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Chapter Ten. Fighting for the Lost Battle
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ChaPtEr tEn Fighting for the Lost Battle I came to Essex in July 2006, after eighteen years at the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum in New York to take over as executive director of the Connecticut River Museum, located on the Essex waterfront. I knew nothing of the British raid. My wife had googled Essex before we came and told me about Loser’s Day. We joked that any town that had the chutzpa to hold an annual parade to mark the worst day in its 300-year history must have pretty thick skin and strong self-esteem. Ironically, even in the museum, which stands right on the waterfront, precisely where the British had come ashore, there were no exhibits about the raid, just a handful of cannonballs and a few charred ships timbers, all packed away in storage. The Connecticut River Museum building is relatively new by Essex standards . It was constructed in 1878 as a steamboat dock and three-story warehouse for loading and offloading cargo and passengers to and from the massive side-wheeled steamships that connected Hartford to Manhattan during the golden age of steam navigation. When the steamboats left the river in 1931, the building survived the next several decades through adaptive reuse as a general store, marina, dance hall, tea room, roller rink, restaurant, and at last a pretty dodgy bar and disco in the early 70s. By 1974 it had gone bust for the last time. The grand old building which had once been the heart of this maritime community was most likely destined to be torn down and the land used for condos, or god knows what. But a group of locals, lead by Bill Winterer and Herb Clark, rallied the community, pooled their resources and bought the place. At first they had no plan; they just wanted to make sure it didn’t become anything worse. In the end, largely due to the influence of maritime historian Tom Stevens, who donated his archives, they decided to make it into a museum. Its galleries now tell the stories of the river. Among the exhibits is a working replica of the world’s first combat submarine, Bushnell’s Turtle. The original was built a few miles down the road in what is now Westbrook and first launched into the Connecticut River at Ayers Point. It was used against the British in New York Harbor in September and October of 1776. The Turtle had long been one of my favorite stories so upon my arrival I sank my teeth into building new exhibits around this incredible example of Yankee inge- 118 } The British Raid on Essex nuity. I did ask about the Commemoration Day parade and the burning of the ships, and was handed the slim, yellowed booklet written by Albert Dock and Russell Anderson, published by the Essex Historical Society back in 1981. I skimmed through its pages and was intrigued but put it aside as I submerged myself deeper into the story of the Turtle. By the following year, in the summer of 2007, we finally got around to building an exhibit about the British raid. We dug out the charred timbers, dusted off the cannonballs and created some text panels that told the story.We commissioned artist Russell Buckingham to paint a twenty-two-foot mural of the British landing and actually photographed local boatyard workers storming the town with push brooms and sticks, which he then transformed into Royal Marines and fighting tars carrying muskets and boarding swords. To top it off we built a little diorama of the river complete with burning ships and a timeline of the raid. In the summer of 2009 I attended a maritime history conference just up the coast at Mystic Seaport. Of the many programs offered, the one that caught my eye was a session hosted by the United States Navy’s History and Heritage Command about the upcoming bicentennial of theWarof 1812.They had created a Maritime Heritage Trail, including such obvious locations as Fort McHenry in Baltimore and the USS Constitution in Boston. I made my way into the crowded room to see how Connecticut was being represented. In fact there was onlyoneWarof 1812 event mentioned and that was the battle of Stonington. Stonington certainlydeserved to beon the map.With its tattered battle flag and cannons mounted in the town park, still pointing out to sea, Stonington was the perfect counterpoint to Essex with its Loser’s Day parade, where the...