Connecticut Trivia & Tidbits - Page 14

Looking for Connecticut trivia? Try our list Connecticut little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

In the first religious services held in Woodstock (pop. 7,221) in 1686, the minister preached from a boulder called Pulpit Rock to parishioners on a nearby hillside. The site is marked by a tablet.

first appeared: 3/10/2002

During the Revolutionary War, the “whaleboat fleet” of Fairfield captured and burned several British ships for the cause of American independence.

first appeared: 3/3/2002

Pink granite quarried in Connecticut has found its way to Grand Central Station, the base of the Statue of Liberty, and a Civil War monument at West Point.

first appeared: 2/24/2002

Westbury-born artist John Trumbull (1750-1831) was an aide to Gen. George Washington during the Revolutionary War. After the war, he was asked to paint four scenes from the revolution for the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C.

first appeared: 2/17/2002

New-Gate Prison in East Granby (pop. 4,745) was Connecticut’s first state prison. Built in 1773, it housed Loyalist prisoners during the Revolutionary War.

first appeared: 2/10/2002

Connecticut was home to at least 14 American Indian tribes in the 1600s. The most powerful were the Pequots, who lived around what is now New London (pop. 25,671).

first appeared: 2/3/2002

The national champion sugar maple tree, located in Norwich (pop. 36,117), has an 8-foot-wide trunk and is 91 feet tall.

first appeared: 1/27/2002

At least half of the forces Gen. George Washington deployed in New York during 1776 came from Connecticut.

first appeared: 1/20/2002

Carrie Saxon Perry became the first African-American woman mayor of a major American city when she was elected to that post in Hartford in 1987.

first appeared: 1/13/2002

The state animal, the sperm whale, can grow 60 feet long and weigh up to 45 tons. Whaling ships once were common on Connecticut’s coast, and sperm whales are still fairly numerous throughout the world.

first appeared: 1/6/2002

Windham-born Samuel Huntington (1731-1796) is called by some America’s first president because he served from 1779-1781 as president of the Continental Congress, then the country’s highest office.

first appeared: 12/30/2001

Manchester-born Christopher Spencer (1833-1922) patented the Spencer self-loading, or repeating rifle, in 1860, which was immediately adopted by the U.S. government and used extensively in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln personally tested the rifle.

first appeared: 12/23/2001

The first 17.5 miles of the Merritt Parkway opened in June 1938, from the New York border to U.S. Route 7 in Norwalk, where the state’s first cloverleaf intersection still stands.

first appeared: 12/16/2001

The Iwo Jima Memorial Monument in Newington (pop. 29,306) bears the names of 100 Connecticut citizens who died in that battle. The state has planted 100 evergreen trees along the Iwo Jima Memorial Expressway.

first appeared: 12/9/2001

The wooden schooner Brilliant, berthed at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic (pop. 4,001), set a trans-Atlantic crossing record of 15 days in 1933, served as an anti-submarine patrol vessel during World War II, and was restored as a yacht in 1946.

first appeared: 12/2/2001

Called the “most watched woman in Connecticut” by the Hartford Courant in 1981, Adrianne Baughns-Wallace was the first female television news anchor in the state and the first female African-American newscaster in New England.

first appeared: 11/25/2001

Dentist Horace Wells of Hartford discovered the general anesthetic, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), in 1844.

first appeared: 11/18/2001

Marshall Jewell (1825-1883), who helped his father open a leather belt factory in Hartford, was elected governor of Connecticut three times, was named postmaster general by President Grant in 1874, and was the Republican presidential candidate in 1876.

first appeared: 11/11/2001

The first patented can opener was the 1858 invention of Ezra J. Warner of Waterbury. A forbidding device that was part bayonet, part sickle, the opener was adopted by the Union Army during the Civil War. Before that, cans had to be hammered open.

first appeared: 11/4/2001

Alec Baldwin, while preparing for his role in the 1990 movie The Hunt for Red October, studied nuclear attack submarines at the U.S. Navy’s New London Submarine Base.

first appeared: 10/28/2001

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