Welcome to the Stories 1-5 page!

  1. a Freeman builds a home on Hill Street

  2. the Celestials move in on Bradley Street

  3. beating the odds

  4. a warm welcome on John Street

  5. what a cab driver sees

image locations and people are designated with a red heart

This is a map of what we have today stretching from State Street north to the bridge. 26 Hill Street is the red heart in the middle of the Thamesview Apartments.

courtesy CONL

and here we are back in 1954, though the street layout has remained the same over the previous 150-200 years. The red heart is at 26 Hill Street.

‍ ‍Sanborn map courtesy the Library of Congress

‍ ‍Story 1 - a Freeman builds a home on Hill Street

Good day to you, sir… good day to you, ma‘am.

When you get to my age, you do a lot of looking back, looking back on your life and on the people around you. Now you don‘t set out thinking, you‘re going to outlive everyone… be the last man down anf under, but there you have it.

Consider this if you would: I was born a slave in 1799, in north Florida, and am finishing up my days in 1908, in New London, Connecticut… from horse and wagon to the age of automobiles, telephones, phonographs, and flying machines! These hundred and some odd years were the best of times, and I can tell you why.

You start with need… direction, and the Lord‘s intervention.

Like I said, I was born into slavery. My mother and father were born into slavery. My younger sister Emma was not. We‘ll get to Bertha later. Anyway. there was a divine thread holding us together. You see, as a boy, Master Seton was grooming me to be the house boy in his country estate down in southeast Georgia. The Missus was especially interested in training me.

The Seton family country estate in Georgia looked much like the home above.

courtesy Georgia Historic Society

You see, my job was doing things like setting the table… that took awhile and got my ears boxed by the Missus. Keeping the floor and carpets clean, the windows, polishing the silverware, the glasses. After my ears got boxed, the Missus sent me out of her hair, as she put it, and into the stable to help clean up after the three horses. Actually, I got to like the horses and Mr. Tom, ol’ Tom they called him, the stable boy who took a liking to me. Tom had been there forever and whispered to the horses… can you imagine? He started showing me how to feed them, brush them and exercise them out in the yard. Most important thing Mr. Tom showed me was how to handle myself with these horses and no get my head kicked… the Missus would‘ve liked that. As the ear boxing became a near daily event, I spent more time in the stable cleaning and learning from Mr. Tom.

One day something bad happened in the family. I was busy in the parlor pretending to polish the top of the sideboard, when the Missus flew into the room and saw me trying to ignore her. She started for me. I instinctively back away and in doing so, knocked over a tray table with a pile of dishes. Our one-sided boxing match started… back and forth… til I was near unconscious on the floor. Master Seton came in and found me bleeding from my nose and ears.

That saved me. Despite her screaming and hollering, Master sold me to a kind old man that was going lame and needed a new set of legs - mine. After a year or so, he made me his little coachman. My boxing days were over.

In the meantime, I saw my father again, the first time in years. He‘d become a successful carpenter working for English tradesmen, while under the supervision of his owner. A divine hand was again making a play in our lives. My father had been in touch with my mother. When my master died later that year, father made arrangements to buy our freedom… all three of us.

But the devil had other plans. We had just been granted our paid-freedom, when a group of slave traders with guns and torches in southeastern Georgia tried to resell us into slavery using trickery and influence on a local judge.

It was close, my friends. Thanks to a warning from some true Christian people, we made a quick run into Florida under the cover of darkness. In a small coastal town just above Jacksonville, we booked passage with Captain Flood on his schooner the Emma.

The hand of the Lord stayed with us. Ah… those days at sea. I watched and listened… what else was there to do? There were no horses on board. I learned seamen‘s knots, how to use a compass, read the wind and water surface, the many lines of a sailing ship and how to set them. Captain Flood had a terrier that chased newbies like me around the deck towards the lines the captain‘d barked out during his drills. Yes, it got tiring, but we were no longer under the threat of a beating should something go wrong.

After two weeks, the Emma had brought us up the coast toward Virginia… Hampton Roads, I think it was. I asked to stand watch and sited the stars as we moved through the night, ever north, northeast. Most times there was not a light in sight. How raw and beautiful, I thought.

We noticed noticed the weather getting colder. We made port calls along the way, taking on and letting off other passengers and freight.

Can you guess, shipmates, where we got off?

