Notes On Quaker Hill

1.There weren't really Quakers. Among the first settlers of the strip of land north of New London were the Rogers, a family of Congregationalists turned Seventh-Day Baptists turned trouble-making sect of their own known as the Rogerenes. Some of their anti-establishment beliefs were similar to those of the Quakers, unpopular group at the time,  but they didn’t choose the name themselves – the appellation “Quaker Hill” was bestowed upon the Rogers’ land as a dig by their enemies. (Waterford didn’t have any , at least not officially, until 1985.)

2. Guilford has Connecticut's largest town green, and Milford has the longest. I've never heard any place claim to have the smallest green, but if no one's already measured them, I'm betting Quaker Hill has a pretty good chance. (Though technically it might not count; see #4.)

3. Bloomingdale Road comes out behind the ShopRite in New London! Go ahead, laugh, but I had no idea. I turned onto it out of curiosity and drove on (and on) up the hill. It seemed the road continued for a very long time; if I’d come out in Bozrah I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. I wondered if I should turn around, but the hills were so pretty, and I kept discovering things (like a Piggery!) so I kept driving. And then, all of a sudden…ShopRite. Crazy.

4. Once upon a time, there was The House in Middle of the Road. It was located at the intersection of Old Norwich Road and Old Colchester Road. It was burned down by the for training purposes, and the land on which it stood is now the Village Green. Oddly this tale seems to be a favorite of real estate companies. Why this will make people want to buy houses in Quaker Hill, I do not know. Other sources say the structure on this site, whether the same house or a different one, was a general store.

5. In 2002, the Quaker Hill Historic District made the National Register of Historic Places. The buildings that qualify it date from the 1780s to the middle of the 20th century, and represent a range of architectural styles. There are the expected Colonials and Greek Revivals, Queen Annes with porches and early Capes. There are Craftsman bungalows and Ranch houses, at least one Tudor Revival, and touches of Georgian and Gothic for good measure. That is by no means a complete list; it would probably be easier to list the styles that are missing.

6. The Old Norwich Road was once the Norwich-New London Turnpike. This 1792 road, the first turnpike in Connecticut, followed an earlier country road, which itself took the route of the old Mohegan Trail.

7. The Red Lion Tavern, overlooking the green, was built in 1824 by Asa Wightman. It has a four-bay facade, apparently because Wightman’s Baptism considered five bays to be unacceptably over the top.

8. Quaker Hill's was constructed in 1961. Before that, mail was processed in one of the neighborhood's general stores.

9. I confess that for years, every time I ever saw Scotch Cap Road I thought it must have been named after a pepper. Until I looked it up for this column and realized that the innocuous-looking yet extremely hot pepper is called a Scotch Bonnet. A scotch cap is a hat, often called a Tam o'Shanter, which the pepper supposedly resembles. I could find no mention of why the road was named for a hat, however.

10. The first recorded human activity in West Farms, the area of New London that would become Waterford, took place in 1645 in what is now Quaker Hill. Appropriately for a place that would remain primarily farmland for centuries, that activity was the haying of meadows along the river.