Is Connecticut Really New England?
After decades of whispers, our analyst puts the Nutmeg State on the couch for a little identity therapy. Is Connecticut really New England? We think you’ll approve of the answer.
By Richard Conniff|Jun 13 2016|
Coffee By Design | Portland, Maine
Photo Credit : Katherine KeenanNew Englanders have been whispering for decades: If many of its restaurants feature Manhattan-style (red) chowder, if many of its residents root for the Yankees (and boo the Red Sox), if many of its towns send a third of their residents on trains to New York City each workday, is Connecticut really New England?
I know this may be difficult for you, New England. But just for a moment, think happy thoughts about Connecticut.
No doubt your mind goes blank. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, they’re the real deal, “the heart of New England,” as they like to fashion themselves. You consider Connecticut, at best, some dim, vestigial part of the genuine New England experience. The appendix, say.
Photo Credit : John S. Dykes
Or maybe more like the wallet, with the entire state stereotyped as not New England at all, but more like one big bedroom community for hedge-fund managers from New York, with some weapons manufacturers and insurance executives tossed in for diversity. Connecticut is the state that “let’s be honest, nobody else in the region likes or respects,” Jon Stewart joked last year on The Daily Show. And the humiliating thing is that he was talking about the Mid-Atlantic region.
So does Connecticut really even belong in New England?
I’ve lived here for 37 years, and probably ought to know. But with considerable doubt I set out to answer the question. This may be partly because I grew up in New Jersey, which also lives in the shadow of New York, comes in for more than its share of ridicule, and yet somehow boasts a distinct identity—and great musicians like Sinatra and Springsteen to crow about it to the world. “Is there some Connecticut equivalent I’ve been missing?” I asked a Hartford native, and he shot back, as if in disbelief at my ignorance, “We had Gene Pitney, ‘the Rockville Rocket’!” Letting that sink in, he added, “Also The Carpenters.”
Well, you see the problem. It was compounded for me because I’ve frequently traveled for my work as a writer, and I’ve often been puzzled, after experiencing the literature of Ireland, say, or even Maine, to come home to a state whose great books all seem to be about someplace else. (Think Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Styron.) Even the director of the Connecticut Humanities Council once lamented, “Connecticut has no literature of itself.” Wallace Stevens might arguably be an exception because he sometimes wrote poems about Connecticut. But perhaps wisely, he also kept his day job. As an insurance executive.
In search of a longer view, I phoned University of Connecticut geologist Robert M. Thorson. Like me, he’s a blow-in, but he’s become an adoptive Connecticut Yankee and an expert on stone walls. (Memo to “Heart of New England,” and also Robert Frost: If you’re seeking “the epicenter of traditional New England stone walls,” Thorson’s book Exploring Stone Walls will steer you to the corner where Rhode Island and Massachusetts meet, ahem, Connecticut. Oh, and while we’re at it, your iconic New Hampshire play Our Town? Written by Thornton Wilder, a Connecticut resident.)
But back to Thorson. When I posed my question about Connecticut’s New England legitimacy, he replied, “Look at the landscape first, and don’t ask whether The Carpenters are the culture.” The arc of ancient mountains that runs like a spine through New England gets its start in the foothills of southwestern Connecticut, then sweeps up through the Litchfield Hills in the northwestern corner of the state, the Berkshires in Massachusetts, the Green Mountains and the White Mountains in … I forget those state names just now … rising finally to Maine’s Mount Katahdin.
“The whole damned thing is New England,” Thorson said, “and Connecticut is a very respectable part of it.” The same rolling hills, the same forests and ponds, the same rocky shores and pocket beaches, from Eastport, Maine, to, yes, Greenwich, Connecticut.
The real question, Thorson was saying, is why Long Island—basically a line of New England rubble dumped by receding glaciers—ended up being grabbed off by New York. But to myself, I was thinking, “Hmm, Long Island. The Hamptons. Billy Joel. Definitely the appendix. We can let that one go.”
***
Connecticut has plenty of nicknames— the “Nutmeg State,” the “Land of Steady Habits,” the “Constitution State,” the “Provision State”—and they all come from stories about our past. That “Nutmegger” thing, for instance, supposedly started with the idea that our far-ranging Yankee peddler forebears sometimes sold wooden nutmegs to suckers in other states. (Our story is that those customers were just too dumb to know that you have to shave nutmeg. They tried to crack it open like a nut instead.) We’re the “Provision State” (also the “Arsenal State”) because we’ve ranked among the nation’s top weapons suppliers since at least 1776, when rebels tore down a statue of King George III in Manhattan and shipped it to a foundry in Litchfield, to be recycled into musket balls for our soldiers to deliver back to the British.
Photo Credit : John S. Dykes
And yet Connecticut also suffers from the widespread notion that it has no identity, no sense of place. Maybe it’s because we have nothing to make us stand out along the lines of Boston’s “pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd” speech impediment. Nor do we say “ayuh,” or call good things “wicked.” Our accent is largely Mid-Atlantic newscaster standard. In sports and culture, we feel the tug of New York a bit too much on one side of the state, and of Boston on the other. (One wit suggested that our state motto should be “We’re kinda close to the places you really want to be.”)
Even residents often mistakenly regard Connecticut as an anyplace/noplace they happen to live right now. Half of us supposedly wish we lived someplace else, according to a 2013 poll. For outsiders, it can seem like just a place to race through en route to Maine, Cape Cod, or some other “more authentic” New England place. We are, said one friend, the “New England Flyover State.”
