Hartford on the Brain

 

 

Starting outside the Koeppel Community Sports Center,  at 175 New Britain Ave, you can see this Temple’s Upright Sugar Maple, one of the two Connecticut state Champion trees that are a part of the Trinity College arboretum.  You can find a walking tour of the arboretum here.

 

 

 

 

Cross New Britain Avenue at the light/crosswalk and enter the main campus.

Start at the southeast corner of campus where the Nutt Building houses computer science, engineering, and math.  Find the portrait of Professor Marjorie Butcher.  Marjorie Butcher was born on July 24, 1925, in Jackson, MI. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947, and received an M.A. in actuarial mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1949. Professor Butcher was the first woman faculty member at Trinity College.  She was hired by Trinity College in 1956 and was granted a full professorship in 1979, the first woman to do so.  She retired in 1989.  She was granted an honorary doctor of science degree in 2009.  The Student Government commissioned a portrait of Professor Butcher to break up the collection of potraits of men in Hamlin Hall.  However, the portrait ended up in the Nutt Building instead.

Trinity Mourns Loss of Professor Butcher

Eulogy of Majorie Butcher

 

 

On your way out the east door of the building, see the engineering time capsule created in 1997 to be opened in 2097.

 

 

 

 

 

Head to the Jacobs Life Science Center.  Outside the building you will see the Biodiversity Garden and Wildlife Habitat.  No pesticides or herbicides are used and the garden is maintained by the Environmental Science Program.  You can learn more about sustainability at Trinity here.

 

 

 

  You can also see the Otozoum fossilized footprints from the Triassic era outside the Life Science Center by the windows near the greenhouse, and also inside the lobby of the building running up the wall.

 

 

 

Find the portrait of Professor John Emmett Simmons.  Professor Simmons was the first African American full Professor at Trinity College and studied physiology and endocrinology.  He born on February 6, 1936 in St. Petersburg, Florida.  He attended racially segregated elementary, junior high and high schools, and graduated salutatorian from Gibbs High School in St. Petersburg in 1952. He received a B.S. in Biology from Morehouse College in Atlanta at age 16.  Then he received an M.S. from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University. At the dedication ceremony for this portrait, then Trinity President Dr. Evan Dobelle noted, “But it was in the research laboratory that students forged lasting and beneficial ties with Professor Simmons. The work in his laboratory helped to provide important opportunities for undergraduate participation in research that distinguish Trinity’s science programs from those at many larger institutions.”  John received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Trinity in 2008. He retired in 1997 after 25 years of teaching.

 

The first person to teach a psychology course was philosopher William Marshall Urban and the first PhD faculty in psychology was Robert Bines Woodward Hutt in 1927.  To learn more about the history of the Psychology department at Trinity, William Mace has provided some details here.   One notable person was Karl Pribram who taught at Trinity as Visiting Instructor of Psychology while conducting research at the Institute of Living in 1957-1958.  He was once called called the “Magellan of the Mind” for his pioneering research involving brain regions (limbic system, frontal lobes, temporal lobes) and their roles in decision making and emotion.

 

Walk west and into the ground floor of the McCook Building. 

Here you can find a collection of minerals as well as the Trinity College Seismograph Station.

 

 

 

 

 

The quad outside the building is where a group of scientists gathered in 1883 to observe the Transit of Venus (Venus passing between the earth and the sun).  Four scientists arrived from Germany (see photo right from this article) and together with Trinity students and faculty used the college’s telescope and built a heliometer in order to measure the distance between the earth and the sun. A marker for the Transit of Venus event was erected  Shortly after this St. John’s observatory was built near Seabury Hall.

More on the observatory here

 

 

 

You can find the marker for the Transit of Venus in front of Hallden Hall. According to the Encyclopedia Trinitiana, the College placed an inscribed stone marker atop the concrete pier “on which stood the heliometer with which the transit of Venus was observed two years earlier.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walk north to the quad between the library and Mather Hall.  This is the past location of Boardman Hall, also known as the Hall of Natural History.

Many of the specimens from Boardman Hall are still being used for teaching in comparative anatomy classes in the Life Science Center.  You can read about the collection here.

 

One notable scientist who worked in Boardman Hall was Professor of Biology Thomas Hume Bissonnette.  He published extensively on photoperiodicity, including several publications in Science.  He also served as His work was summarized twice in Time.  He also served as the Director of the Summer Course in Invertebrate Zoology at Woods Hole.

 

 

 

To learn more about neuroscience at Trinity, Daniel Blackburn has assembled this history.

 

Walk into the library and make your way to the Watkinson Library on the first floor. The Watkinson Library has a collection of rare materials. You can set up a time to use the Watkinson Library and see papers in their collections by emailing. You can learn more about the Watkinson Library, how to search the collection, and how to set up an appointment to browse items in the collection here.

