About Laura Smith

Archivist

Sources for Research on Historic Properties in Connecticut

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Laura Smith

Goodspeed Opera House, East Hampton, Connecticut, from the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.

The architectural surveys in the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection are a tremendous source for those who are researching historic properties in the state, and one of our most regularly requested collections here in the archives. But there are several other ways to find information about historic properties, including:

The Historic American Buildings Survey at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/

The National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/index.htm

The Connecticut State Library’s database of 1930s WPA Architectural Surveys/Census of Old Buildings in Connecticut: https://cslib.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4005coll7#:~:text=Often%20called%20%22The%20WPA%20House,clipped%20to%20the%20survey%20forms.

List of Historic National Landmarks in Connecticut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Historic_Landmarks_in_Connecticut

Let me know if you know of others so that I can add them to the list.

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May 11 is National Train Day!

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Laura Smith

The New England Limited, better known as the White Train, or Ghost Train, which traveled from New York to Boston on the Air Line Division (formerly the Boston & New York Air Line Railroad) of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad in the early 1890s. Leroy Roberts Railroad Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.

Let’s get on board to celebrate National Train Day on Saturday, May 11! Amtrak organizes this event to celebrate the ways trains connect us all and to learn how trains are an instrumental part of our American story.

We here in the Railroad History Archive in Archives & Special Collections are celebrating this day by enjoying the rich resources in the collection that document how the railroad was pivotal to the lives of the people of New England in the Golden Age of Railroads in the late 1800s. This photograph shows the New England Limited on the Air Line Division, formerly the Boston & New York Air Line, which was built to provide a direct route diagonally across the state of Connecticut to connect the important financial centers of New York City and Boston. At the time this photograph was taken, in the 1890s, the B&NYAL was taken over by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and then known as the Air Line Division. The New England Limited reminds us of a time when luxurious trains were ridden by the Gilded Era’s captains of industry.

The Last Steam Trip on the New Haven Railroad, April 27, 1952

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Laura Smith

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In the early 1950s the New Haven Railroad phased out use of its steam fleet in favor of its electric and diesel locomotives. Shown here is a menu and photographs taken on an excursion trip from Boston’s South Station to New Haven, Connecticut, through the route of the old New York & New England Railroad with stops in Willimantic and New London, Connecticut. The photographs were taken by Seth P. Holcombe and Ralph E. Wadleigh, both of whose photographs we hold in the Railroad History Archives.

Menu for New Haven Railroad’s last steam trip, April 27, 1952. Donated by Frank Morrissey, University Railroad Collection, Archives & Special Collections of the University of Connecticut Libraries.

Photographs from Archives & Special Collections part of an exhibit at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Laura Smith

Employee of the New Britain Machine Company during World War II

Several months ago I worked with Laura Blum, a student at E.O. Smith High School in Mansfield, Connecticut, who needed photographs from the Connecticut Business History Collections for a project she was working on for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Laura was selected, with fifty other high school students in every state in the country and the District of Columbia, to provide images of how their states contributed to the challenges of World War II on the homefront. Laura chose six photographs from our collections, all depicting Connecticut workers and the efforts they made on behalf of the war effort, and wrote an introduction.

The photographs that Laura chose are available in the Connecticut window of the Salute to Freedom website of the National World War II Museum, at http://salutetofreedom.org/. We are happy that Laura used photographs from our collection for this national-oriented project and very impressed with the good work she did in highlighting and describing the photographs.

The museum blogged about the exhibit on December 31, 2012, available here: http://www.nww2m.com/2012/12/student-scholars-honor-local-contributions-to-wwii/

A Historical Comic Book of the Southern New England Telephone Company

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Laura Smith

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In January 1878 George Coy founded the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut, less than one year after telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his invention at Skiff’s Opera House in that city. Coy’s new company was the first commercial telephone company in the world.

Seventy-five years later, in 1953, the company now known as the Southern New England Telphone Company produced a charming comic book — Pioneering the Telephone in Connecticut — to celebrate its history. In 1998 the company records were donated to Archives & Special Collections, and the comic book was among the materials.

Here are just a few cells of the comic book, a captivating way to learn about this important company’s history.

121st anniversary of the Train Wreck at East Thompson, Connecticut, on December 4, 1891

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Laura Smith

East Thompson train wreck, December 4, 1891

Known as “The Great East Thompson Train Wreck,” it involved four trains of the New York & New England Railroad: the Long Island and Eastern States Express from New York to Boston; the Norwich Steamboat Express from new London to Boston; the Southbridge Freight, a local train to Southbridge, Mass.; and freight train no. 212.

It started with the eastbound 212. To keep it from delaying the eastbound Long Island and Eastern States Express and the Steamboat Express, conductor William Dorman got orders in Putnam, Connecticut, to shift to westbound track no. 1, pass East Thompson and switch back to the eastbound track no. 2 in East Douglas, Massachusetts, 19 miles away. But no one notified the East Thompson station that an eastbound train was on the westbound track. As the train crew was coupling cars to the Southbridge freight train on the westbound track, Dorman’s freight train slammed into the engine. Several cars jackknifed and one was thrown across both tracks.

