Month: February 2015

Love is in the air in the small coastal town of Southport Connecticut, especially at the Pequot Library! To get ready for Valentine’s Day, the Pequot Library, located on 720 Pequot Ave. is offering a kids’s candy making workshop on February 13 from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Kids, grades K-8 will learn how to make professionally looking chocolate treats to use as a Valentine’s Day dessert. The workshop will also teach kids how to create a beautiful gift box to present their goodies in .

On Valentine’s Day, the Southport Library is hosting the Opera Singers Initiative with a special Valentine’s Day theme from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. At this very special event, Young Artists New York City Opera Singers perform works celebrating love! Opera Singers Initiative is committed to providing classical singers with the critical skills and support they need to build a sustainable and successful career in the arts. They provide career development, mentoring, and performance opportunities for emerging professional classical singers. This program is free and open to the public.

Steps away from the Pequot Library is the very romantic Delmar Hotel and Restaurant. This elegant hotel offers its guests 44 individually-designed luxurious rooms and suites and a full service spa. Once inside the uniquely decorated lobby with its custom designed furnishings, antique marble floors, museum-quality art and French limestone hearth, the stage is set for an unforgettable Connecticut escape. Check their website out for special deals and packages at http://www.delamarsouthport.com.

In the early years of the Connecticut Colony, the area known today as Westport was called Saugatuck and was a part of the towns of Fairfield and Norwalk. The river was the boundary between the two towns. But by 1835, the river’s growing economic importance moved Saugatuck’s business leaders, concerned that their river was playing second fiddle to ports closer to the centers of Norwalk and Fairfield, to have Saugatuck incorporated as a town to be called Westport.

Saugatuck’s Past Come Alive in Westport’s Artist Mural. Robert L. Lambdin’s meticulously researched mural depicting Saugatuck as a center of manufacturing and river commerce in 19th century Westport will anchor the exhibition “Saugatuck @ Work – Haven of Community, Commerce and Innovation” hosted by the Westport Historical Society on 25 Avery Place.

Saugatuck’s location near the mouth of the river, allowing raw materials to be delivered by boat and products to be shipped to New York and other ports, made it an ideal setting for manufacturing and maritime commerce. One of Saugatuck’s longtime employers was Elonzo Wheeler’s button factory, and some of Wheeler’s buttons, produced from ivory nuts imported from Brazil, along with local produce, can be seen in the foreground of Lambdin’s mural waiting to be loaded onto a market boat. Saugatuck eventually became a tight-knit community of Irish and Italian immigrants who came to Westport to work in factories and as stonemasons, gardeners and laborers on the railroad.

The late Westport artist’s large wall painting, “Saugatuck in the 19th Century,” was created for the Westport Bank & Trust Company’s Saugatuck branch when it opened in 1970. It measures 6 by 10 feet and shows the various types of vessels that plied the river over the course of the century, as well as such long-gone landmarks as the Saugatuck Bank, precursor of Westport Bank & Trust, and the Methodist Church, and those that still survive: Saugatuck original firehouse and the village’s historic swing bridge and train depot. Though I-95 did not come into being until the mid 20th century, its bridge over the river appears as a huge arc framing the riverfront scene.

The exhibition will also display historic photographs of workers and workplaces of the village, antique maps of Saugatuck harbor, vintage tools made there, patents by Saugatuck inventors, costumes, and ship and railroad logs.

A companion exhibit devoted to the life of those immigrants, “Framing Saugatuck,” will run in the WHS’s Mollie Donovan Gallery concurrently with “Saugatuck @ Work.”

For more information on the Westport Historical Society http://westporthistory.org/