Outtakes - Guilford, Connecticut

Text by Tim Clark
Photographs by Stephen O. Muskie

HERE IS A STORY TOLD around Guilford, Connecticut, about Simeon B. Chittenden, one of the town's wealthiest and most powerful native sons. Having moved to New York and made a bundle in dry goods during the Civil War, Chittenden was elected to Congress and kept a summer home in Guilford. The story goes that Chittenden once offered to build the town a library. There were two conditions: that it would be named after him and that it would be built on the town green, where no buildings had stood since 1838. The town rejected the offer.

The incident almost certainly never occurred, according to local historian Joel Helander, whose family has lived in Guilford for 14 generations. "Chittenden was a preservationist," says Helander. "He would never have proposed such a thing."

But the fact that the story survives says something about Guilford's pride and proprietary feelings about its green. "It is the center and the gathering place," says Edith Nettleton. "You don't think too much about it, but you appreciate it."

For someone interested in learning more about Guilford, Edith Nettleton is a good person to start with. When the existing Guilford Free Library building opened in 1934 (not on the green, but facing it), she was its librarian. She saw the hurricane of 1938 tear a hundred graceful elms out by the roots, changing the green from a hushed, sanctuary to a bare pasture. When library's modern annex opened in 1977, it was dedicated to her.

Edith Nettleton Returns Books
to the Shelves in the Guilford Room

"People think, because I'm a librarian, I know everything about the town," she says. "I tell them it's not true at all. But I know where to find it."

She's now retired, but most days you can still find her at the library, especially in the Guilford Room, where books and records and other artifacts of this historic town -- seventh oldest in Connecticut -- are lovingly displayed and stored. Here you can learn the basic facts of Guilford's past: how it was founded in 1639 by a small group of Puritans led by the Reverend Henry Whitfield, whose stone house still stands above the salt marshes of Long Island Sound; how it was bought from a female sachem of a local Indian tribe for "12 coates, 12 fathom of Wompom, 12 glasses, 12 payer of shooes, 12 Hatchetts, 12 paire of stockings, 12 Hooes, 4 kettles, 12 knives, 12 hatts, 12 poringers, 12 spoons, and 2 English coates"; and how one of the settlers' first acts was to lay out "their large and beautifully located public green, a perpetual monument of their foresight and sagacity."

In those days, the green was a 16-acre parallelogram of rough and uneven ground containing a number of small ponds. In its first two centuries, it became crowded with two churches, two graveyards, a town house, a hay scale, and four schoolhouses. More than four acres were shaved off its southern and eastern sides to provide central locations for a pair of blacksmiths. But early in the 19th century, stung by Yale president Timothy Dwight's criticism of its unkempt appearance, the citizens of Guilford decided to beautify their green. They tore down or moved the buildings, disinterred and reburied the remains of their ancestors, planted elm trees, and leveled and fenced in the ground. The result was one of the most spectacular greens in New England, a civic jewel.

Fishing from the Town Dock is a Favorite Pastime for Some at the End of the Day

There is more to Guilford than its green -- the town boasts a rich and varied landscape, from its coastal rocks and beaches to the hills and farm-land of rural North Guilford -- and along the crowded corridor of U.S. Route l, the old Boston Post Road, it suffers from the same dreary strip development as its more urban neighbors. But the green, shaded by maples and other trees planted after the 1938 blow, has always been guarded and groomed by the people who live there.

In the late 19th century, for example, the ladies of Guilford gathered on the green every spring for a remarkable ceremony. "When the worthy women of the town have house-cleaned through April," wrote Miss Mary Gay Robinson in 1877, "the dead leaves covering the Common are a challenge to their reserve strength.

"Some of the ladies dressed in antique style of big bonnet and ruffles for head-dress. They marched onto the Green in divisions, raking according to the direction of the wind.... and as the piles of dead leaves were raked up men drove in with wagons, loaded and carried them off.

"The raking done, each lady shouldered her rake and went home, content that she had put the Village Green in as good trim as her own parlor." (go to part two)

Relaxing on the Green During Lunch Hour