Moments later, the Long Island and Eastern States Express rounded the sharp curve at about 50 mph and crashed into the thrown car on track no. 2. The engine spun around, vaulted off the embankment, struck a telegraph pole and crashed. Steam plowed the soft gravel for about 150 feet and destroyed a home.

That crash killed Express engineer Harry Tabor and fireman Jeremiah Fitzgerald of Boston. Dazed trainmen tried to send a flagman to signal the Norwich Steamboat Express but it was too late. That train barreled around the curve and drove nearly 8 feet into the rear Pullman sleeper of the Long Island and Eastern States Express, setting the sleeper and engine cab on fire.

All this occurred in the space of 5 minutes.

Hundreds of passengers were injured. All four engines were destroyed, as were the sleeper and a baggage car, and the track was torn up for about 500 yards east of the passenger station.

National History Day, “Turning Points,” and connecticuthistory.org

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Laura Smith

In the years that I have been a curator here in Archives & Special Collections I have been fortunate to work with a wide array of researchers, from academic scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and genealogists to railroad fans, lawyers and preservationists, but I admit to you all right here and right now that I get the most satisfaction when I work with middle school and high school students, those who are at the early point of discovering the wonder and power of primary sources. And one of the ways we get to work with young students is to help them find the resources they need for National History Day projects.

Never heard of National History Day? Here is the description of the contest from the website at http://www.nhd.org/:

“Each year, more than half a million students, encouraged by thousands of teachers nationwide participate in the NHD contest. Students choose historical topics related to a theme and conduct extensive primary and secondary research through libraries, archives, museums, oral history interviews and historic sites. After analyzing and interpreting their sources and drawing conclusions about their topics’ significance in history, students present their work in original papers, websites, exhibits, performances and documentaries. These products are entered into competitions in the spring at local, state and national levels where they are evaluated by professional historians and educators. The program culminates in the Kenneth E. Behring National Contest each June held at the University of Maryland at College Park.”

Thomas J. Dodd at the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-1946, from the Thomas J. Dodd Papers

We here in Archives & Special Collections are collaborating with connecticuthistory.org by choosing materials from our collections and providing these sources and essays for students to use for their NHD projects. Two of the essays are currently online (with more to come), which include:

Connecticut Lawyer Prosecutes Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg, which describes the work of Thomas J. Dodd, who served on the Executive Trial Council at the Nuremberg Trials following World War II, and the tragedy of Kristallnacht, a turning point that unleashed the persecution of European Jews by the Nazi regime.

Reporting News of Pearl Harbor, which tells of how Andre Schenker, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and a commentator for Hartford radio station WTIC in the 1940s, reported this shattering world event — a turning point in history if there ever was one — to his Connecticut listeners.

There are more “Turning Points” to come, so stay tuned. Also, if you haven’t tooled around connecticuthistory.org then spend a few minutes with this extraordinary resource, reading the essays and looking at the unique photographs and documents. There is a lot to learn there about the history of Connecticut!

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

The Connecticut Company, and a devoted collector of its history

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Laura Smith

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William B. Young was an avid fan, enthusiast and historian of the Connecticut Company, particularly its trolley cars, which controlled the street railroad system that provided public transportation in the state’s towns and cities from 1905 to 1948. Mr. Young, born in 1942, spent much of his youth in Stamford and Roxbury, Connecticut, where he explored local trolley right-of-ways, collected railroad documents and memorabilia, took photographs, and rode the trains at every opportunity, not just in the state but across the country. While earning a degree in history (focusing many of his term papers on transportation history) at Yale University he worked summers as a Conductor on the Chicago Transit Authority. After he graduated in 1966 he was commissioned as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy, serving as a Naval Aviator during the Vietnam War, and continued as a flight instructor after the war, when he left active duty in 1977. After his service he became a database programmer and lived in North Carolina until his death in December 2010.

Mr. Young compiled an enormous and extraordinarily comprehensive collection of materials about the trolley system which includes publications, photographs, timetables, maps, postcards, manuals, and reports. He corresponded with an extensive network of other knowledgeable railroad and trolley historians, where the minutiae of the cars and the broad history of the company were discussed and dissected with equal interest and regard. His ultimate goal in amassing this information was the creation of a car roster database, which classified each car in the system by number, owner, purchase cost, weight, roof, type, builder, first year in service, accident history, motor type, compressor type, and controller.

In February 2011 Mr. Young’s sister, Mary Young, contacted the archives about donating the collection. In the time between this initial contact and its ultimate donation in June 2012, Ms. Young and her sister Lucy gathered the materials from Mr. Young’s home in North Carolina, separated those materials most appropriate for donation, boxed and organized the materials by format, created “finding guides” and other descriptions to ease discovery of the materials, and provided much of the written information about Mr. Young and the company that helped place it all in context. This comprehensive collection is now available for use by the general public, and its finding aid, which includes long descriptions of the life of Mr. Young and the Connecticut Company, is available at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/911.

