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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.
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.
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.