The Watkinson Library has a collection of papers and monographs by Benjamin Lee Whorf.  Benjamin Whorf was a fire prevention engineer but is known for his theories about linguistics. Benjamin Whorf was born on April 24, 1897, in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Chemical Engineering in 1918 and went to work as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.  He developed an interest in linguistics and, in particular, Mesoamerican languages.  He was particularly interested in the Hopi. He frequently studied at the Watkinson Library (then at the Hartford Public Library).  In 1931 he began to study with Sapir at Yale.  Together they developed the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity, postulating that the language you speak influences your thoughts and perceptions.

To find Whorf’s books and manuscripts, you can search the

Trinity College library collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Watkinson Library is also home to the collection of the Hartford Medical Society.  This includes 30,000 volumes, 100 archival collections, and 550 medical instruments dating back to the 1500s.  You can see photos of items in the collection here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exit the library by the second floor exit and walk into the second floor the Clement Chemistry Building.  Read about Vernon Krieble, who invented Loc-Tite glue and find other instruments on display, including a Debye-Scherrer camera and a scale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exit Clement onto the main quad.

 

 

The statue of Thomas Church Brownell, the first President of Trinity College is in the middle of the quad.  Known for being an Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut and founder of Trinity College, he also spent a year in Britain and Ireland studying chemistry, and was a lecturer of rhetoric and chemistry at Union College.

 

 

 

Directly in front of the statue of Brownell is the second of Trinity’s State Champion trees.  It is an English Elm and number 32 on the walking tour,   You can learn more about this tree here.  The Trinity College Arboretum was established in Spring 2023.  It includes over 1,500 trees, including the two state Champions and several other notable trees.

 

 

 

Inside the Chapel are a number of pews dedicated to science and scientists.  Using this map

 

from the 1951 edition of the Trinity College Chapel, you can find the following:

7 A tribute to Dr. Horace Wells. He was a dentist from Hartford and is sometimes credited with discovering the use of anesthesia. He is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery.  The figure on the top is Aesculapius and on the arm-piece is St. Apollonia, the patron saint of dentists. She is holding a pair of forceps gripping a molar.

8 In memory of Dr. Frederic T. Murlless, Jr., a founder of the Newington Home for Crippled Children (which later became Newington Children’s Hospital).  On the finial are Saint Cosmos and Saint Damian, twin brothers who were physicians.

37 This kneeler-end was given by the class of 1940 in memory of Ernest William Schirm. He was a pre-medical student.  The carving is of  St. Dunstan, scholar and patron saint of goldsmiths.

46 Given by the Hartford Dental Society this pew-end is in memory of Horace Hayden, born in Windsor, CT.  He established the first dental college in America. The panel shows St. Romuald.  It is said he once cured a man’s toothache just by breathing on him.

69  This pew end was given by a group called the League for the Hard of Hearing.  This group held an annual service in the Chapel Crypt, led by Pres. Ogilby and using audiphones. Dr. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is shown teaching a child about God.  Members of both the Gallaudet and Clerc families attended Trinity.

74 The finial is Henry VIII, founder of Trinity College, Cambridge. The main panel includes Isaac Newton, a Trinity Cambridge graduate, watching the apple fall from a tree.

 

Continue to the north end of the campus along Zion Street.  Here you can see the cliff of sandstone and basalt rock formations that are responsible for the Hartford neighborhood below being called Behind the Rocks.   The base of the basalt flow is in the Rocky Ridge Park on Zion Street where you can also see the remnants of an old quarry.  You can learn about the geology of the Trinity Campus from this paper from the Centennial in 1923 and this from the Bicentennial in 2024.

 

Cross over Allen Place to enter Zion Hill Cemetery.

Zion Hill Cemetery is made up of a number of smaller cemeteries. One of them is Beth Israel Cemetery,

Inside Beth Israel Cemetery you can find the headstone of Dr. Fanny Radom.  She was one of the first licensed women pharmacists in the state of Connecticut, at a time when there were unspoken quotas to exclude Jews to medical schools and residencies and there were only 28 Jewish physicians in Hartford overall. Despite being one of the few women doctors at the time, she was one of the founding physicians of Mount Sinai Hospital in 1923. At the time Jewish doctors were not permitted hospital privileges at Hartford Hospital or Saint Francis Hospital. You can learn more about her here.

 

 

Also buried in Zion Hill Cemetery is Patrick Henry Clay (PHC) Arms.  He graduated in 1890 from Howard University and 1894 from Columbia University Medical School.  He was the first licensed Black physician in Hartford and the first African American to run for office in Hartford.  He ran for mayor in 1906, but it would be 50 years before there was a Black member of the City Council.  On December 28, 1907 Dr. Arms had a call out at 3:00 am. A Police Officer David Mairson stopped him and “made him give an account of himself.” Dr. Arms brought charges against the officer. The officer was found “guilty of nothing but the faithful performance of his duties and the commissioners told him to do the same thing again under similar circumstances.” Hartford Courant, January 7, 1908 You can learn more about him here.

 

 

Rebecca Primus, educator is buried here with her mother. Rebecca Primus was an educator. She may have begun teaching in the basement of the Talcott Street Church.  In 1865 she traveled to Baltimore to teach at a school for freed people.  The schoolhouse was named the Primus Institute. After four years she returned to Hartford where she died.  She is buried with her parents.  You can learn more about her here and here.