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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.
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.
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.
