Collection: Redding Connecticut

What's with the electric car in the Redding woods? A New York banker, Walther Luttgen, drove a wind-charged electric runabout on his Redding estate, now Huntington State Park. There were no power lines on Sunset Hill then and there would be none for years, so a windmill turned a generator and the generator charged the batteries. A niece learned to drive the car there at eleven. Luttgen dug a chain of ponds, raised a small stone lighthouse on an island, and steamed about in a paddlewheel boat. The lighthouse is still there. So are the drives, which is why the trails at Huntington are so wide and so gentle: they were graded for a car that ran on wind.

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Why is Redding called Connecticut's Valley Forge? Because in the winter of 1778–79 Major General Israel Putnam quartered a division of the Continental Army here — about three thousand men in three camps of log huts — short of bread, blankets and shoes. Joseph Plumb Martin, a Connecticut private who wintered in Redding, remembered the season as one of starving and freezing. The main camp is now Putnam Memorial State Park.

The town began as a gap on the map. The country between Fairfield and Danbury was common land when John Read, a Fairfield-born lawyer, settled a tract he called Lonetown; his deed from the sachem Chickens is dated 1714. Farms and mills gathered around it, the settlement became a parish of Fairfield in 1729, and in 1767 it was incorporated as a town of fewer than a thousand people and named for Read. The spelling settled into Redding, the way it had always been said.

The Revolution came up the road. In 1775 some hundred Redding men marched north under Captain Zalmon Read in the new 5th Connecticut Regiment. On the morning of April 26, 1777, the war came to them instead: a British and Loyalist column under William Tryon, landed at Compo the evening before and bound for the supply depot at Danbury, halted on Redding Ridge in front of the Anglican church. The militia gathered behind it. By that afternoon Generals Silliman, Wooster and Arnold were in Redding with the Fairfield County men, and the next day they caught the column at Ridgefield. Redding's part in that week was the militia's part: neighbors with muskets, turned out on a morning's notice.

Then the army itself arrived. Putnam chose the Redding hills for the winter of 1778–79 because from here a division could cover the Danbury stores, the Sound and the Hudson Highlands at once. New Hampshire men under Enoch Poor, Moses Hazen's Canadian regiment and two Connecticut brigades under Samuel Holden Parsons and Jedediah Huntington built their huts in three valleys. On December 30 the Connecticut line, unpaid and half fed, formed up to march on the legislature at Hartford; Putnam rode in and talked them back to their huts. In February a spy and a deserter were executed on the hill still called Gallows Hill. The division marched out in the spring, the chimneys fell, and the woods closed over the camp.

A century later the town went back for it. In 1887, at the urging of Redding residents, the state took the main camp ground as a memorial, and in 1888 it raised the granite monument: Connecticut's first state park. The log blockhouses and cannon at the gate came after. The bronze of Putnam on horseback at the entrance is the work of Anna Hyatt Huntington, who lived a few miles up the road.

The nineteenth century was farms, limekilns and one factory. In 1818 Benjamin Gilbert began weaving horsehair sieves in his cellar at Georgetown, on the town's southwest corner. The firm that became Gilbert & Bennett moved from hair to wire, and when the Civil War cut off its Southern customers it painted its surplus wire cloth and sold it for windows — the firm is credited with the first woven-wire insect screening. The railroad came through in 1852, with stations at West Redding, Topstone and Georgetown. The wire mill ran until the end of the twentieth century.

The same railroad brought Mark Twain. He stepped off a special train at West Redding on June 18, 1908, seventy-two years old, to see for the first time the Italian villa his biographer had talked him into building. He named it Stormfield, after the sea captain whose story had helped pay for it. That autumn he gave the town a library from his own shelves and charged his guests a dollar apiece to build it a home. His daughter Jean died at Stormfield on Christmas Eve 1909. Twain had come into the world with Halley's Comet in 1835 and said he expected to go out with it; he died at Stormfield on April 21, 1910, a day after the comet rounded the sun. The house burned in 1923. The library he founded is still open.

He was the first of a line. Charles Ives built a house on Umpawaug Road in 1913 and put the old camp into music as Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut. Edward Steichen bought worn-out farmland at Topstone in 1929, bred delphiniums on it and photographed it for forty years; most of it is now a town park. And after Luttgen died in 1922 and Villa Linta burned, his ponds and carriage drives passed to Archer Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, who left the land to the state. It opened as Collis P. Huntington State Park in 1973, with her bears and wolves at the gate. Joel Barlow, poet of the Revolution and later a diplomat, had been born here long before any of them, in 1754.