I turned for help to William Hosley, also a blow-in, from upstate New York by way of 1970s Vermont. At 61, he’s a boyishly ebullient devotee of all things Connecticut, a man who can dismiss Vermont as, historically speaking, “a wholly owned subsidiary of Connecticut.” Hosley has made his career as a Connecticut museum director and curator specializing in the state’s culture and history. He also runs a Facebook group with the somewhat symptomatic title “Creating a Sense of Place for Connecticut.” (A different website specializing in Connecticut museums uses the underwhelming slogan “Destroying the myth that there is nothing to do here.”) We met at a franchise coffee shop, one of the great purveyors of the “anyplace/noplace” sensation (though with a nice caffeine buzz to help customers forget).
“Connecticut has a lot of authenticity,” Hosley began. “What it doesn’t have is a lot of strong, coherent identity.” European colonization began with “little puddles of settlement,” each community living independently from the others, “and that independence survived even after they came together.” State identity matters now less than the very distinct identity of our towns, 169 of them.
We tend to repeat this number ritually, but it probably underestimates our fragmentary nature, because of proud bastions of local identity within towns: Ivoryton and Centerbrook, for instance, are sections of Essex, but distinctly different from Essex proper. This intensely local character turns up in the richness of the state’s 600 or so museums and historical societies—but also in its intractable segregation by race, ethnicity, income, and social status in communities that are sometimes side by side.
“Connecticut is really a thinking man’s state,” Hosley said. “You have to be alert to nuance—what differentiates places and makes them stand out. You have to be a connoisseur of cultural differences. If you want a foreign experience, just drive 20 minutes. There’s so much diversity packed into this state.”
***
Taking Connecticut at an angle, from Stonington in the southeastern corner to Salisbury in the northwest, it’s a two-and-a-half hour drive, three if you dawdle. But away from the anonymous highways, it’s unmistakably New England: the rivers, hills, and forests; the abundance and saturated color of the towering trees; the deep, dappled shade; the stone walls enclosing fields now gone to goldenrod; the lichen-dappled old gravestones; the town greens; the Congregational churches with their white-clapboard siding.
You can, of course, also see this New England character being eroded by 1960s ranch houses and 21st-century McMansions (a tale of too many gables), and by the Walmarts and Stop & Shops on the periphery of old downtowns. You can see New England’s lost industrial character, its waning Yankee ingenuity, in the cavernous brick factory buildings left idle, with tattered “Now Leasing” banners up top.
I stopped at Norfolk, the most altitudinous town in Connecticut, at 1,280 feet, and also “the icebox of Connecticut.” When I brought up my question about whether Connecticut belongs in New England, a local promptly replied, “It does in Norfolk.” A former farming and mill town, it’s one of the northwestern hill communities that reinvented itself, with the coming of railroads in the late 19th century, as a summer colony. Norfolk became an enclave for professors, artists, musicians, and writers. A thinking person’s town. For a time in the 1930s, the experimental-poetry journal New Directions was published from a barn there. (A local family recalls pelting Ezra Pound with grapes during a swim at Toby Pond.) Generations of visitors have also regularly assembled in Norfolk’s long, shingled, church-like music shed (hard seats, no air conditioning, great acoustics) for a celebrated summer concert series affiliated with Yale.
The thing about Connecticut is that if you pick around almost anywhere, you turn up tantalizing threads of history. Sometimes it’s in the garden, in the form of shell middens or a George III penny. Sometimes it’s in the attic, in a squirrel-torn letter from an Italian countess to her Yankee ship-captain husband. And if you follow the thread back in time, it becomes a story.
In Norfolk, historian Ann Havemeyer has done much of the thread-following, and as we sat in her office at the town library, she shared the results, starting with an early-20th-century architect named Alfredo Taylor. On the cover of her book An Architect of Place and the Village Beautiful, “Fredo,” as he was known to his friends, cuts a jaunty figure in white jodhpurs, a checked tweed jacket, and a bow tie, with unruly white hair, a full beard, and a Sherlock Holmes–type briar pipe hanging from his lips.
Though he practiced in New York, Taylor designed more than 30 buildings in Norfolk, and they’re eclectic: an English Tudor house for one client, a Swiss chalet for another, a Serbian summer cottage for a woman who had fallen in love with a Columbia University professor from Serbia. “What Taylor did expressed the individuality of the client, and of the architect,” Havemeyer said. It was distinctive, not like the work of architects associated with nearby towns, who simply reached into their kit bags to lay on a veneer of imaginary New England colonialism.
Robert Dance, a fellow historian in Norfolk, chipped in, more explicitly: “It wasn’t like Litchfield. Litchfield made itself a sort of fake New England town, like Williamsburg. It’s beautiful, but those avenues of white-clapboard houses? They never looked like that.” (Did I mention that rivalries with nearby towns are the essence of local identity in Connecticut?)
But Norfolk reimagined its identity, too, Havemeyer added, and that had to do not just with the coming of the railroads, but of the Irish, generally regarded as the Mexican immigrants of their day, only worse. The Irish worked at the woolen mill and worshiped at a Catholic church in Norfolk’s lower village. From the pulpit, the minister of the Congregational Church (upper village) raged in 1859 against the trend among local families of moving to larger farms out West, “leaving our homesteads to degenerate under the semi-barbarous usage of foreigners.” The Irish were entirely at home taking over the rocky, unforgiving fields they left behind, even if unwelcome.
The rivalry between old and new passed from pulpit to street, at one point taking the form of “gang warfare,” Dance said, with rioting mobs flinging stones at one another. The warfare also took place along more discreet lines, in the tidying up of the town green and the commissioning of traditional New England public buildings to give permanent form to the dominant hierarchy.
