'~ ..one
thing about this river, it's close to you. It's an intimate river. ..."
dam, a steam ferry boat-no bridge there in those days. Where the atomic energy plant is now, there was an old man living in a farm house there who operated a boat ferry, a rowboat, across the river. He had a license from the Legislature to operate it, and the farmers from Haddam Neck wm~ld come down and be rowed across the river-they and their wives-and they 'd stop and get the railroad up the river at Arnold's Dock down there. They'd go to Middletown for their shopping, and when their shopping was over in the afternoon, they'd come down on the afternoon train, and the old man would row them across the river. The ferry when I first knew it was six cents. Then you go on further on down to the big good ferry at East Haddam and another good ferry at Hadlyme, and the Hadlyme Ferry, of course, is still operated. Then, of course, there was a big ferry at Saybrook, a steam ferry, the largest on the river, and that ferry slip on the west side of the river is just below site of the present railroad bridge. Below Middletown when the State Highway Department was putting in Route 91, a man operating a power shovel finally got down to the rock, and said , " Oh look! Look at these tracks. What are they?" So they came and looked. They scraped off the dirt, and they uncovered the best set of dinosaur tracks and prehistoric bird tracks in the state. So the state moved the road over another half a mile, and made Dinosaur Park out of it, which is still maintained at Rocky Hill . You go down a little bit further, and you come to Middle Haddam. There's another island there. It used to be Darts Island. That island has practically disappeared and a new island has come in north of it, at least 75 acres and a quarter of a mile long that's been built by the rivers. Now it's heavily wooded. I used to like Darts Island because it was small . It had no water on it, but we boiled our coffee out of the River water and drank our water out of a jug. That's the way we got along. I might say at this point that the river today is much cleaner, very much cleaner, than it was when I was a boy. You go down below Middle Haddam , and there's a beautiful reach in the river. The deep water on the- river is usually on the outside of the bend because that's where the current flows . The navigational aids show you that. Down below what's presently Hurd Park (it wasn't Hurd Park in my day, although it was used as a park-it was privately owned) they built a long breakwater. The reason for that is that at that particular location, there are what they call fish piers in the middle of the river, great stone piers, put there in Colonial times. The Colonial people would put their nets across the river, across the channel , from the piers to the other bank and probably would catch everything that went up or down. The salmon were plentiful , so that the Indians, who didn't (of course) have nets, used them for fertilizer. They told the farmers, the early settlers, to put a salmon in each hill of com.
Schooners, Canoes, Launches Two schooners sailed out of Portland, the Frank Brainerd (a big three-master) and the smaller Brownstone.1 I had a trip on the Brownstone once, up to New York . (You know the boatman never talked about going down to New York-it's going up to New York, up to the head of the Sound .) Billy Davis and I went in her with an old fellow named Swan, and he sailed that little schooner with just one hand . She was light-sailed just like a yacht. And we had a lively time; slept very well that night ; got up to New York; picked up our tug and towed through Hell Gate. I. The 254-ton Brainerd was built at Rockland , Maine. New when Governor Baldwin saw her, she was the last commercial sailing vessel to come up the River, making a trip to Hartford with lumber in 1931- the same year the steamer Hartford made her last run upriver. The 165-ton Brownstone, built at Hartford in 1869, was aged about 40 when Baldwin sailed in her, and ended her days soon after.
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At the Salmon River, below East Haddam , in my boyhood days the tugboats used to take coal barges three miles up river to a dock which was called Leesville, and the coal was peddled to a couple of plants in what is Moodus. We used to camp there. It was a lot of fun to come dowrr in a canoe, then paddle all day long up the Salmon River, pull your canoe up on the bank, turn it over, build a little fire out of wood, fry some eggs, warm a can of beans, make a cup of coffee, turn in on the ground , under the canoe. I was sleeping under the canoe one night at Bodkin Rock and a big steamer went by, sending its wash up the shore. I rose up in a hurry. I forgot I was under the canoe! I remembered that for three more days. When school let out in June we took the first advantage of the vacation to go down there. We used to stay down there ten days until the food was all gone, then we'd paddle all the way home on an empty stomach. Once when we were paddling along on a rainy day, all of a sudden this tremendous fish came out of the water, about 24 or 30 yards from the canoe, and he looked as big as the canoe. I had seen a picture of a sturgeon with a corrugated snout and a corrugated back, and I knew it was a sturgeon. And he came out of the water and landed-splash! I thought he was going to land in the canoe. He looked as big as a canoe. I'm sure he wasn't, but he was at least six or eight feet long-a big, big fish . Every once in a while in the old days, the shad fishermen would get a sturgeon. They don't get them anymore. But this year they counted in one day 500 salmon going through a trap North of the Enfield Rapids, so the salmon are coming back to the Connecticut River, and that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I said Father gravitated to the Middletown Yacht Club. They had a wooden clubhouse on the west bank of the river. Mother and the girls would get on a trolley car and come down with the food , walk down to the boat yard. Father and I would go down earlier, get the rowboat, row out to the boats-they were all anchored across the river, about 75 of them. There were soine lovely yachts, in those days, the early days of the gasoline engine. I think my father and I did a lot to introduce the gasoline engine. We had a 30-foot class cabin boat called the Medea. She had a six horsepower, two cylinder engine. Someone asked how you started it. I said: "I don't know. As I saw it as a boy it required a lot of profanity with a lot of words that I haven't heard very often." Well, Father on a long weekend would take Mother and my three sisters and myself with food and we'd go down the river in the boat , and we'd swing around at Essex and up the crick (it was known as a crick then) . The Dauntless 2 was still afloatthey'd built a house on her-and they had a club in the house. While the Dauntless was still in the river, you'd tie up between a couple of piles and stay there. Father and I would stay on the boat, and then we'd come to the Griswold, where Mother would be staying with the girls, and we'd usually have dinner together there. Father knew Frank Ladd at the Griswold very well . Father was in the wholesale grocery business and used to stop there every once or twice a month to sell old Ladd groceries and things of that kind. So Ladd would say : "Hello, Lou ." Lou would say : "What you've got today?" Well , he'd say: " We got corned beef 2 . The schooner yacht Dauntless was a famou s vessel. Built in Mystic in 1866 for James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, she was in the first defense of the America's Cup in 1870. Jn 1883 she was bought by Caldwell H. Colt , son of Sam Colt, the founder of today 's Colt Industries in Hartford . After his untimely death in 1894 at age 36 his mother and later hi s sister Elizabeth (Mrs. Charles Robinson) kept her on as a hou seboat in Essex, until she was scrapped in 1917, having been sunk by ice the prcevious winter.
SEA HISTDRY, SUMMER 1985