Madison’s Iron Men
There was a time before our time, It will not come again When the best ships still were wooden ships But the men were iron men. From Stonington to Kennebunk The Yankee hammers plied To build the clippers of the wave That were New England's pride. —Rosemary and Stephen Vincent
Old-Time Madison
Madison has a special connection to how the world tells time. Charles F. Dowd, born in Madison in 1825 and a descendant of the original 1639 Guilford settlers, graduated from Yale in 1853. He moved to New York State, and, in 1870, addressing his long-held desire to simplify train schedules,
Doctor in the House
Mila Rindge There is a small room at the Madison Historical Society’s Allis-Bushnell House full of medical documents, instruments and paraphernalia dedicated to Dr. Mila E. Rindge. Who was she? Mila Elisabeth Rindge (1915-2002) earned her BA degree from Connecticut College for Women, and her M.D. degree from Duke University
Lincoln Telegram
At the Madison Historical Society’s Allis-Bushnell House, we keep a strange old document we call the Lincoln Telegram. Addressed to Madison native Cornelius Scranton Bushnell, the hand-written message arrived while he was living in New Haven in 1863. Cornelius, a railroad magnate by that time, had promoted and financed the
Civil War Monuments
We may think that arguments about Civil War monuments are something new, but right here in Madison, 123 years ago, a controversy developed over whether a planned memorial to the town’s Civil War soldiers should be in the form of a monument or a building with public meeting spaces. Only
Smallpox Burying Ground
Capt. Ichabod Scranton and many of the soldiers under his command died in the nearby forest in 1760, even though not a shot was fired. The Madison Historical Society offers a public tour each April of the “pock lot,” otherwise known as the Smallpox Burying Ground. Ichabod Scranton, a fourth-generation