In the early 1920s, the growing Catholic population needed a bigger church, and Taylor once again provided architecture that expressed the individuality of his clients (this time at no cost). The result was an ocher-colored stucco-and-stone structure, evoking medieval Spain, or Tuscany, or ancient Ireland, depending on your point of view. Its location also made it the first thing visitors saw on arriving in Norfolk from the west, “and the local elite were mortified,” Havemeyer said. They responded by hiring a different architect to add an imposing two-story colonnaded portico to the front of the Congregational Church. Thus Norfolk rejected what Havemeyer describes in her book as Taylor’s idiosyncratic “architecture of place” and “firmly wrapped” itself “in the Colonial Revival culture of recall.” The newcomers no doubt took in the abiding lesson of life in Connecticut: We are together, but we stay separate.
***
There is, let’s admit it, something amiss with Connecticut, but it’s certainly not a lack of New England identity. Maybe it’s a temporary breakdown of values, from having lost the industries that once gave purpose to individual lives, communities, even entire valleys: clockmaking and brasswork on the Naugatuck River, textiles on the Thames. Danbury, Bill Hosley told me, “used to manufacture 75 percent of the world’s hats, a couple of dozen major players, all gone. Now it’s where the help lives for Greenwich.”
Maybe the sense of emptiness is a reflection of stark income inequality, or of the industries that still thrive here: arms, insurance, financial services. Connecticut, the writer and radio host Colin McEnroe joked, is “about killing people elsewhere, and preventing anything from happening here. It has all that joyous and life-affirming character.”
Connecticut’s problem may just be that it’s a bit too much New England: too much taciturn reserve, too powerful a tendency for people to withdraw into their private lives, too focused on work (or the search for work). Once, after a highly gregarious trip through Cajun bayou country, I came home desperately seeking some Connecticut counterpart to Louisiana’s “Laissez les bon temps roulez!” Then I realized it was right in front of me, in the dependable, but joyless, “Land of Steady Habits.”
***
There is, however, one thing that draws us together, defines us, and also connects us inextricably to the rest of New England: the water. Partly I mean the coastline. Let’s call it 100 miles from Greenwich to Stonington, or 618 miles if you go by the federal system of measuring nooks and crannies, and I can tell you that the nooks and crannies definitely count: Take a boat tour among the raw granite ledges and outcrops of the Thimble Islands in Branford’s Stony Creek Harbor. Or eat a lobster roll at Abbott’s Lobster in the Rough in Noank. They’re almost—almost—the equal of Five Islands in Maine. (Our beaches are better—sand, not rock. But enjoying them, on the other hand, can be difficult. Eighty percent of the coast is privately owned.)
More than the coast, though, it’s the rivers that make us who we are: the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, the Farmington, the Quinnipiac, the Willimantic, the Quinebaug, the Thames. Together with countless tributaries, they drove the early agricultural mills, and later the first factories, obliging us to create and endlessly improve new products, in the process inventing Yankee ingenuity itself. The Connecticut River in particular gives Connecticut its name, raises it to the level of a great American place, and makes it the real heart of New England (or anyway, the aorta).
The river rises just below the Canadian border and travels through 410 miles, and four New England states, missing just Maine and Rhode Island. But it earns its name, an Eastern Algonquian word meaning “long tidal river,” only as it leaves Massachusetts and begins to feel the rhythms of its destination in Long Island Sound. From the Connecticut border south, the river’s footprint broadens into a 20-mile-wide rift valley, with some of the best farmland in the region (any region). Then, somewhere north of Middletown, a spirit of Yankee independence (or ancient geology) seizes hold of the river, and it abandons its own valley, veering southeast for 30 spectacularly scenic miles down to the Sound. This stretch of the river is why I live in Connecticut, and love it here. (The old valley bed, incidentally, ends up 32 miles away in New Haven, with the Quinnipiac now running there.)
One recent summer day, I was canoeing at the mouth of the Connecticut and was struck, as I’ve often been, by the way shifting sandbars have kept this estuary looking much as it did a century or two ago: unindustrialized, with the white steeple of Old Lyme’s First Congregational Church rising above the treetops. I was interested that day in ospreys. My guide, Paul Spitzer, an ornithologist who grew up in Old Lyme, described the species as a very Connecticut bird, “a bird of steady habits.” It migrates each fall to South America but remains loyal year after year to its North American summer nest site and to its mate. Both male and female are industrious at the business of catching fish to feed the young, and they share the work more or less equally.
Spitzer and other birders started working with ospreys here in the 1960s—another recent thread of history worth picking up—after the population plummeted from 200 nests to a few dwindling holdouts. Under the guidance of Barbara and Roger Tory Peterson, the bird artist, volunteers established the first 10-foot-high osprey nesting platforms on a place called Great Island, mainly to rule out the possibility that nest-raiding predators might be the real problem.
The platforms were an old New England idea updated. Someone remembered that Connecticut farmers used to put wagon wheels on poles to attract ospreys, with the idea that the fish eaters would keep the chicken hawks and redtail hawks away from their poultry. The problem for ospreys in the 1960s turned out to be not predators, of course, but the inadvertent eggshell-thinning effect of the widely misused pesticide DDT, abetted by dieldrin in the river from the woolen mills upstream. Even so, the ospreys took to the platforms on Great Island, especially as the population recovered after the banning of DDT and dieldrin in 1972. The platform idea soon spread along the East and West Coasts, and across to Europe. It was a bit of Yankee ingenuity, still at large in the world.
