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Chapter Six WeddinG Bells Aa Considering that Morgan Bulkeley didn’t get married until he was forty-seven, it is quite possible that he considered business, politics, horse racing and baseball, more important than attracting a wife and starting a family. Or maybe, as they say, he just hadn’t met the right woman. In truth, Bulkeley was shy around women. Billy, the younger brother, was a hail-fellow-well-met extrovert, while Morgan was more reserved. As if the mustaches were the measure of the men, Billy usually brandished a ‘‘fixed-bayonet’’ variety, while Morgan favored the more conservative walrus style.∞ Morgan Bulkeley might have become a pear-shaped, tobacco-chewing Tammany Hall politician, bursting with base instincts, but he did not. There were plenty of temptations surrounding City Hall, not the least being of the sexual variety . Like all cities of the second half of the nineteenth century, Hartford swarmed with prostitutes. There were a dozen brothels within shouting distance of City Hall Square alone, on State and Market Streets, and more particularly down by the river, on Front and Ferry Streets. At least 300 women worked at these houses of ill-repute—plus an additional 100 streetwalkers, whose numbers could shoot up wildly when the General Assembly was in session or when a Civil War reunion gathered.≤ Could Morgan Bulkeley have been a regular customer? Not likely. Although he was not an especially spiritual man, Morgan was raised in a fairly religious home. Judge Bulkeley attended the Pearl Street Congregational Church every Sunday, and as one source noted, ‘‘[He] never failed . . . to attend, and preside over the meetings of the Pearl Street Ecclesiastical Society, to which he belonged.’’≥ With this type of upbringing, it is unlikely Morgan Bulkeley was a ‘‘rounder’’ who frequented roadhouses when the urge was upon him. In matters associated with life’s underbelly, he was actually a bit of a prude—not just concerning sex, but the whole universe of criminality. At least in his mind, dirty tricks went with the territory in politics, but when it came to sin of the wickedest kind, it just wasn’t his style.∂ So said, Cupid stormed into his life in 1884 and Morgan Bulkeley was never the same. A gamine, lovely young woman, Fannie Briggs Houghton of San ∫∂ c r o w b a r g o v e r n o r Francisco, California, came to Hartford with her mother, Carrie, to visit some old friends.∑ The wealthy Protestants of the Gilded Age traveled widely to find suitable mates for their children, and so the possibility that Carrie Houghton had matchmaking on her mind when she planned this trip to Hartford cannot be discounted. Nevertheless, Morgan Bulkeley was smitten from the moment he first set eyes on the gorgeous Fannie Briggs Houghton. Morgan faced a little problem though. Fannie and her mother were headed to Europe after a short visit in Hartford, and Morgan needed to work fast. Not only did he have to convince Fannie that relocating to Hartford was a sound idea, but he had to sell her on a far bigger proposition—that he was her man. Lord only knows where Bulkeley came up with the fortitude to attempt this merger, but let’s just say, he found it. As tall an order as all of this sounds, Bulkeley caught an enormous break because the Houghtons were a peripatetic bunch themselves. Fannie’s father, Gen. James F. Houghton—a rough-and-tumble man with the square-block face of a prizefighter—was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1827, studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and earned his degree in 1848.∏ Boston Water Works gave him his first job, but gold fever got the better of him, and in 1849 he and some friends chartered the Richmond, stocked her with supplies , and sailed around Cape Horn to California. He was twenty-two when the boat pulled into San Francisco.π Right o√, James could see panning for gold was dicey at best, so he took a job with the commission house of B. T. Baxter & Co., receivers of consignments from the Otis Rich Line of Boston and California packets. Then in 1852, he purchased a lumber business in Benicia—where the state capital had been moved from Vallejo (for exactly one year)—a business he later sold to his brother.∫ The following year, James partnered with a friend in Pine & Houghton, the lumber firm that ‘‘became one of the best known and most...

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