Crowbar Governor: The Life and Times of Morgan Gardner Bulkeley

NOTES

NOtes Aa a note on sources Undoubtedly some readers and historians will fault me for leaning too heavily on the newspapers of New England, New York, Washington, and San Francisco. Ideally, a biographer draws from a treasure trove of diaries, letters, o≈cial documents, and personal papers. Sadly, this was not possible with Morgan Bulkeley. One can assume that he wrote to his mother and his Aunt Eunie during the Civil War, but only one letter survives. Bulkeley did not keep a diary, so his inner life remains a mystery. The Connecticut State Library has a collection of Morgan Bulkeley’s gubernatorial papers, but it is fairly small and casts almost no light on the major events of his two terms as governor. The Connecticut Historical Society has some scrapbooks of Bulkeley’s years as Hartford mayor and as u.s. senator, but again, they o√er little of substance. Beyond these limitations, virtually all historians—even the most respected ones—have perpetuated myths and outright falsehoods about Morgan Bulkeley, going back a century or more. Lastly, even a fantastic collection, like the Hawley Papers (over 13, 000 documents in the Library of Congress), makes little or no mention of Morgan Bulkeley. Based on this, I have had to evaluate each piece of data carefully against direct quotes from Morgan Bulkeley, those of his contemporaries , and newspaper accounts of the day. Only then was I able to assign a value to the information and use it accordingly. ∞. the man 1. When the Bulkeleys hired Willis Becker in 1899 to draw Beaumaris, he was a struggling—albeit pleasant—thirty-five-year-old architect with a wife and a three-year-old child. As noted in Chapter 10, Becker did all the preliminary drawings for free. 2. Marion Hepburn Grant, In and Around Hartford: Its People and Places (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1989), 100. 3. Ibid., 104–5. 4. ‘‘Former Senator Morgan Bulkeley Now a Farmer,’’ Hartford Courant, July 1, 1917, X5. 5. U. S. Census Records, 1910, 1920; Grant, 104–5. 6. U. S. Census Records, 1910, 1920; Grant, 105. 7. When James II ascended to the English throne in 1685, he authorized Sir Edmund Andros to seize Connecticut’s Charter of 1662. To thwart such a move, Captain Joseph ≤≠≠ n o t e s Wadsworth secreted the charter in a hollowed-out section of an oak tree on the Wyllys estate. The tree was thereafter referred to as the Charter Oak. Sadly, it was felled during a great storm on August 21, 1856. Naturally, Hartford became the Charter Oak City. 8. Richard Hooker, Aetna Life Insurance Company: Its First Hundred Years (Hartford, CT: Aetna Life Insurance Co., 1956), 100. 9. ‘‘Brer Rabbit Bulkeley,’’ Hartford Times, November 15, 1890, 4 (repr. from the Spring- field Republican). 10. Grant, 102. 11. Grant, 97. 12. ‘‘Leverett Brainard: Death of Substantial Public-Spirited Citizen . . . ,’’ Hartford Courant, July 3, 1902, 13; Grant, 97. The Brainard children—in no special order—were Albert, Robert, Charles, Helen, Mary, Ruth, Edith, Lucy, Morgan, and Newton. The first five died in childhood or early adulthood, including ten-year-old Helen, who died after an emergency appendectomy on the Brainard’s kitchen table at their Washington Street home. Billy and Emma Bulkeley’s children—from the oldest to the youngest—were Mary Morgan, William E. A., Grace Chetwood, John Charles, Sally Taintor, and Richard Beaumaris. The Brainards kept the same cottage on Lot #18 from 1877 until long after Mary Brainard’s death in 1921. Likewise, Morgan and Fannie Bulkeley’s children kept Beaumaris in the family. However, Billy and Emma Bulkeley built their fist cottage on Lot #299 in 1877, but only kept it four years. About 1881, they built a nicer place on waterfront Lot #25, just west of where Morgan and Fannie built Beaumaris in 1900. Five years after Billy’s death in 1902, Emma Bulkeley let that cottage go and began spending summers at Fenwick Hall. 13. Atlas of the City of Hartford and the Town of West Hartford (New York: Sanborn Map Co., 1921), 1; Old Saybrook Land Records, vol. 7, p. 152, Old Saybrook Town Hall, Old Saybrook , CT. 14. ‘‘Common School Report,’’ Hartford Daily Courant, February 20, 1845, 4. Some of Hartford’s common schools were little more than a couple of rented rooms in an o≈ce building, but the Centre School was first-class, boasting separate playgrounds for the boys and girls, each with its own outhouse. A ‘‘Brick School House...