Great Island is now a kind of osprey garden, with more than 20 platforms, and on an earlier visit, Spitzer had peered into a nest to check on progress with the help of an old bicycle mirror attached to one end of a bamboo pole. Now, though, the young had fledged, and they were in the sky all around us, a male and female “jagging and flaring,” as Spitzer put it, in some sort of display, and others winging out to fish, and back again with their catch slung underneath, face forward, bright blood streaming down from where the talons gripped each fish’s flanks.
There’s an older sort of Yankee ingenuity at work here. Some of it is built in: Ospreys can, for instance, dislocate their shoulders to get their wings out of the way as they plunge beneath the surface to pick flatfish off the bottom. And some of it is just an extraordinary ability to spot shifting resource possibilities: An osprey will fly long distances to hit a fish hatchery, for instance, or pluck an expensive meal from an ornamental koi pond.
Mostly, though, their food comes, as it always has, from the river and the Sound. One osprey turned to run off a black-backed gull trying to steal its catch, and the gull, plainly outnumbered here, soon fled. Across the river, a “kettle” of ospreys—23 of them—wheeled over South Cove in Old Saybrook. I breathed in the salt air, glad to be apart from the rest of humanity for a while—something still highly possible in a state that remains more than 60 percent forested. The fledglings splashed down feet first to the water with a kind of childish exuberance, missing the fish much of the time, but hitting often enough to be happy.
You could call this place Connecticut, you could call it New England. The birds didn’t give a damn. On this gorgeous morning, it was simply a very fine place to live.
Was sooo disappointed in this article – thought it would make a good story but instead more than half of it was about ospreys???? Wish the author would have kept with the title instead of going so off base for so much of the article.
He couldn’t even spend five minutes researching what the technical and historical meaning of the term “New England” actually is. If he did that then he would know that Connecticut is inextricably bound, by historical definition, to New England, so can’t ever not be part of New England. I agree it is a very poorly written article. The answer is plain as day: Connecticut is part of the historical Dominion of New England, and therefore always will be. Unless someone invents a time machine and tells them to put some term in the original definition which excludes Connecticut in a certain year, then there is no way to remove Connecticut from the historical definition of New England. Not having the same “charm” can’t change the technical and historical fact that Connecticut always has been and always will be a part of New England.
I sense a built in prejudice just for the mention of CT residents who work in NY. They LIVE in CT! The CT shoreline was given short shrift. We are free to talk about the mountains in VT and NH as if to say this is REAL New England. The CT, RI, MA,NH and Maine ALL have magficent shorelines which differ from state to state. But they all are New England.
I’ve been building, restoring and giving talks on outhouses and Americana since the turn of the century at my Bull Hill Workshop and am darn good at it. Most folk who need me come from north of the Ct. border and are happy they did. Some may bad mouth Ct folk at times, but they is sure glad we keep basic New England culture alive when they need us. Yesiree
This article reminds of the Dunkin Donuts tv commercial where various actors portray New England accents (e.g. Maine and Boston accents) but when it came Connecticut, the actor asks, perplexed, “What’s a Connecticut accent?” There does seem to be something of a Connecticut accent – just ask a native to pronounce “New Britain” – but otherwise it’s not very distinctive.
Forgot Glastonbury which has the most colonial era homes in NE except for Marblehead MA. Also, has the largest berry farms, and was the home of Gideon Welles, a close confidant of Abraham Lincoln. Many of CT towns can probably share their rich history that has made our nation what it is.
I am disappointed that this is Yankee’s offering on Connecticut. Your writer at least mentioned two towns east of the Connecticut River, Stonington and Noank (both on the coast). But his entire “argument” is based on the New York bedroom communities west of the river, and then goes a bit off the rails at the end to encompass his appreciation of ospreys and the river itself. Had he written a serious article about Connecticut’s New Englandness he would have focused significantly on the eastern region of the state. There he would have found everything that defines historic New England–including colonial town greens and 300+ year old homes (still occupied) and many family-run farms. He would also have found a deep appreciation of New England and American history, and “authentic” places and sites significant in that history. He would have found resilience, self-reliance, and independent-mindedness–the very qualities prized by such New England luminaries as Emerson and Thoreau. That the writer is an admitted “outsider” and relied so heavily on Connecticut transplants perhaps accounts for the obliviousness to these qualities that make Connecticut not the “appendix” of New England, but in fact a cornerstone of the region.
One has to remember “Yankee” comes from Ct as both the French, Dutch and local people (native americans) called the British settlers “inglais, Yan-gee” etc… It seems that only VT, NH and Maine can be considered New England, maybe Massachusetts. Rhode Island which I enjoy visiting has Providence, Warwick and Westerly which hardly has a New England accent. In fact they sound more like New York than New Yorkers do. Connecticut is blessed and cursed by its proximity to New York, otherwise Connecticut would have little industry (like our cousins to the north).
Yes Massachusetts has great towns, each screaming New England… and they have taken ownership (or given) of the title New England while Connecticut is ignored even in this publication. With Connecticut´s Still Revolutionary campaign we are showing the world we are innovative and yes one can find a tri-corn hat and historical site or two as well. Remember without Connecticut there would be no America or New England.
Might I add… there would no Lobster Roll, Hamburger and good pizza!
What strikes me, as a New Hampshirite with cousins in Connecticut who do not much seem like New Englanders as I know them, is that when one goes into a general store in Connecticut one usually finds not the Boston Globe but the New York Times. This has not been my experience in any of the other New England states. Of course, in all seriousness I do not think there is any doubt that Connecticut is part of New England.