New London was the last port call. Captain Flood had prearranged some time off whereby a local shipyard would mend the Emma, a new sail here, new lines there, tightening up her hull so that the old gal wouldn‘t leak so much. In ten days or so, she and Captain Flood would be heading back south making the same port calls in reverse. I missed Captain Flood and even Flash, his terrier.

Through my father‘s skill as a carpenter and his drive to make the best of a new start, we settled on Bayonet Street near Briggs Pond, which was used in the winter for harvesting ice. For myself, I did some coachman work and even learned some masonry from a contact my father had made, building stone cellars for houses in New London and Waterford.

All the while though, the water was pulling at me like a magnet. I made a few long distance sails down into the Caribbean calling at Barbados and Nevis. After my third run, I met my Martha at a church social with her parents, this being about 1830. Boston, her father and a freeman himself, had built their house on a plot of land he‘d bought in 1812 on Hill Street.

Boston was born a slave in 1776. At 27, he was released from the Miller Farm in Quaker Hill and, given his birth year and knowledge of the Boston Massacre, took the name Boston Freeman. He found work around town as an expressman or trucker. His marriage later to Betsy Avery of Block Island prompted him to buy land on Hill Street and by 1819 there officially was a dwelling noted on land records at the clerk‘s office in City Hall.

Boston Freeman was proud to give his wife Betsy and adopted daughter Martha a modest, but love filled home that by 1819 was mortgage free.

In the fall of 1834, Boston Freeman passed at the age of 58, leaving Betsy and Martha the house. I tried to fill Boston‘s shoes by being around more often, taking only local coastal jobs that kept me in the Sound or only as far east as Fall River. You see, we had a lovely household… warm food on the table, wood in the stove, dry roof over our heads, tea, coffee and sugar. We went to service weekly, together when possible, at the Methodist Episcopal Church on Federal Street where we continued to have our social life. When Betsy passed in ˋ48, the service was beautiful. How much our lives had changed, all in the Lord‘s grace.

Now down to two, we decided to take in a couple, a freeman and a free woman from Pennsylvania, Aaron and Fanny Newby. Ah, but the children that came from this union in short time! After a couple of years, they left for larger quarters.

In the absence of their household contributions, I again went to work with horses, the agility in my limbs gone and so my days on the water. I went back to my old occupation as a hostler, that is a caretaker of horses. I did this at an inn on State Street, the City Hotel, a New London landmark for locals and travelers alike. I also did the odd job as a coachman which paid better and got me out and about on my own.

Of course, in those days, I had my own horse, called him Wild Bill. Bill wasn‘t really wild. He was getting tired like me. He lived in a stable at the end of School House Lane, just across the street. Now and then I‘d take him put for a slow walk during nice weather, stopping to talk here and there. The furthest I‘d go was Bayonet Street where my sister lived with my father, Robert. God rest his soul, my father passed at a ripe old age for which they kept no records down south. I remember reading him the paper. He liked it a bit more than the Bible, I‘m afraid… said he knew some of the characters in the newspaper, didn‘t know any in the Bible.

At one point, and this again was in the 1870s, a church friend from Huntington Street talked me into raising pigs in the back yard. My Martha didn‘t like the idea. As the months went by, her garden got smaller and smaller as the number of pigs grew like rabbits. Some 28 hogs called 14 Hill Street their home and I had to keep a near constant eye on them. Now, I have good neighbors, but there was always someone passing by who took the notion that I couldn‘t count and try to relieve me of an animal or two.

In the end though, it didn‘t matter. Cholera came calling and took them all away. Even knocked on Wild Bill‘s door. My faith in the Lord has saved me and others, but this was a curve ball.

The second strike came later in 1898. Martha Freeman Hull, my dear wife and friend for close to 60 years passed over to the side where her parents, Boston and Betsy, were waiting. She‘d reached 92. We‘re all fighters, you see. We always strove to live life on our terms and ride with whatever the outcome.

My niece, Mary Benjamin, came to live with me thereafter. When not attending to her other paid duties, she kept the house immaculate, saw to the cooking, washing and was my human companionship under that roof… of course there was Flash, a terrier… remember him from my first days at sea? Well this was Flash Junior. He kept me balanced on one side, a hickory walking stick on the other. We‘d go down to Union Station and then the pier behind.

It was on these warm weather occasions that I‘d stop in to visit my younger sister Emma, who‘d lived with my father Robert on Bayonet Street. She‘d found work there at the train depot waitressing and cleaning. It was great fun for me getting caught up on family gossip and doings at the station. It was a busy place.

