CTConnecticut Famous People

A hero and a traitor, born about 30 miles apart

Nathan Hale was born in Coventry in 1755, taught school in East Haddam and New London, volunteered to gather intelligence behind British lines on Long Island, and was hanged without trial on 22 September 1776 at the age of 21. He is the official state hero. Benedict Arnold was born in Norwich in 1741, roughly 30 miles from Hale's farm, fought brilliantly at Saratoga, sold West Point to the British in 1780, and in 1781 led the force that burned New London, less than 15 miles from the town he grew up in. Connecticut sends neither man to the National Statuary Hall. It sends Roger Sherman, a Massachusetts-born cobbler who became a New Milford storekeeper, then a lawyer, then mayor of New Haven, and who remains the only person to have signed the Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

Three people who set the country arguing

John Brown was born in Torrington in 1800, left the state as a boy, and was hanged in Virginia in 1859 for the raid on Harpers Ferry. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield in 1811 into a family of preachers, published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, and spent her last 23 years in a cottage on Forest Street in Hartford. Prudence Crandall admitted a Black pupil, Sarah Harris, to her Canterbury boarding school in 1832, watched every white family withdraw, reopened the school for Black girls only, and was jailed under a law the legislature passed specifically to close her down. The state named her its official heroine in 1995.

The only president born here

George W. Bush was born at Grace New Haven Hospital on 6 July 1946 while his father was finishing at Yale on the GI Bill, and the family left for west Texas soon after. He was president from 2001 to 2009. The inheritance runs the other way too: George H. W. Bush was born in Massachusetts but grew up in Greenwich, and his father Prescott Bush was a Connecticut senator from 1952 to 1963. Oliver Ellsworth of Windsor supplied the Connecticut Compromise that gave every state two senators, drafted the Judiciary Act of 1789, and became the third chief justice. Ella Grasso of Windsor Locks took office in January 1975 as the first woman elected governor of any state without following a husband into the job, and resigned in December 1980 while dying of cancer.

Rubber, revolvers and one very good salesman

Charles Goodyear, born in New Haven in 1800, spent years in and out of debtors' prison trying to stabilise rubber, hit on vulcanisation in 1839, and died broke; the tire company took his name almost 40 years later. Samuel Colt of Hartford patented his revolving cylinder in 1836 and built the blue onion-domed armory beside the Connecticut River. Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel in 1810 and served four terms in the state legislature and a year as mayor of Bridgeport. Eli Whitney was born in Massachusetts, but the armory he opened north of New Haven in 1798 is where his ideas about interchangeable parts were worked out. Igor Sikorsky, born in Kyiv, flew the first practical American helicopter at Stratford in 1939.

Words made in Hartford

Noah Webster was born in West Hartford in 1758 and spent more than two decades on An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, which is why Americans write color and center. Mark Twain was born in Missouri but wrote Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in the house he built on Farmington Avenue, where he lived from 1874 to 1891 with Stowe as a neighbour. Wallace Stevens wrote most of his poetry in his head on the walk to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity offices, where he was a vice president, and took the Pulitzer in 1955. Suzanne Collins was born in Hartford in 1962 and wrote The Hunger Games, and Annie Leibovitz was born in Waterbury in 1949.

Fenwick, Bristol and the rules of football

Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford in 1907 to a urologist and a suffragist, won four Best Actress Oscars, and kept the family house at Fenwick in Old Saybrook until she died there in 2003. Christopher Lloyd was born in Stamford in 1938, Meg Ryan in Fairfield in 1961 and Michael Bolton in New Haven in 1953. Walter Camp, born in New Britain in 1859, spent decades on the rules committee at Yale, and the changes he forced through, the line of scrimmage, eleven players a side and the system of downs, turned rugby into American football. Bill Rasmussen put ESPN on the air from Bristol on 7 September 1979 because land in the town was cheap.

Questions people ask about Connecticut natives

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