CT is called New England, but no state called NE is a part of anything because NE is actually nothing but a title slapped on some states. The closet you can get to NE being something is metro Boston – of which CT has nothing to do with because it is too far away. We are not concerned with them, but you New Englanders are obsessed with us.
I think Northern CT, North of Branford is New Englandly. However, Southern CT, is more of the Greater New York area.
I remember reading this article in the paper version of Yankee. I agree with the others that the author missed the target, failing to get to the root of the matter. He is myopic, though, inasmuch as he mentions the critical piece of evidence but doesn’t see it as such: the outsized influence of the town. Each one is so fiercely independent of the other that town identity eclipses state identity. That should remove any doubt that not only is the whole of Connecticut part of New England, but that it is the purest embodiment of it. The great paradox, though, is the fact that so many people misunderstand what New York is. Settled by Yankees both downstate and up, with large segments of Long Island, Westchester County, and Dutchess County once part of Connecticut politically, the Empire State is an extension of New England; its culture is derivative. Yes, Gotham is “Yankee territory.” No one will argue against that, of course.
Actually, New York’s money-centric outlook was largely influenced by the Dutch settlers.
What you “New Englanders” don’t get is that here in CT – we don’t care about nor do we identify as anything called “New England,” despite the many businesses set up here who make sure to name them “New England” something so that New Yorkers see the “New England” as if you out of towners are marking your territory – which is not your territory. This is metro NYC and you jealous New Englanders have to deal with it. Boston is not around here and our world does not revolve around a SMALL, city as much as FOUR HOURS away! When I went to Boston, I maybe spotted one CT plate, but down here in this Tri-state area, I always see MA, RI and NH plates. That’s a lot of traveling to a region that you claim to hate – or is it that you want to be a part of it, like that other hating state of PA?
A whole lot of talk and hot air about…. nothing. I grew up in NYC, my wife in Boston. I live in western CT and have for a decade now, still close enough to work every day in NYC. Let me tell you, CT is all New England. New York is a crowded, superficial, egomaniacal, self centered place. It’s houses are all on top of each other. It’s culture is dominated by Catholic peoples, Italians and Irish mainly, who cling to an old world style of life since they are more among their own there and clustered together. CT has a strong Irish and Italian gene pool as well, but those with that blood up here, myself included, assimilate into the region. Here, in the small foothills of the region, people are spread out, rural, independent, stalwart, quiet and flinty. Stone walls, white steeple churches, tranquility, leaf peeping, Apple picking, pumpkin growing, no street lights…. this is New England. Plain and simple. It had almost nothing in common with NY at all, despite the fact that it’s so close, and it doesn’t want to. The slower, easier yet steadier way of life here is so far removed from anything you’d find in NYC or LI that your assertions are laughable. My wife often says that life here is a lot more like life in her Boston suburbs than she ever thought it would be. It is absolutely nothing like life in the NYC suburbs I was accusomted to. I suggest you do a little traveling around and talking to other people first before lecturing them on things you clearly know little about
And yet you go a half hour north of NYC in New York state and it will feel just like western CT, there is absolutely no part of the TriState are that feels like a Boston Suburb also have u even been to southern Fairfield and New Haven counties? It screams NYC suburb.
Wrong. I have always identified as a New Englander.
Also Connecticut is technically part of New England by historical definition. Because someone might think that Connecticut “doesn’t have the same charm” is meaningless in the face of the historical fact that Connecticut is, by definition, part of the geographic region that made up the Dominion of New England. Since the Dominion of New England is officially dissolved for hundreds of years no one can ever take Connecticut out of New England just because, in their opinion, “it doesn’t have the same charm.” No official legislative body will ever be able to change what has always been. Connecticut is, therefore, ALWAYS part of New England, whether someone likes it or not!
Both of my maternal grandparents came from Connecticut (my grandfather transplanted from Pennsylvania) and settled in Rhode Island. My father’s parents came from England (grandfather and my grandmother called herself a swamp Yankee). I certainly always thought of Connecticut as New England as we travelled from home to Southington to visit relatives. However, when I settled in New Hampshire I learned that, unlike most rivers, Vermont has no claim to any part of the Connecticut River! The border does not run down the center of the river but continues to the western bank, making the river entirely in New Hampshire. If Connecticut has an identity problem, the problem lies with those folks with ties to Connecticut that insist that it is part of the “Tri-state Region.” For whatever reason they try to attach Connecticut to New York and New Jersey – that reason surely escapes me. In my 72 years on earth I have noticed that the individual states of New England have lost much of their individuality – New Hampshire beginning to look much like Massachusetts, having grown up in Warwick, RI (pronounced “Warrik) and having few real “R’s” in my speech an now hearing them everywhere when I go home to visit) – but as a region we hold steadfastly to our roots keeping the six states solidly “New England.”
Outsiders to CT (particularly those from actual New England – or PA!) love to put “Tri-state area” in quotes, but the FACTS are, this Tri-state area is a REAL thing while “New England” is NOT a real thing! This Tri-state is a metro region (America’s largest) and one can get from NJ to CT without worrying how to get it done. If someone from here is stuck in Boston and beyond, you have to wonder how to get home. When someone is in the city (Manhattan) and they are from NJ or CT, they know how to get home and know that they will easily get home. We have the same LOCAL NYC TV stations, radio stations, etc. Again, Boston and it’s sports teams are out of market to ALL of CT. That means the Boston Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Patriots are YOUR local teams, while the Yankees/Mets, Knicks/Nets, Jets/Giants, Rangers/Islanders/Devils are OUR (CT’S) local teams! These reasons alone is why we are not a part of this “New England” thing. When Patriots owners Kraft teased Hartford with the Patriot’s move, he took it back and said: “I am happy that the Patriots are staying where they belong – in the REAL New England!” His coach even said: “I was the coach of the Patriots, but everyone in CT were either Giants or Jets fans.” YOU “New Englanders” keep wanting and begging for CT to be with YOU to enhance your standing and markets because we are in the NYC region. We don’t seek you – you seek us. I would be overjoyed if you would leave us alone and stop thinking that using us to get to NYC to expand Boston’s influence. We in CT do not care about Boston – that is YOUR central city. Our central city is America’s central city – New York City.
