210. The Mattatuck Museum: Waterbury and Summer Leisure
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, host Mary Donohue visits the in Waterbury, a place that includes stellar architecture, art by some of the most renowned artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an exhibition that tells the story of Waterbury’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. The Mattatuck Museum is an art and regional history museum on the Green in downtown Waterbury, that started out as a historical society in 1877. Our guest is Rebecca Lo Presti, Assistant Curator. She served as the curator for “ The Art of Leisure” an exhibit that is up now until June 15, 2025. From...
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209. Mary Hall and the Good Will Club
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, Natalie Belanger of the CT Museum of Culture and History tells the story of the Good Will Club, the forerunner of the youth club movement that got its start in Hartford. But the story of the club can't be separated from that of its founder, a woman who's an inductee of the CT Women's Hall of Fame for her barrier-breaking work in the legal field. There are lots of ways to learn more about the history of the Good Will Club and about Mary Hall. Here’s a partial list of sources consulted for this episode: Elizabeth Warren, CT Explored, Spring...
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208. Saving Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern Homes
Grating the Nutmeg
We’re celebrating May, Historic Preservation Month, with an episode on the Modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s. Could you live in a glass house? New Canaan, Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern homes designed after the Second War are world famous. In addition to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, now a museum, New Canaan has homes designed by Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Durell Stone. Each one is a part of architectural history and is a masterwork of the era’s most talented architects. But by the 1990s, people began to demolish these relatively...
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207. Book and Dagger: Yale Professors Become Successful WWII Spies
Grating the Nutmeg
In her new book, Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of the World, Dr. Elyse Graham tells the story of academics, like Yale literature professor Joseph Curtis, who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents, and Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa. At the start of World War II, the United States found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and in an...
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206. Hartford’s Rural Cemetery: Cedar Hill
Grating the Nutmeg
Last year in episode 186, we talked about Grove Street Cemetery’s pioneering role as the first planned cemetery in the country. The design of Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven in the 1790s used several of the features that became standard, like family plots and established walkways. Today, we’re going to move the clock forward and discuss the rural cemetery movement of the 19th century with in Hartford as a signature example. Established in 1864, Cedar Hill Cemetery encompasses 270 acres of landscaped woodlands, waterways, and memorial grounds. The urban oasis...
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205. Coffee — A Connecticut Story
Grating the Nutmeg
Coffee is more than a hot drink or a boost of caffeine. For Connecticans, it’s hundreds of years of history. It has fueled new ideas, social reform, and workers’ rights. It is comfort in wartime and connections across cultures. It is universal, yet distinctly local. In this episode, the 's Natalie Belanger chats with her colleague, Karen Li Miller, about the Museum's new exhibition exploring these connections, Coffee — A Connecticut Story. Make sure to visit the Museum's web site to see upcoming programs! Thanks to the for their financial sponsorship of...
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204. Artistry, Charm, and Whimsy: Connecticut’s Carousel Museum
Grating the Nutmeg
Carousels are marvels of brightly painted animals, mechanical excellence, music and lights. Located in a historic mill building in Bristol, the houses well over 100 antique wooden carousel animals including white rabbits, pigs, lions and even an alligator. The museum has a full-size carousel inside the building complete with beautifully painted horses and Wurlitzer music - and you can take a merry-go-round ride during any season of the year. Plus, you can take a peek into their restoration workshop. Our guest for this episode is Morgan Fippinger, Executive Director. Plan your...
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203. Amistad Retold: New Haven and the 1839 Amistad Revolt
Grating the Nutmeg
The New Haven Museum staff and their community partners have reinterpreted the Amistad story in an exhibition that takes a new angle on the familiar story of the Amistad. The 1839 Amistad Revolt was led by 53 West African captives who were being trafficked from Havana’s slave markets on the schooner La Amistad after being kidnapped from their homeland. For nearly 19 months in New Haven, the Amistad captives worked closely with anti-slavery activists who formed the Amistad Committee and connected with networks of engaged citizens to organize and fundraise for their legal defense....