The Connecticut Company, which by 1907 was controlled by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, operated most of the trolleys and buses in Connecticut, with fourteen divisions and, at its peak in the 1910s, a roster of over 2200 cars and nearly 800 miles of track that either ran in or connected twelve major Connecticut cities. Ridership started to drop in the 1920s and systems were abandoned by the 1930s. The last trolley ran on September 25, 1948, in New Haven, as the post-war boom of personal ownership of the automobile became widespread.

Connecticut is lucky to have two trolley museums to preserve this important aspect of transportation, including the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven (http://www.shorelinetrolley.com/) and the Connecticut Trolley Museum in East Windsor (http://www.ct-trolley.org/).

The archive is deeply grateful to the family of William B. Young for this valuable collection that will serve as a vital resource for this corner of the state’s transportation history.

Laura Smith, Curator of Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

Connecticut Railroad Commissioner reports now online!

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In our continuing efforts to make our collections available online we present to you a set of Railroad Commissioner Reports of the State of Connecticut, now available through the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/search.php?query=%22uconn%20libraries%22%20%20railroad%20%22annual%20report%22. This is done courtesy of our cooperative relationship with the Boston Libraries Consortium and the Digital Programs and Preservation and Conservation staff here at the UConn Libraries.

The railroad commissioner reports are very rich documents, published yearly between the 1850s until 1911, and provide details about bridges, structures and track laid for each railroad in the state as well as the expenditures and income. Many of the issues have details about train accidents and lists of the members of their board of directors, important information for any railroad researcher.

Many of these reports were donated by a long-time donor of railroad materials, Mr. Leroy Beaujon. Mr. Beaujon has a soft spot in his heart for the Central New England Railway, which ran in western Connecticut and eastern New York State until it was taken over by the New Haven Railroad in the early 1900s. He grew up on Canaan, Connecticut, so his interest in the railroads of that area was formed early in his youth and has remained throughout his life. We are pleased that we can make Mr. Beaujon’s gift of the railroad reports available not only to the researchers who visit us here at Archives & Special Collections but to anyone, anytime and anywhere.

Check out the reports online, and enjoy!

The end of the steam era in Connecticut — a new collection in the Railroad History Archives

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Laura Smith

“The 12:25 to Waterbury.” Engine 1338 of the New Haven Railroad in Newington, Connecticut, on July 10, 1946. Photograph by Seth P. Holcombe.

Seth P. Holcombe loved steam trains, and as a youth who grew up near the railroad station in Hartford, Connecticut, he particularly admired those of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad (better known as the New Haven Railroad), the predominant railroad in southern New England from 1872 to 1969. Mr. Holcombe was born in 1918 and lived his life in the Hartford area, graduating from Trinity College in 1941 and serving as registrar of the Morgan Horse Club (now known as the Connecticut Morgan Horse Association) as an adult. He was also an avid photographer and took numerous photographs of the trains he loved. His interest never wavered from the steam trains of the New Haven Railroad, so when the railroad switched to a diesel fleet in 1952 Mr. Holcombe’s interest in the railroad waned.

Seth Holcombe died in 2009 and his wife Lucy made a gracious gift of his photographs to the Railroad History Archive this year. The collection shows trains in and around Hartford, as well as other railroad lines across New England when Mr. Holcombe would travel on excursions. A finding aid to the collection is available at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/908 and all are welcome to come to Archives & Special Collections to view this terrific set of photographs.

Celebrate the first day of summer!

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Laura Smith

Who wouldn’t want to spend the first day of summer at the beach? Surely these telephone operators from Norwich were enjoying just that as this photograph, from the Southern New England Telephone Company records, from 1913, shows us. These ladies, dressed all in white down to their stockings and shoes, seem happy to be on such a pleasant outing that briefly took them from their switchboards for sun and sand.

The New Haven Railroad and the Bracero Program — a source for teaching and learning

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Laura Smith

In 1942 the United States government, then in the midst of fighting World War II, and Mexico entered into an agreement for Mexican citizens, predominantly men, to provide labor in the U.S. in industries that were most severely affected when many American men went to fight in the war. This program and the men, who became known as braceros, provided desperately needed labor for many industries that were pivotal to U.S. war efforts. While many of the Mexican men worked in agriculture, almost 100,000 braceros worked for the nation’s railroads, mostly providing track labor.

The New Haven Railroad participated in the program, hiring several hundreds of workers in 1944 and 1945. The railroad company built housing for the workers in the Montowese section of North Haven, Connecticut. This document from January 26, 1945, submitted to the company trustees, tells the company president that it is necessary to hire more than the original 650 men that were originally alloted to them, and that another 550 men are needed.

Here are some questions to think about when you study this document:

What were the conditions that led to the hiring of Mexican men during World War II?

What were the benefits of hiring the braceros to the railroads? What were the benefits to the men themselves? What might have been negatives in the hiring of the men?

What do you think happened to the men after the war, when the American soldiers came home and wanted their jobs back?

Do you think this is a good example of how countries can cooperate?

This resource conforms to the Connecticut Social Studies Curriculum Framework standards for high school students, 1.3 — significant events and themes in world history/internatonal studies, number 21 (analyze conflict and cooperation in world affairs).

This letter is from the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Records.