Obviously, you’re a New York sports fan. Sorry to disillusion you, but less than half of Connecticut baseball fans root for the Yankees. CT NYY fans, 44 percent; CT BOS fans, 36 percent; CT NYM fans, 13 percent. (Source: boston.com) Connecticut is more Patriots country than Giants country. Fairfield and New Haven counties have more Giants fans; the other six counties have more Patriots fans. (Source: Facebook) Connecticut is overwhelmingly Celtics country. The area with more Knicks fans is a smaller portion of Fairfield County only, west of a line that runs roughly from Danbury, right there on the New York border, down to Bridgeport on the Sound. (Source: The Upshot.) And vividseats maintains that there are more Rangers fans than Bruins fans in Connecticut, although I live in New Haven County and I encounter more Bruins fans. Who cares? The truth is, neither New York City nor Boston “own” all of Connecticut, and I and the people I grew up with in metropolitan New York consider ourselves New Englanders first who also happen to be Tri-Staters. The two are definitely *not* mutually exclusive, and each adds to the richness of Connecticut culture and life.
Written like a true outsider to CT! We never called ourselves “New Englanders,” that is something that people from NE or from some far place across the country assume when they do the quick Wiki search to find out that CT is called a so-called NE state, which has ZERO meaning. We never called ourselves “Tri-staters” either, which proves that you are not from here. Your sources about sports fans are invalid (I saw the website) and my response was not about who is a fan of a team or not, it was about which city’s teams are LOCAL to CT, which would ONLY be NY and NJ teams! It does not matter if the whole state of CT loved far away Boston’s sports teams – they are still out of marker teams, which is why you do not see them advertised here, except on Boston based product they Trojan horse into CT. You guys are simply jealous because we are 10 minutes from NYC and Boston is no where around us. I see too many MA, RI and NH plates on the roads in our NY/NJ/CT Tri-state area, so clearly you people love it HERE more than you do Boston in order to drive for so long to get here! I know you don’t understand us, but YOU are New England, while we are a state CALLED NE, but we have zero to do with you – plus Boston is way too far away to matter to us. If you could move them closer, then we might be interested. As of now, you New Englanders need to leave us alone and stop trying to get in on this metro NYC business and stick to the Boston whom you claim to love.
I grew up in Connecticut, where town fairs were a prevalent and important part of the communities in the state. When I moved to the Midwest and traveled through nearly 90% of the United States, I began to notice that very few of them had anything other than a state fair. State fairs are a huge event, lasting a week or more, but I truly miss the homey atmosphere of the Connecticut town fairs. They had a different kind of feel to them; a warmth and pride that cannot be replaced by the state fairs I have visited. Perhaps I’m just nostalgic, or maybe just naive, but other states don’t seem to subscribe to the small town fair idea that I miss so much. I think it sets Connecticut apart as a New England state that celebrates togetherness.
I came across this article because I am a CT NATIVE and I can say without hesitation that CT is all NYC metropolitan area and we have NOTHING to do with this “New England” concept – and we don’t want anything to do with them! In fact – they need to leave us alone! People up in the so-called New England region (Boston area) are just jealous that CT is in America’s #1 city’s metro region and WE HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH BOSTON! Boston’s sports teams are NOT LOCAL TO CT, they do not sound like us, we cannot pull their radio/TV stations and they are a totally different region from us, aside from being as much as 4 hours away!. On the other hand, NYC is a mere 10 minutes from the CT border! CT is rich because it is in the NYC region while the poorest and least populous part of CT is the part closest to Boston. Only outsiders come to CT to spread that New England stuff, we natives never grew up with it and we could care less about it. OUR Giant stomped THEIR Patriots in the Super Bowl – TWICE!
why are you so mad about connecticut being new england, chris? why do you want connecticut to be new jersey when its not? youre right about one thing, western ct is more tri-state area, but eastern ct where i’m from is DEFINITELY new england, no new york influence at all! not all of connecticut is fairfield county 🙂 so dont talk like you speak for all of the state. thanks! xoxo
Connecticut is by technical definition part of New England because it is part of the old Dominion of New England. So nothing anyone does can ever change the fact that Connecticut is inextricably bound to New England. Maybe it may be culturally distinct in its own ways, but that can’t change the fact that CT has always been and always will be part of New England. It can’t not be because there is no longer a Dominion of New England to officially remove Connecticut from the geographic definition. New England is an historical term and nothing anyone does can change that. One can say they are going to Northern New England, or VT or NH, or Mass, but that can’t change the fact that CT is part of New England. How the article missed that irrefutable fact is beyond me. All they needed to do was look up the origins of the name. Just because it “doesn’t have the same charm” doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of New England. And I’d argue that many parts of Connecticut have more regional charm than parts of the other states in New England.
As a CT native, we are and always have been New England. You are not a CT native. You are the child of NY transplants. You do not get to speak for those of us who have been here for generations.
