months old he stopped growing, lingering for years at the same weight and height, and even his feet, for...

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