This document provides a summary of a book about the history of Connecticut food, wine, and literature. It discusses how Connecticut developed a wine industry before and after Prohibition. It profiles early winemakers and the varieties of grapes grown. It also explores Connecticut's rich literary history, from the Hartford Wits in the late 18th century to modern authors like Wallace Stevens, Thornton Wilder, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller. The summary highlights how Connecticut authors helped shape American literature and drama.

1. A History of Connecticut Food and Wine
By Amy Nawrocki and Eric D. Lehman
“…we are tasting, always tasting, a white, a red, rosé, a sweet
dessert, oaked and unoaked, barrel-aged or bottle-ready, wines
made with genius, with alchemy, with love.
You might wonder what these magical drinks of the hills and
shores taste like. How to say this without pride? Like
Connecticut.”
Connecticut Grown
Support Local Agriculture
Produce, Cheese, Meat….
And Wine.
Finding The Meaning of Home

2. A Hidden History
Wine Growing Regions Before Prohibition and Today
Late 20th Century Pioneers
Farm Wineries Today
Making Connecticut Wine
Wine Varieties of Connecticut
Whites like Chardonnay
(shown here)
Riesling,
Seyval Blanc, and dozens more…
Wine Varieties of Connecticut
Cold climate
Reds like
Marechal
Foch,

3. Cab Franc, (shown here)
and
St. Croix.
Wine Varieties of Connecticut
More “recognizable” red grapes like Merlot grow well in
microclimates throughout Connecticut, but are too risky
You have your own palate!
Find what you like, not what some critic or friend or book tells
you to drink…
From Wine to Food
Rich Bounty from Farm and Sea
Clams from the Sound
The Well-
Earned Feast

4. Changing Palates…
…and Changing Cuisines
Connecticut Specialties
Clear Broth Chowder and Roasted Barbecue Clams
New Haven Style
Steamed Cheeseburgers
Learning the Process
Translating for the Home Chef
The Delicious Result

5. *
Telling Local Stories
The Dickermans
of Hamden
By
Eric D. Lehman
1
Telling Stories of Our Homes
“One day you might stop at the ancient Jonathan Dickerman
house to explore its modest rooms and primeval herb garden.
Crossing the lane that Ezra Day rode to teach Sunday school,
you could reflect on the longer path he took to glory and doom.
A trail leads along the banks of the Mill River, past the
crumbling stone foundation of the Axle Shop and to the site of
Munson’s ancient dam, where a fly fisherman, the ghost of A.C.
Gilbert perhaps, hooks a trout. Taking a fork in the path, you
ascend through glacial wreckage to the lip of an old quarry.

6. Below, arches and pillars of a ruin shimmer through the leaves.
History itself seems to catch the corner of your eye.”
2
The Amazing Dickerman Family
Ezra Day Dickerman
Elizabeth, Abbie, and Fannie Dickerman
3
Details Make Stories
4
The Importance of Sources:
Where do we get our details from?
Catalogue of Connecticut Volunteer Organizations with
Additional Enlistments and Casualties
to July 1864. Hartford: Press of Case, Lockwood, and Co.,
1864.

7. Croffut, W.A. and John M. Morris. The Military and Civil
History of Connecticut During the
War of 1861-1865. 3rd edition. Revised. New York, NY:
Ledyard Bill, 1869.
Dickerman, Edward Dwight and George Sherwood Dickerman.
Families of Dickerman Ancestry:
Descendents of Thomas Dickerman. New Haven: The Tuttle,
Morehouse, and Taylor Press, 1897.
Dickerman, George Sherwood. The Old Mount Carmel Parish:
Origins and Outgrowths. New
Haven : Yale University Press for New Haven Colony Historical
Society, 1925.
Dickerman, John. H. Colonial history of the Parish of Mt.
Carmel. New Haven: Press of Ryder’s
Printing House. 1904.
Hartley, Rachel. The History of Hamden, Connecticut 1786-
1936. Hamden, CT: Quinnipiack
Press, 1943.
Manual of the Mount Carmel Congregational Church. 1929.
McCain, Diana Ross. Connecticut’s African-American Soldiers
in the Civil War. Hartford, CT:
Connecticut Historical Commission, 2000.
Niven, John. Connecticut for the Union. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965.
Warren, Israel. The Sisters. Boston: American Tract Society,
1859.