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202. Miss Crandall’s School for Black Women
Grating the Nutmeg
After a campaign initiated by schoolchildren, Prudence Crandall was designated the Connecticut State Heroine by the Connecticut General Assembly on Oct. 1, 1995. You may not know Connecticut has a state heroine, or you might have some inkling that Crandall was maybe a spinster Quaker schoolmarm, who had an unsuccessful school in the hinterlands of eastern Connecticut. Founded in 1833, the Crandall Academy educated more than two dozen Black women during its eighteen-month existence. In this episode we’ll hear how a trio of like-minded women helped to get the academy off the...
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201. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir with Griffin Dunne
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, Host Mary Donohue talks to Griffin Dunne, actor, producer and director and now New York Times best-selling author about his family memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. His Hartford to Hollywood family includes generations of writers, movie producers, journalists, and actors including his father Dominick Dunne, uncle John Gregory Dunne, and aunt Joan Didion. This prominent family dynasty has part of its roots in Irish-American Connecticut, coming from Ireland to Derby and Hartford. Irish Catholics, unwelcome in Protestant Connecticut from the jump in the 1820s,...
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We’re celebrating May, Historic Preservation Month, with an episode on the Modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s.
Could you live in a glass house? New Canaan, Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern homes designed after the Second War are world famous. In addition to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, now a museum, New Canaan has homes designed by Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Durell Stone. Each one is a part of architectural history and is a masterwork of the era’s most talented architects. But by the 1990s, people began to demolish these relatively small homes sited on large lots. People in New Canaan began to band together to save these artworks-”machines for living”. Towns across Connecticut have at least one or two good Mid-Century Modern homes worth saving and celebrating.
Host Mary Donohue discusses what a homeowners and community members can do to help save these modern homes. Her guests are Gwen North Reiss, historian and author of New Canaan Modern: A Preservation History published by the New Canaan Museum and Historical Society in 2024 and Mary Dunne, Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer for the Dept of Economic and Community Development and homeowner of an architect-designed, Mid-Century Modern home.
For more information on New Canaan’s Modern houses, order your copy of Gwen North Reiss’s book New Canaan Modern: A Preservation History from the New Canaan Historical Society. It has really tremendous photography-a joy if you are a fan of this era!
To buy the book, contact the New Canaan Historical Society at [email protected]
To learn more about Modernism in New Canaan, go to: https://nchistory.org/modern-new-canaan/
To visit the Glass House, go to: https://theglasshouse.org/
You can find the link to the New Canaan Modern House Survey on the website of the Glass House Museum here: https://theglasshouse.org/learn/modern-homes-survey/
To read more about Mary Dunne’s mid-century modern home and furniture designer Jens Risom, go to:
https://www.ctexplored.org/the-answer-is-risom/
https://www.ctexplored.org/the-modern-style-in-manchester/
photo: Michael Biondo
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Visit Connecticut’s four state museums operated by the State Historic Preservation Office including the Eric Sloane Museum in Kent, with the artist’s studio; the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, the state’s oldest house built in 1639, , Old New-Gate Prison & Copper Mine in East Granby, the Nation’s first chartered copper mine and state prison; and the Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury, the first school for young black women.
Learn more here: https://portal.ct.gov/decd/services/historic-preservation/state-museums
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Each issue offers a photo essay, feature-length stories you can sink your teeth into, and shorter stories you can breeze through—plus lots of beautiful, large historic images. We include oral histories, stunning museum objects, must-see destinations, and more. From Colonial history to pop-culture, you’ll find it all in this magazine.
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This episode of Grating the Nutmeg was produced by Mary Donohue and engineered by Patrick O’Sullivan at www.highwattagemedia.com/ Follow GTN on our socials-Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.
Follow executive producer Mary Donohue on Facebook and Instagram at WeHa Sidewalk Historian. Join us in two weeks for our next episode of Grating the Nutmeg, the podcast of Connecticut history. Thank you for listening!