I was outraged when the geologist speaking on what is “really” considered New England couldn’t remember what the states of New Hampshire and Vermont are called. I stopped reading when the author demonstrated that he doesn’t know how to use “wicked” in a sentence (it’s used anywhere you would “really” or “very”, it doesn’t actually mean anything in itself). The focus on accents was also a huge red flag that this author doesn’t know New England. The majorith of New Englanders have no discernable accent at all, only those from the heart of Boston have a Boston accent, and there are specific and odd little accents for different regions of New England (even a barely there Western Massachusetts accent). Your accent is not central to your New England-ness.
yes, also Connecticut is, by historical definition, technically part of the old Dominion of New England, so nothing anyone says or believes can make Connecticut NOT be a part of it. You’d think they’d have done at least a literally research on the origins of the term because it literally and with total certainty answers the question of whether or not it is part of New England.
I came across this again. You New Englanders keep talking about what is or is not NE and what looks like NE. I’ll bet this magazine $1M that you cannot tell me what NE is or is supposed to look like! I’ll bet you that South Jersey, Philly to VA look more like a “New England” (if colonial is the look) than so-called New England. Boston needs this NE thing in order to try and make it seem larger than what it is. Philly being closer to NYC than Boston cannot get anything out of it and half of NJ is in the Philly region! What makes you think that far away Boston can get any of this when no part of CT is in the Boston area? Oh yeah – we get The New Yorker Magazine here…
You spoke about the weaponry from CT and failed to recognize the “mass production contribution” in the state of CT made by Eli Whitney to the country and the New England Region.
It depends on whether you’re talking about Eastern or Western CT. CT has two very different identities; one being New England and one being New York. Even within CT, many of us Southeastern CT natives don’t really consider Western CT to be part of the same region.
I grew up in the Mystic area and I dare anyone to tell me that’s not New England, both in landscape and attitude. I grew up among the stone walls, old colonial houses, proper clam chowder, and a love for everything that coastal New England has to offer. When I got a job in the CT valley I felt like I was in a different state. The people west of I-91 are much closer to being New Yorkers than those of us who grew up closer to the RI or MA borders. But east of I-91, especially along the shoreline, is very much New England. I now live in Metrowest MA and I feel more at home here than I did in Central CT. It feels a lot like Southeastern CT without being right on the water.
I am amazed at most of these comments. It seems no one realizes the author’s humorous intent. Tongue-in-cheek, he describes “perceptions” different folks have about the state of CT. As the daughter of a mother, born and raised in CT, and a father, born and raised just 8 miles west of Boston, and as a woman raised slightly west of Boston, who transplanted herself and her children to Maine nearly 40 years ago, and who now has a son living in CT for the last 20 years, and a daughter living in RI for the last 20+ years……..I can attest to the legitimacy of the “perceptions” this author has entertainingly presented here. Remember when we all learned that the vowels in our English language were: a, e, i, o, u….and sometimes y?” Well, that’s how I think about the New England states: ME, NH, VT, MA, CT, RI…..and SOMETIMES NY. The truth is each of the New England states do have distinctive differences in accents (sometimes several within each state’s borders). CT does have a mix of not only sports preferences (NY vs. Boston), but also accents…which range from sort of NY Jewish, to Italian, and an unusual Polish twang. These same accents can definitely be detected in its neighboring state of RI, too. MA also has a few, like Italian mob, Irish, and the Hahvahd dialect spoken by the so-called elite of the Boston area. And, then there are many who speak like our family does…with so little detectable accent that people in other areas of the country remark that they can not tell from where we came…..unless we are very tired…then that “A and R” switching around begins to slip out. VT and NH have been taken over in their southern lands by NY and Boston, respectively…..and ME natives have, what I call, a constipated, sped-up, Southern drawl. Now, that is all MY opinion. What this author knows, and ably put down on paper…not only with historical bits and pieces, but lovingly……New Englanders, from each little or big village, do have varying “perceptions” of all of their neighbors. Though, when far away from home, they think of themselves with pride as New Englanders (far better than being Southerners, Westerners, Middle-Westerners, etc)…. these “perceptions” do allow them to remain distinctively separate, each with their own proud identity.
The late Gladys Taber may have been born in Colorado Springs, but she wrote about her farm, Stillmeadow, in Southbury. She made me fall in love with New England, including Connecticut.
Visit Woodstock and Pomfret and Mashmuqqet. Very NEW England. And also visit Woodstock Putnam and North Grosvernadale New England CT
I was born and raised in Ohio, went to college in Worcester, lived a few years in Manhattan, and have lived in New Jersey for thirty-seven years. Somewhere along the way I heard the following: “To a Southerner a Yankee is someone from the North; to a Northerner a Yankee is someone from New England; to a New Englander a Yankee is someone from Vermont; to a Vermonter a Yankee is someone who is allowed to talk directly to God.”
To be historically accurate, the portion of land west of the Connecticut River in what is today Connecticut should be part of the “New Netherland” Region. If a regional name such as New England still exists, it is only fair to recognize all of the names once used. If anyone is in doubt, please look it up.
I just wanted to reply to Chris. The incredible arrogance of NY fans was one of the reasons I couldn’t wait to leave Connecticut. I agree that Connecticut is not part of New England. New York and New Jersey can keep it. I now happily live in Northern New England, close to Boston, close to the Maine coast and close to the White and Green mountains. Please stay away and enjoy your Jets and Knicks down there,
CT is part of NE. The state has unfortunately been destroyed by NYers over the past 40 or so years though.
To Anthony – good! Now if the rest of you “New England” transplants can go back home (or respect this Tri-state), things would be better! We have nothing in common with the Boston region and it is too far away for us to be concerned with it. I don’t like anyone trying to associate me with regions that I am nowhere near.
