Tag Archives: cia ramble

Israel Wells’ Powder Horn

The Simsbury Historical Society is closed until after I leave. The Simsbury Free Library, with its genealogical collection, is also closed until after I leave. The aforementioned Newport Tower Museum was closed until after I left. The nice-looking restaurant here in the Simsbury 1820 House is closed until after I leave.

I’m sure this is just bad luck and I have no reason to be worried about it.

When I wrote to the Simsbury Historical Society last week, they said that they didn’t have any information on Ezekiel and Mary Wells, but they do have Israel Wells’ powder horn from 1776. There’s a summary of their research on their website (PDF).

I couldn’t go in to see it, but I could peer in the window and get this picture.

Left to Right: Powder Horns Belonging to Dudley Ely, Israel Wells, and Nathaniel Humphrey

Simsbury, Connecticut

I’m staying at the Simsbury 1820 House, which, coincidentally, was built in 1820. As you can clearly see from the photo, it reflects Georgian and Adamesque influences with its Palladian windows and Doric columned porch. It’s also the birthplace of Gifford Pinchot, and yes, that is the very same Gifford Pinchot who founded the US Forest Service in 1905.

A place as ritzy as this really requires its own custom toilet paper label, and indeed it has one.

Simsbury is where my 4G-grandfather Israel Wells lived prior to the Ohio migration of 1804-1805, when he was in his mid-40s. His parents also lived here until their untimely deaths around age 30, in 1762. Israel and his sister were then raised by their maternal grandparents.

There isn’t much to Simsbury. I expected more of a town, with a town square and streets laid out in a grid around it, but there’s none of that. It’s just a collection of buildings along one side of the Farmington River, built at various times over the last 350 years.

The Starbucks was built in 1762. As you may have guessed, it was not a Starbucks at the time.

It was originally built as a house and used as a tavern during the Revolution. Given the central nature of taverns during that period, I like to think that Israel was in there at least once, when he wasn’t out shooting redcoats.

Manus et Brachium

In a small chapel on Enders Island, just south of the town of Mystic, CT, the incorrupt arm of St. Edmund of Canterbury moulders peacefully in a glass tube.

Edmund of Abingdon died in 1240 and was canonized in 1246. Most of him reposes in France, except for one leg that’s in a town north of London, and this arm, which found its way to the US in 1954 and eventually to this particular chapel in 2002.

Seeing any severed arm is unusual, but seeing a consecrated one from the 13th century is a real treat. Roadside America rates this “Major Fun”.

The Elizabethan Horologium of Newport, Rhode Island

This week I’m attending my cousin’s graduation from the CIA*, and I decided to take a few days on either side to drive around New England. Sort of a CIA ramble.

I flew into Boston, rented a car, and drove to Newport, RI, where I spent the night in a motor-court-style motel that was probably built in the ’40s or ’50s.

The following morning I wandered around downtown Newport, which is a charming town full of maritime coloniality. And perhaps even pre-coloniality, due to this tower which was built by the Vikings. Or maybe the Chinese. Or possibly the Knights Templar.

Or maybe—just maybe—it’s the base of an old windmill from the 1700s.

Okay, no, that last one is just crazy.

Roadside America has the full story, including the theory of the proprietor of the Newport Tower Museum across the street, who thinks it’s a horologium—an astronomical clock—built by the British in 1583. The museum was closed, so I wasn’t able to talk to him, and as a result I’m not able to find any flaws in his theory. Can you prove it didn’t happen? No you cannot.

But I couldn’t hang around and wonder at horologia. Not when there was a severed arm waiting for me in Connecticut.

* No, not that one. The other one.