What they all came for was the country, and the town decided to keep it. The farmers had gone west after the Erie Canal opened, and the forest crept back over their stone walls; by the 1930s Redding was woods again. In 1965 residents founded a land trust. When the Great Ledge above Devil's Den came on the market in 1988, the town bought it. Today nearly forty percent of Redding is protected, with about sixty miles of trails, most of them cleared each year by volunteers.

Our Redding logo carries an old oak on a rise between two stands of pine, above “Connecticut — Est. 1636,” the founding year of the Connecticut colony and the date all our Connecticut towns share. It is drawn in worn black-and-white, like an old feed-sack stamp. The date belongs to the state; the oak is Redding's own, for the town that let its pastures go back to woods and then made sure they stayed that way.

Our Redding designs follow that story: an old oak for the town that grew its forest back, the Putnam Camp gate for the winter of 1778–79, and Old Put himself, sword up, for the general who held a hungry army together here. From the camp in the snow to the electric car in the woods: wear a little of Redding's history.

Redding, Connecticut — Travel Guide

Visiting Redding Today

Redding sits in the hills of Fairfield County, about sixty miles northeast of New York City, between Danbury and Westport. There is no downtown to speak of — the town is four villages (Redding Center, Redding Ridge, West Redding and Georgetown), two state parks and a great deal of woods. Metro-North's Danbury Branch stops at West Redding. Most visitors come for a day of walking.

Putnam Park, Huntington & the Trails

For visitors looking for things to do in Redding, Connecticut:

• Walk the camp at Putnam Memorial State Park — the gate, the 1888 monument, the lines of collapsed hut chimneys and the small museum.
• Take the carriage roads at Collis P. Huntington State Park past Luttgen's ponds to the stone lighthouse on Lake Hopewell; the bears and wolves are at the Sunset Hill Road entrance.
• Hike to the falls in the Saugatuck Falls Natural Area, or up to the Great Ledge for the view over the reservoir.
• Swim or walk the pond loop at Topstone Park, Edward Steichen's old farm.
• Visit the Mark Twain Library, founded by Twain in 1908, and walk the trails of the Stormfield preserve below his hilltop.
• See Lonetown Farm, the historical society's farmhouse museum on the land where the town began.
• Finish in Georgetown, the old wire-mill village, for dinner on Main Street.

Why People Visit Redding

People come to Redding for what is not here: no highway, no strip, no crowd. They come for a Revolutionary War camp you can walk alone on a winter morning, for sixty miles of trails, and for the hills that drew Mark Twain, Charles Ives and Edward Steichen out of New York.

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Kindred Cities

Greetings, friends from Florence (benvenuti) and Solingen (willkommen) — Redding has no formal sister city, but two of its best stories began in yours.

Stormfield was a Tuscan villa set down on a Connecticut hilltop. Mark Twain had rented two houses in the hills outside Florence, the Villa Viviani at Settignano in 1891–92 and the Villa di Quarto at Sesto Fiorentino in 1903–04, and when he built his last home in Redding he asked for something like them: loggias, a terrace and a long view. The original burned in 1923, and the house that replaced it kept the Italian lines.

Solingen, the German city of blades, is where Walther Luttgen was born in 1839. He crossed the Atlantic as a child, rose from office boy to partner in a New York banking house, and spent his fortune on a hill in Redding: ponds, a lighthouse, a paddlewheel steamer and the electric car this page begins with.

Come from Florence and the stone walls and terraced hills will look familiar; come from Solingen and you can walk the carriage drives a Solingen boy laid out. Come and visit us soon.

When you plan the trip, the Redding Land Trust's Book of Trails is the place to start.

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For deeper reading on the Redding history described here — John Read and Lonetown, the 1777 march to Danbury, the winter encampment of 1778–79 and the creation of Putnam Memorial State Park, Gilbert & Bennett at Georgetown, Mark Twain at Stormfield, the Luttgen and Huntington estate, and the town's open-space program — it may be useful to consult (1) the Redding Historical Society, (2) the Friends & Neighbors of Putnam Park, (3) the Mark Twain Library, (4) Charles Burr Todd's History of Redding, and (5) the Connecticut State Library. For travel and visitor information, it may be useful to contact (1) the Town of Redding, (2) Connecticut State Parks, (3) the Redding Land Trust, whose Book of Trails maps every public trail in town, (4) Metro-North Railroad for the Danbury Branch, and (5) the Connecticut Office of Tourism.