8. Three Sisters Against Fate
The Mount Carmel
Female Seminary
6
Little Brother Ezra Day Grows Up
The 10th Connecticut at Roanoke Island
9
Captain of the Whitney Rifles

9. 10
Defeat at Chancellorsville
Hamden’s Other Civil War Heroes
12
Ezra’s Heroic Dash to Gettysburg
13
A Family
at War
with Tragedy

10. “When he was dragged back behind the lines, the battlefield
surgeons pronounced this third war wound hopeless, and left
him to die.”
14
Telling stories
of heroes…
Who’s Next?
15
The Dickerman Legacy Today
16
We must celebrate local history, not only with plaques and
memorials, but by keeping the stories alive, in our hearts, and in
indelible words. Otherwise we become a nation of self-
important nomads, connected to nothing but abstraction and
speculative ideas.

11. 17
Literary Connecticut
Nutmeggers
and Nomads
By Amy Nawrocki and Eric D. Lehman
Connecticut’s Rich History of Authorship
Life is either a great adventure or nothing.
-Helen Keller
“Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the
improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind,
but it has no practical value.”
– Mark Twain
Creating literature is a human activity – we all do it, even if we
are just telling a funny story about our uncle and a pig. But few
people write those stories down, and even fewer are read by

12. more than their families…that is why great writers are so
important – their work stands in for all those lost tales; they tell
our stories as I they knew us, as if they verbalized the unwritten
longings of our souls.
America’s First Literary Movement
The Wits:
John Trumbull, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Timothy
Dwight
“Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world
and the child of the skies! Thy genius commands thee; with
rapture behold, While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.”
- Timothy Dwight
From Yale Graduates to Hartford Worthies to Poets of a Nation
Four years of college dozed away
In sleep, in slothfulness and play,
Too dull for vice, with clearest conscience
Charged with no fault but that of nonsense
- John Trumbull, “Progress of Dulness”
All spurious appellations, void of truth;
I've better known thee from my earliest youth,
Thy name is Hasty Pudding! thus our sires
Were wont to greet thee fuming from their fires;

13. And while they argued in thy just defence
With logic clear, they thus explained the sense:
'In haste the boiling cauldron, o'er the blaze,
Receives and cooks the ready-powdered maize;
In haste 'tis served, and then in equal haste,
With cooling milk, we make the sweet repast.
No carving to be done, no knife to grate
The tender ear, and wound the stony plate;
But the smooth spoon, just fitted to the lip,
And taught with art the yielding mass to dip,
By frequent journeys to the bowl well stored,
Performs the hasty honors of the board.'
Such is the name, significant and clear,
A name, a sound to every Yankee dear,
But most to me, whose heart and palate chaste
Preserve my pure hereditary taste.
- Joel Barlow, “Hasty Pudding”

14. Why were the Hartford Wits forgotten?
Their true allegiance was to life rather than to the muse…
Noah Webster’s Dictionary
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of
dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work,
needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of
humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
- Noah Webster
The Youngest and Last Hartford Wit Defines an American
Language
Connecticut Authors Help to Change America
The Beechers of Connecticut
“I thus sat and watched my father writing,
turning to his books, and speaking from time
to time to himself in a loud, earnest whisper.”
~Harriet Beecher, on her father’s library.
Nook Farm
“. . . A little society by ourselves”
~Isabella Beecher Hooker

15. They were women who put the pen to work for the progress of
all women and for the promise of equal opportunities for all
people.
“The first duty of a human
being is to assume the right
relationship to society –
more briefly, to find
your real job, and do it. “
~Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Toward a More Perfect Union
A story, as simple as those we tell each other
on the coldest of nights around the fireplace,
has the can blow the fire out, or start a new one.
Connecticut Playwrights Transform American Drama
I tasted the power which is reserved, I imagine, for playwrights,
which is to know that by one’s invention a mass of strangers has
been publicly transfixed.
- Arthur Miller
William Gillette and the Old Dispensation
Gillette’s castle in East Haddam
Eugene O’Neill

