Boothe Memorial Park volunteer Beverly Benedetto cleans the porch of Boothe’s family property circle in Stratford, Connecticut, on Friday, May 7, 2021. La the park’s annual opening will be held in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19. .
STRATFORD – The 32 acres of Boothe Memorial Park are as eccentric as the two men who ceded it to the city in the late 1940s.
There’s a historic farm. A clock tower A lighthouse. A rose garden. A windmill A blacksmith’s shop. And, for some reason, a former toll booth on Merritt Parkway, some of the 18 buildings that dot the property.
And after a year of reduced capacity due to the coronavirus pandemic, the public will be enjoying the land at 57fourFour Main Street for hire on Sunday from noon to four in the afternoon.
“This year will be the opening day we didn’t have last year,” Said Doreen Jaekle of Friends of Boothe Park.
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The annual opening of the park will take place in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The annual opening of the park will take place in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Doreen Jaekle, with Friends of Boothe Park, takes a boxed tour in Stratford, Connecticut, on Friday, May 7, 2021. The park’s annual opening will take place in a week, which it cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Boothe Memorial Park volunteer Beverly Benedetto cleans the porch of Boothe’s family property circle in Stratford, Connecticut, on Friday, May 7, 2021. La the park’s annual opening will be held in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19. .
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The park’s annual opening will take place in one week, which was canceled last year due to COVID-19.
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The annual opening of the park will take place in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The annual opening of the park will take place in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The annual opening of the park will take place in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford, Connecticut, Friday, May 7, 2021. The annual opening of the park will take place in a week, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19.
Activities scheduled for Sunday include blacksmithing and weaving demonstrations, an exhibition of old cars, tours and a midday flagization through the Stratford Veterans Museum and the local VFW.
The park is named after Stephen Nichols Boothe and David Beach Boothe, the last heirs to an ancient circle of English relatives whose roots in the United States date back to 1639.
“We felt it was right that the citizens of the city of Stratford had a suitable place for recreation and rest. 1949,” he says.
The park was compromised six years later through the city, which takes control of the assets very seriously.
Jim Connor, a member of the City Council whose 8th district covers the park, is the chairman of the Boothe Park Commission. He said he was proud to help oversee “what I am the ultimate asset in New England. “
“Many occasions and have been created since the park opened: weddings, first dates and sleds,” he said. “I inspire everyone to come to inauguration day. “
Jaekle said the brothers were “very, very eccentric,” and the surviving anecdotes attest to this.
One story tells that the brothers wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943 to seek the farm’s federal popularity as the oldest in the country.
They never received an answer and, in desying the president’s most urgent demands for attention at the time, promised to vote for Republicans thereafter.
It’s the only thread connected to a prominent president, or the Republican Party.
“When you imply genealogy, the call doesn’t have e after. But after the Civil War, they added it so they wouldn’t be accused of being relatives of John Wilkes Booth,” Jaekle said.
The brothers, who made money from rental homes in Bridgeport and a circle of relatives in the agricultural machinery business, helped others, according to the stories.
“They were eccentric, they were also very altruistic,” Jaekle said.
They organized events to raise funds on assets for local devoted groups, organized facilities for dawn at Easter, and, the Depression, hired staff to build a two-story, four-foot to six-inch California red wood “technocratic cathedral” sent across the Panama Canal.
It is not known why the construction is called cathedral. It is also known as the “basket” because it was full of baskets, many of which had been purchased from American Indians.
“The buildings were left open and the teenagers used to come in and cut them like Easter baskets for their girlfriends,” Jaekle said, pointing out some of the old baskets inside the farm. “We think it’s safer to prove them here. “
The construction now holds the proceeds from paintings by a more philanthropic teenager: a vast collection of minerals donated years ago that local explorer Kevin Collazo cleaned up and relabeled last year for an Eagle Scout project.
But the baskets bring visitors and remember the idiosyncrasies of the brothers.
“I came here and donated baskets,” Jaekle recalls. ” She said, “I hate to tell you this, but my father used to take the Boothe brothers off the green to his house. “
It’s the even strangest fact.
“They paid grocery stores and other retail outlets $25 a month to come in with their long wool coats and make other people think they were stealing, because they were kicking them,” Jaekle said.