ideal, which includes, inexplicably, a white picket fence (in Frog Hollow that white picket fence would more likely be a knee-high wrought-iron one).3
The American Dream has been given its last rites multiple times, but it is never far from our conversations. Recent discussions about what to do (or not) with Syrian refugees referenced the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of this country as a nation of immigrants (discounting the natives who were here in the first place), and those immigrants rising above their earlier stations to Be Somebody. For at least some residents of this country, Emma Lazarus’s “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” still means something.
You can learn a lot by taking a deep dive into one American neighborhood, especially if it’s one as vital as Frog Hollow, a neighborhood that has served as a petri dish for every important movement in American culture from its inception, from before the streets were paved—even before there were streets. From the beginning, the land was a significant site for original residents who walked Connecticut’s inland forests. Later it was home to an influential colonial newspaper and a water well of magical proportions, until it morphed into a formidable manufacturing center that turned out an amazingly varied array of goods, including sewing machines, bicycles, machine tools, and guns. Here immigrants filled their kitchens with the smells of eastern Europe, Italy, and Ireland. Here owners of speakeasies and ham-fisted cops battled for territory. And here an awakening Puerto Rican community moved from a neighborhood church basement to grab a firm hold on the state’s political power, all within forty short years.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in Connecticut’s capital city, people came to Frog Hollow for the opportunity to learn English, get a job, and one day afford a home for their family. Frog Hollow was the springboard onto which generations of Americans and would-be Americans jumped so that they could land in a better life, however they defined that life. People came to Frog Hollow, and they bounced. The Italians bounced south from Frog Hollow to the town of Wethersfield; the Irish bounced southeast to Glastonbury; African Americans bounced north to Windsor and Bloomfield; and Latinos and Hispanics bounced east to Manchester and East Hartford. People came to Frog Hollow, got their financial legs beneath them, and then moved on and up, trading their urban life for a suburban one. As Adams said, they attained, “to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable,” their new station in life, wrought by their own hard work and ability to adapt to a new culture. They pursued the American Dream. But first, they came to a richly cultured, multilayered neighborhood that sat waiting to receive them.
Three Kings Day, Park Street. January 6, 1997. Tony DeBonee Collection, Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library
The world has changed, but not that much. People still come to Frog Hollow, and they still want to bounce. If we are looking for America—and the dream defined by Adams—we would do well to start with Frog Hollow.
FROG HOLLOW
1. The Difficult Dream
THE BABCOCKS DIG A WELL AND LAUNCH A NEWSPAPER
The Babcock family’s colonial saltbox house—its steep-pitched roof sloping from a high front to a low back—sat near what is now the intersection of Capitol Avenue and Lafayette Street in Hartford. The wooden house had a central brick chimney, and its front door opened to an entryway, with rooms branching off a central hall.1 The architecture was simple, sturdy, and fortified with oak timbers that measured sixteen to eighteen inches.2
As houses went, it was pretty standard, but the marvel of the property was outdoors. Just after the American Revolution, no one could explain the well on Dolly Welles Babcock’s one-hundred-acre farm, but even people passing through town knew about it. Dolly Babcock’s well is one of the first recorded stories from the neighborhood’s European history, and it illustrates the combination of luck and hard work that built Frog Hollow.
A 1781 visitor described the Babcock well as preternaturally plentiful. When the well was dug, near today’s intersection of Park and Washington streets, “the water sprouted up with such amazing velocity” that workers could barely set the stones.3
In fact, the gusher came so fast that the men digging the well had to scramble to avoid drowning. Only after they made it out did they realize they had lost more than a few tools in the gushing water. After the water was tamed, logs were cut and hollowed out to fit into one another, end to end. The person who cut and fit the pine logs—perhaps it was Nahum Carter, a Vermont sawyer—did an excellent job.4 In 1896 excavators unearthed some of the original wooden pipes and found the legend “1796?” carved into them. A law that was passed in May 1797 created a corporation “for the purpose of water into the city of Hartford, by means of subterraneous pipes, and their successors be, and they are hereby incorporated for said purpose, and made a body politic, by the name of The Proprietors of the Hartford Aqueduct,” which provided drinking water to Hartford residents who could afford twelve dollars a year per share.5 The proprietors included one Elisha Babcock, Dolly’s husband.
The well was so famous that in 1847 the Courant reported that it frequently overflowed from its “perennial springs.”6 When more pipes were dug up in 1908, according to the Courant, they were said to have carried water so sweet that it was like the “drops of the morning.”
The water company eventually dissolved, but not before it made the Babcocks wealthy.7 The family did not have to worry—as did fellow Hartford residents—about the source and quality of their water.
While Dolly Babcock and her five children ran the farm, her husband, Elisha, ran a successful newspaper, the American Mercury.8 The first edition appeared on July 12, 1784, a Monday, and ran just four pages, with a half dozen columns per page printed in blisteringly small type. As was the custom for newspapers of that era, scant local news graced the paper and the national and international news that did exist was often days old. Traveling at the speed of horse and boat, news of an event in Washington easily took five days to reach the pages of the Mercury.
The Mercury prospectus promised to “furnish a useful and elegant entertainment for the different classes” of customers.”9 In fact, early American newspapers weren’t news so much as reprinted gossip, letters from afar, and overheard tavern conversations. Most were, journalistically, little more than the throwaway, ad-heavy publications available at supermarket checkouts today, according to Older Than the Nation: The Story of the Hartford Courant, a 1964 book by John Bard McNulty. News wasn’t a publisher’s bread and butter anyway. The bills were paid by other print jobs taken on, or by selling notions at the publisher’s print shop. The idea of news judgment—or placing news in a newspaper according to its importance—was light-years away. The Courant ran the Declaration of Independence on page two, “in keeping with the printing custom of the times that arranged the news approximately in the order in which it arrived at the printing office,” wrote McNulty.10
The Mercury and the Courant were two of the 180 newspapers that dotted the early American landscape. All told, the papers had a combined circulation of roughly twelve million and were vital to forming a sense of community.11 Newspapers were the connective tissue between colonists and among the early Americans. Then as today they created a sense of place. They provided information, succor, and a sense