100% projection.
George: Can you describe in words, what “VERY New England” is and what that is supposed to look like? I have news for you – a shoreline in the northeast is not one of the characteristics…
Hey Richard, in your opening paragraph you failed to mention Massachusetts! You lost me right then and there! CT is not officially part of New England in part because of their proximity to NYC and the attitude that wafts thru the state and into New England . It’s a feeling that they are better than us! If you want to include them you might take a closer look at a map and divide that state. Anything within 30 miles west of 95 to the coast goes to NY and the Yankees! West might have a prayer of consideration!
I grew up in CT on the Glastonbury border in E Htfd. As a child ( before strip malls and suburban development) I walked to school next to cornfields, cow pastures and wooded paths. In winters we skated on a pond. In Summers I would ride my bike next to farms. We went to Old Sturbridge village on school trips and the Old Cider Mill in S Glastonbury was an annual joy. We had horse driven sleigh rides on snowy nights in downtown Htfd. The “big city” was Boston where we would go to Red Sox games. I lived in CT for thirty seven years before I moved the NYC to pursue a career in the theater. As a child NY was a strange scary faraway place. As a New York resident CT couldn’t possibly be part of NY but I did not grow up in the SW region of CT. NYC is loud, dirty, expensive and annoying although it has many great qualities such as a rich vibrant arts culture and diversity of people I miss CT and all the NE states and am fortunate to still have family and friends in CT. I spend many Summers in the NW part of CT near Barkhamstead, Riverton, and Farmington River area. We still go to Jacobs Pillow, Tanglewood, hiking and camping the AT and environs. NY with the exception of the ADK is a different planet and I will always cherish my home state of CT ad New England.
My very early years were spent in W. Hartford, Connecticut. My growing-up years were spent in Greenwich, Connecticut. I agree that that area of the state so closely identifies with New York City/Westchester County. I even spoke with a NY accent. When my family would visit our relatives in the northwestern part of the state, my cousins would drive me crazy constantly asking me to say words like call (cawwl) or coffee (cawwfee) and laughing hysterically at my pronunciation. It was wonderful to live in an area so close to NYC where my family would go every weekend to shop or visit all the usual touristy spots, but also amazing places like the United Nations and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Rockefeller Center has to be one of the best places in the world to people watch. Growing up in Greenwich doesn’t mean we were wealthy. We are Italian American and lived in a close-knit area of the town that was almost entirely Italian American. These were the people who built the mansions and created and cared for the landscaping of the rich. Every year the local church had a “feast” where a statue of the church’s patron saint was carried through the streets. At night there was a carnival with rides and food booths. All this in my little neighborhood. I now live in Massachusetts….beautiful Cape Cod. But I’ll always love Connecticut. I have no doubt in my mind that Connecticut is part of New England. Anyone who travels around the state would know it’s true.
As someone not from CT, but who has visited a few times in my travels, I always felt like the southwestern portion of the state closest to NY had that “city feel” to it. The I-95 corridor contained lots of people who were in a hurry. When I visited the eastern part of the state (Pauchag State Forest area), it had a different feel. I meandered on back roads with sunflower fields, stone walls, and quaint houses. It felt more “New England.” CT faded almost seamlessly into Rhode Island on those back roads.
Having lived in Delaware for 20 years, I can draw a parallel between these two states, in that they both suffer from somewhat of an identity crisis due to their geographic location. Just as CT is under the sphere of influence of NYC and Boston, so Delaware’s northernmost county identifies strongly with Philadelphia culture, while some would say the other two southern counties might have more in common with the Southern culture of Virginia and Maryland.
Born and raised in Connecticut and still live here ~ don’t want to live anywhere else. I resent being judged based on the “transplants” to Connecticut. You just have to open your eyes and take a look at the towns and the native Connecticut residents to know that it is definitely New England at its finest. Those who disagree, those who say that it is more like NYC, have never ventured out of any of the cities where corporations are based. Take a ride up Rt. 7 ~ does this remind you of NYC? Venture anywhere north and west of Norwalk and you will see that the identity of Connecticut should not be based on the corporate cities. Anyone who does so does not know Connecticut.
I was born at Hartford Hospital, lived until age 12 in E. Hartford, moved to Glastonbury for high school years. After high school graduation, I graduated from Bay Path Jr. College (it was 2 years then). Was recruited to work for the Fed Govt. in D.C. They sent me to Frankfurt, Germany, married my sweetie in Basel, Switzerland in 1964, went to work for NASA in Greenbelt, MD and am now glad to be away from the DC area. We moved south to the Wilmington, NC area. Unfortunately I recently became a widow. I miss Connecticut, but with the snowy winters, I don’t want to shovel and drive on icy roads. Spent my summers in Old Lyme as a teenager. I loved it there. Yes, I am a Connecticut Yankee at heart, but for now I’m located in the South.
I am saddened to see nary a comment about eastern Connecticut. Towns like Willimantic, Norwich, Killingly, Lebanon, and New London are about as New England as it gets, and not full of rich people either. Check em out 🙂
Yes, geographically and historically Connecticut is part of what was The Dominion of New England, so nothing anyone says can change that historical fact. Historically Connecticut has been and always will be a part of New England. Perhaps some will argue that is is culturally distinct from the rest of New England, but Connecticut will always be bound, by definition, to that region because it is part of the historical definition of New England. There is no modern governing body of New England, it is an historical term and you can’t change the historical fact that Connecticut was and always will be part of New England. This is not even a matter worth arguing.