16. Father of American Drama
"[O'Neill] has done nothing much in the American drama save
to transform it utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world
of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and
greatness ... [he has] seen life as something not to be neatly
arranged in a study, but as terrifying, magnificent and often
quite horrible, a thing akin to a tornado, an earthquake or a
devastating fire.'‘
– Sinclair Lewis (Yale grad)
Eugene O’Neill as a boy in New London
Thornton Wilder Experiments
Now, there are somethings we all know, but we don’t take’m
out and look at’m very often. We all know that seomthing is
eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth,
and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that
something is eternal, and that something has to do with human
beings.
- Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Wilder’s writing room in Hamden
Arthur Miller and the American Dream
Miller’s home in Roxbury
I have lived more than half my life in the Connecticut
countryside…There is something about this forty-three [sixty-
seven] year temporary residence that strikes me funny now.
– Arthur Miller

17. Connecticut Drama
Becomes
American Drama
Have you ever thought about writing plays, Albee?
- Thornton
Wilder
Curiosity killed the cat; but satisfaction brought it back
– Eugene
O’Neill
Connecticut Changes American Poetry
What is this purple, this parasol,
This stage-light of the Opera?
It is like a region full of intonings.
It is Hartford seen in a purple light.
* * *
See the river, the railroad, the cathedral. . .
Wallace Stevens
Anna Hempstead Branch, “Connecticut Road Song” (1910)
In the wide and rocky pasture where the cedar trees are gray,
The briar rose was growing with the blueberry and bay.
The girls went forth to pick them and the lads went out to play,
But I had to get to Stonington before the break of day.

18. And when I came to Stonington, she was a town of pride.
'Come in,' they said, 'and labor, and be at home and bide.
For gold shall be thy wage,' but 't was past the hour of morn—
And I had to get to Jordan while the dew was on the thorn.
* * *
Wherefore, ye men of Coventry, if ye desire to stay,
Lay not your curb upon me, that love the open way.
For I want to smell the dew, the blueberry and the bay,
And I have to get to Colchester before the break of day.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think

19. Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
“There is such a complete freedom
now-a-days in respect to the technique
that I am rather inclined to disregard form so long as I am free
and can
express myself freely.”
~Wallace Stevens
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
From “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

20. .
“I awoke once several hours before daylight and as I lay in bed
I heard the steps of a cat running over the snow under my
window almost inaudibly. The faintness and strangeness of the
sound made on me one of those impressions
which one so often seizes as the pretexts
for poetry.”
~Wallace Stevens
“What he derives from his generation he returns to his
generation, as best he can.”
~Wallace Stevens
Genealogy of
Connecticut Poetry
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark
Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from
that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good
since.”
~Ernest Hemingway
The New Millennium

21. The Man who does not read good books has no advantage over
the man who can’t read them.
– Mark Twain
The whole day long, under the walking sun
That poised an eye on me from a high floor,
Holding my toy beside the clapboard house
I looked for him, the summer I was four.
I was afraid the waking arm would break
From the loose earth and rub against his eyes
A fist of trees, and the whole country tremble
In the exultant labor of his rise;
Then he with giant steps in the small streets
Would stagger, cutting off the sky, to seize
The roofs from house and home because we had
Covered his shape with dirt and planted trees;
And then kneel down and rip with fingernails

22. A trench to pour the enemy Atlantic
Into our basin, and the water rush,
With the streets full and the voices frantic.
That was the summer I expected him.
Later the high and watchful sun instead
Walked low behind the house, and school began,
And winter pulled a sheet over his head.
- Donald Hall
*
Homegrown Terror
Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London
Eric D. Lehman
Abstraction of his deeds in the interest of exploring ‘character’
Some historians rewriting him as a ‘hero’ or at least
‘misunderstood’
Rewriting of the American Revolution as a civil war
Overuse of the word and concept of traitor in popular culture
Forgetting his military attacks on Virginia and Connecticut,

23. especially the Burning of New London
What are the problems with current biographical and historical
scholarship on Benedict Arnold?
Prodigal Son of Connecticut
His friends and colleagues
Connecticut was a web of interwoven loyalties and friendships,
as evidenced by the surviving letters and memoirs. It was a
small world, and Arnold was linked to others through business,
through freemasonry, through the Sons of Liberty, and through
service in the army.

