Pequannock, the "dark river" of the Indians, flows out of the hills to
an inlet of the Sound, where the enormous mills of the active city of
Bridgeport have gathered a population of over fifty thousand people,
in a hive containing some of the world's greatest establishments for
constructing sewing-machines and firearms, building carriages, and
making cutlery, corsets and soaps, while other goods also occupy
attention. The grand Seaside Park esplanade overlooks the harbor, and
towards the north the city stretches up the slopes into Golden Hill,
named from its glittering mica deposits, where magnificent streets
display splendid buildings. When the Pequots were exterminated in
1637, colonists founded this town, gradually crowding the Paugusset
Indians, who owned the land, into a small reservation on Golden Hill.
The great establishments to-day are the Wheeler and Wilson and Howe
Sewing-Machine Works, Sharp's Rifle Factory and the Union Metallic
Cartridge Company; and Bridgeport is also the headquarters of the
chief American circus. The stately and high-towered mansion of
Waldemere fronts the park, and was the home of Bridgeport's best-known
townsman, the veteran showman, Phineas T. Barnum. Born in Connecticut,
at Bethel, in 1810, he died at Bridgeport in 1891. He first developed
the financial advantages of amusing the public, and possibly
humbugging them on a grand scale, and by working upon his oft-quoted
theory that "the people liked to be humbugged," twice amassed a large
fortune. In early life he wandered over the country earning a
precarious livelihood in various occupations, and in Philadelphia in
1834 began his career as a showman. He bought for $1000 a colored
slave-woman, Joyce Heth, represented to be the nurse of George
Washington and one hundred and sixty-one years old. From her
exhibition his receipts reached $1500 a week, and she died the next
year. In 1842 he began exhibiting Charles S. Stratton, "General Tom
Thumb," a native of Bridgeport, born in 1832, whose size and growth
were as usual until his seventh month, when he had a stature of
twenty-eight inches, and ceased to grow. Barnum exhibited him in the
United States, France and England, and attracted world-wide notoriety.
Barnum started the American fashion of paying extravagant sums to
opera-singers, in 1849 engaging Jenny Lind to sing at one hundred and
fifty concerts in America for $1000 a night, the gross receipts of a
nine months' tour being $712,000. He subsequently had his fortune
swept away through endorsing $1,000,000 notes for a manufacturing
establishment that went down in the panic of 1857. His fortunes were
revived, however; he had museums in the leading cities, and in his
later life had the "Greatest Show on Earth," which set out every
spring from Bridgeport. Tom Thumb in 1863 married Lavinia Warren of
Middleboro', Massachusetts, a dwarf like himself, and he died in 1882.
To the eastward a short distance, and in sharp contrast with active
Bridgeport, is quiet old Stratford, with Stratford Point protruding in
front into the Sound, at the entrance of the stately and placid
Housatonic, which comes down through the meadowland just beyond the
village. Here there are neither watering-place hotel nor busy factory
to disturb the ancient order of things, encumber the greensward, or
encroach upon the sleepy and comfortable houses, where one may dream
away in the twilight, under the shade of grand trees that are even
older than the town. Stratford is much the same now as when settled by
a Puritan colony from Massachusetts in 1639, the leader and pastor
being Adam Blackman, whom Cotton Mather called "a Nazarite purer than
snow and whiter than milk." Across the patches of marshland, adjoining
the Housatonic, is Milford, its half-mile-long stretch of village
green neatly enclosed, and its houses upon the bank of the silvery
Wap-o-wang, back of which spread the wide streets lined by rows of
overarching elms. A colony from Milford in England settled here in
1639 and soon crowded the Indians off the land, establishing the
primitive church, which was the usual beginning of New England
settlements. Then, true to the American instinct, they proceeded to
hold a convention, the result being the adoption of the following
platform:
_Voted_, That the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.
_Voted_, That the earth is given to the saints.
_Voted_, That we are the saints.
They had a good deal of trouble afterwards, both with the Dutch from
New York and the Indians, but the saints ultimately possessed the
earth in peace, and their successors are now making straw hats for
the country.