During those last years as we ended one century and began another, my health continued to beat the odds placed against us. When I reached being a century old myself, TheDay newspaper made a very nice mention thereof, citing my faith in the Lord and my easy-going nature. I held hatred for noone. Among my former employers, one kept me on a modest monthly pension. The local Republican Party gave me a small gift with every calender year the Lord put behind me. Updates pertaining to my advancements in age continued to appear now and then in the paper.

It was, my friends, a marvellously peaceful period in my life. As I sensed the end draw near in 1906, I quit-claimed our home on Hill Street to my niece and caregiver Mary Benjamin, an angel sent me by the Lord. I was ready to meet my Maker and rejoin my family.

The year was 1908, I‘d reached 109 years of age, a record accomplishment at the time, not only in New London, but in the state of Connecticut. When winter finally cleared in April, I resumed my walks down the hill to Main Street with a cane on one side, and Flash my terrier on the other. I stopped along the way to chat, paused at the train depot to check in with Emma and sit in the sun on the pier.

Then the early summer morning dawned when it was time to move on, my name‘d been called… and I joined my beloved family in the house of the Lord.

Amen.

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‍ ‍Story 2 - the Celestials move on Bradley Street

Greetings, most honorable young American travellers!

You may call me Hong Wah. I write you this letter from the home of my ancestors whose spirits live on along the great river Yangtze.

Before my departure from your honorable city of New London, I was an old and sick Chinese laundryman living above my shop at the beginning of Bradley Street.

‍ ‍My time had come for I was sad and lonely for my family and ancestors. Below is my most honorable father in a photograph taken many years ago by the honorable British photographer Mr. John Thomson. You can see him to the left of two honorable warriors. Mr. Thomson also made a portrait of my beautiful mother. The artist you see in his studio is my brother. And finally my growing nephew already in school where he is honoring an education… much like you honorable young American travellers.

We lived with other Celestials in this large house you see below on the river Yangtze. What is a Celestial, you may ask. It is a name your honorable people give us as we are all subjects or followers of the one Emperor in the sky, the One who rules the stars, the planets… in fact, the universe. This is our home, the sky and beyond.

Let me tell you, dear travellers, what happened one summer day in 1881. It was a Sunday and so my shop was closed. The night before I‘d written a note to my faithful servant Sam Wing Sing or simply Sam as you would call him. In the note I left instructions on what to do with the shop and told him of my desire to have my earthly remains sent home to the Yangtze river in five years time, You see, dear ones, Sam is like my son. Here below is the note.

So, that morning I woke knowing this was the day. With my walking stick, and taking small, careful steps, I was able to come down the stairs and go out onto the sidewalk. I looked into my shop window and said a silent farewell.

The dock was at the bottom of the hill, the bottom of Atlantic Street. I crossed Water Street, thankful to my ancestors that nobody was around. There were no trains, I crossed the tracks and a vacant lot filled with the unneeded possessions of your honorable American ancestors. Finally I was standing on the edge of a deserted, abandoned dock, looking south into the warming sun. I listened to the gentle lapping of the water, of your mighty Thames River which had suddenly become my Yangtze in that brief glorious moment.

There was a gentle splash as my feet entered the water, my hands clasped over my chest… down. down, a weightless down, my heart, my spirit crossing the endless miles of water on my way back home. I was wet, but glowing like the embers of a fire, eager to warm, to cook something delicious.

Still.

My journey took a week…. should I go on, dear travellers?

A week later, my body popped up out of the water, startling two men fishing nearby. My hands were still clasped on my chest, my eyes open to the sky. The two men found a policeman who then found Sam.

‍ ‍Sam acted in the most honorable way. Let me explain.

Through his contacts, Sam arranged my temporary burial on the top of the hill whereby all the honorable founding fathers and their families were buried. It was an honor for a Celestial to be granted such a beautiful resting place over looking the magnificent New London harbor. Starting on Bradley Street, fourteen Celestials carried my silk.wrapped body up the hill, pausing frequently for refreshment. A small crowd of honorable New Londoners followed.

When we arrived at the gravesite, we settled into silent prayer. Later we sang, standing arms raised and the lay face down in a gesture of communion with our heavenly Mother, the Earth. Getting up, the pallbearers fell again into song, this time swaying to the spirit driving an honorable Celestial home… me!