24. Arnold as Hero
In recent decades many scholars have rightfully given Benedict
Arnold credit for his bravery on the side of the American army,
both defeats like Quebec and victories like Ridgefield. They
have especially focused the Battle of Saratoga, considered by
some the turning point of the war.
“That an Arnold, a man who…had given proof of talent, of
patriotism, and, especially, of the most brilliant courage, should
at once destroy his very existence and should sell his country to
the tyrants whom he had fought against with glory, is an
event…which confounds and distresses me, and, if I must
confess it, humiliates me, to a degree that I cannot express. I
would give anything in the world if Arnold had not shared our
labors with us, and if this man, whom it still pains me to call a
scoundrel, had not shed his blood for the American cause. My
knowledge of his personal courage led me to expect that he
would decide to blow his brains out (this was my first hope).”
– Marquis de Lafayette
Betrayal at West Point
The Revolution as Civil War – was Arnold a “Loyalist?”
Joel Stone

25. Arnold’s Oath of Allegiance
1. “Parricide” was used by contemporaries like Thomas
Jefferson to describe Arnold.
2. It is nearly identical to our term “homegrown terrorist,”
though it makes no distinction between a political dissident or
political tyrant.
3. Both the term “parricide” and its modern equivalent focus on
the victims’ reactions rather than the aggressors’ actions.
4. Contemporary reactions by government, media, and citizens
are identical.
Homegrown Terror
and
Parricide
The Burning of New London
New London suffered the largest percentage of destruction of
any American city during the war, and the Battle of Groton
Heights had the highest percentage of deaths, most caused after
the fort’s defenders had surrendered. If we give credit for his
honorable victories, we must also give credit for devastation
and massacre. All commanders are ultimately responsible, but
more importantly, Arnold wanted the responsibility, to not just
be a political traitor but in military command of units that until
recently had been his enemy. He asked for this command, and
he asked to assault his homeland, his comrades, and his friends.

26. Battle of
Groton Heights
William Ledyard, Stephen Hempstead, and friends take a stand
Solution
s –
A New Approach
Directly link Arnold’s story with the stories of his friends and
colleagues, something that has never been done before.
Be honest and clear about both Arnold’s service to America
and his betrayal of it
Separate the people of the time into two different camps: those
who saw America as their home and tried to do what they
thought was right to preserve that home and those who were
more concerned with self-preservation
Reframe his treason as parricide, a term similar to homegrown
terror

27. Focus on the significant but unfortunately forgotten incident of
Arnold’s burning of New London, (which connects to #1
through #4)
Conclusions
In recent decades, respect for Arnold’s military prowess and
early heroism has unfortunately mutated into respect for him as
a man. This problem of revisionist historical scholarship has
leaked into the popular imagination, with many people not even
sure of what Arnold did wrong, or why he was a “traitor.”
The story of Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London
will hopefully draw attention to a regrettably overlooked
incident and its profound effects, and help reassess Arnold and
his place in American history. It will focus on his friends and
neighbors and their reactions to this act of “parricide.” It will
also, I hope, shine light on how Americans responded and
continue to respond to betrayal and terror.

28. Final Exam
Connecticut History
Choose three of the following and answer them in about two
pages each (typed double-spaced or written single-spaced). You
may not choose the same person or event to talk about twice.
Make sure to include quotes to back up your opinions, and cite
them properly. Since this is a take home exam, I expect the
same level of work as the research paper.
Good luck!
1. Choose two of the people we’ve talked or read about and
compare their effects on the state of Connecticut, and the
effects of living here on them.
2. In Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of
New London we can see how Arnold was connected to various
other Connecticut people. Explain the different relationships he
had with Jonathan Trumbull, Nathaniel Shaw, or Eleazar
Oswald.
3. Explain how Marilyn Nelson’s use of poetry in The Freedom
Business to interpret history changes Venture Smith’s original
story, and changes our perception of history itself.
4. Explain one of the problems with writing, reading, and

29. interpreting history, using two or more examples from the class.
5. Compare two of the people from Bridgeport: Tales from the
Park City. How were the ways they achieved their goals
different and/or the same?
6. Take one of the many events in Connecticut history we’ve
talked about and explain what it shows about the character of
the people and/or the specific geography of the land itself.