the sights and sounds of the tra of the Pequod War.

In a remarkable film that opens and takes your breath away at the same time.

East of the River is part of the Connecticut Exper series co-produced by KPTV and the Connecticut Humanities C Together, we're exploring Connec rich history and culture.

Funding for the show comes from our title sponsor, the Mashantucket Pequot Art Muse Additional support is provided by the Community Fou of Southeastern Connecticut with thanks to Lucy Bartlett, Crosby and the Chronicle Printing Compa East of the River is a co-produc TV, the Connecticut Humanities Council and Simon Pure Productio Eastern Connecticut.

A unique place, a part of the st but a place apart, a distinctive that has, in many ways from the defined what Connecticut truly m It is a place of striking beauty remarkable natural resources, and a resourceful people whose history speaks of grand accomplishment and great disappo Its story is one of successive c of economic boom and bust, of struggle and resili of reinvention and revival.

Throughout its constantly transforming hist the region continues to be profoundly connected to it East of the river, eastern Connecticut's distinctiveness is rooted in the land itself.

Connecticut was established as a river colony beginning in Old Saybrook and working your way up the rive into the broad region of the lowlands to the st Connecticut derives from the low that sits in the middle of it and the land to the east and the land to the west of that are merely attached to it.

East of the river is a very different place.

That is the physical geography is different.

And you can identify that just by looking at the drainage.

If you go to the west, all the r run down to the Connecticut and If you go to the east, the rivers run away from the Con So the eastern part of the state has always been more alienated from the namesake rive The Connecticut River then is th and the division in eastern Connecticut is really the Bolton range, which runs from the front infield all the w to the Salmon River region.

To the west of that lies the Con River lowland and the stream.

Drainages to the west are very, very short and segmented and sma But once you get over the Bolton all the drainage gathers into a same portal at Norwich, Connecticut, and it comes down the quint a bo it comes down the shore tuck, it comes down the willimantic comes down the h The whole area from essentially the Massachuset all the way over to the Rhode Is border drains down, entering in and everything north of that poi is a very different region.

When you get to the south, you tend to see shorter drainage estuaries, harder rocks and a ve looking culture that is essentially maritime.

Human beings entered eastern Con about 10,000 years ago.

A gentle topography allowed for movement of people and animals over the l The shorelines, rich marine estu attracted a native population to its bountiful fishing and hunting areas.

These groups were larger and more settled than those in t who moved with the seasons.

settlers who started arriving in the region in the 1630s The European found Indian tribal groups with alliances and shifting boundarie in the eastern region, all paid tribute to the Pequod, the strongest, most populous tribe in the area.

The Europeans first the Dutch, then the English esta a lucrative trade in furs with the native population.

What made this region very disti is the resource that emerged during the fur trade that became the most important c during that time.

And that was wampum.

Wampum is a shell be the largest distribution of the shellfish ap to be between the Connecticut Ri Narragansett Bay and in fact, the Dutch referred to this regio as the Mint of Wampum production.

And whoever control that wampum controlled the fur trade for a short period of time.

Eastern Connecticut probably bec the most important geographic lo in all of North America because where all the wampum is coming f And of course, we know in the later history that that competition between native groups and between the European powers eventually resulted in conflict between the English and the peak and of course, the people at war in 1637 and 38.

Essentially what happened was the English attacked the quartz and wanted to elimina as a political and economic fact in all of this.

And in so doing, they set the stage for another t or four decades of political man in this region between the English and their ag and the Mohegan.

That really played a very import in shaping colonial history and policy for the next 100 years.

To understand the colonial history of Connecti and the colonial history of New you need to understand what's going on in Eastern Conne in the first half of the 17th ce I think it had a huge impact on the political landscape, if you will, of all of new Engla Soon after the Pequod War, European settlers began spreading up the Connecticut and themes rivers and along the length of Long Isl Sound in search of farmland.

By the mid 1700s, colonists had pushed into northeastern Connecticut, founding numerous new towns.

Earlier, Connecticut towns were settled by Puritans for religious reasons.

These new northeastern towns were founded on different princi Most of northeastern Connecticut was settled on the basis of land speculation, individual land spe who were well-connected in the General Assembly, or indeed who were members of the General Assembly, or poss even governors and lieutenant go So that you had individualized s You didn't have a communal spiri You didn't have the community or that you had in these earlier settled places.

from the start, you had a very d kind of a attitude toward commun So that in many, not all, but many of th in especially northeastern Conne Eastern Connecticut's identity grew more distinctive in the early 18th century, with the first Great Awakening, the widespread evangelical movem that was especially strong in eastern Connecticut.

The soil was thin and rocky, thinner and rockier even than Litchfield County.

The farms were not producing eno for a good living.

There was tight and severe times general rule, all through the ea And this is one of the factors is this not impoverished but not a slave, the rich kind of life that was b in other parts of Connecticut that led to anxieties, that crea the great awakening, that great movement of enthusiasm of a hear rather intellectual approach to And that, in turn, led to a breakdown in deference where the old light so-called ministers were being c as being ungodly and false right worshiping false gods.

And one thing or another.

And that breakdown of deference then fed into the opposition to the royal policies of the 1760s and 1770s, so that you had the most radical of the Patriots coming from Eastern Connecticut, and they were really the leading figures.

In 1765, the British government proposed tax stamps be purchased by colon for many government services.

There was widespread opposition with Connecticut Resistance stro in the east.

Eastern Connecticut was a really of revolutionary activity from the Stamp Act on.

One of the great changes in Connecticut politics is that stamp act election of 17 You know when the easterners the folks from eastern Connectic in taking over the state, they elect a governor.

The general court is largely com of eastern men, or at least, you they now have influence and they had an ax to grind.

You know, they had felt for year that they had been second class and they had been, I think, resentful for a long ti of what they perceived as effort by folks in the rest of the colo to discourage efforts to increase trade and commerce.

The center of Connecticut's revolutionary effort was in Leba Jonathan Trumbull was born here He was a graduate of Harvard.

He really did like the Mercantil and he joined his father in busi and he expanded the business and it grew quite sizable.

He invested in ships.

He even built ships over in East on the Connecticut River, and he became the largest meatpa in the colony of Connecticut by gathering cattle from all around the surrounding and shipping them primarily to the West Indies.

At the time that the revolution from 1775 to 1783.

He opened up his store and used what came to be known the war of for meetings of the Council of S and for the everyday routine that he had to be in command of as commander in chief of Conn militia navy.

Our 13 ship Navy.

And it was here in this town that Connecticut's contributions of men, materiel and especially food and supplies for the Continental Army were gathered.

We think farming has always been importan to eastern Connecticut.

Most eastern farm families in the 17th century produced little more than they consumed in the 18th century.

More farmers were able to create modestly successful businesses.

All the force that we see are of relatively recent origin.

At one point, really from the late 18th centur right up through the 19th centur I would say well into the 20th c most of the land around here would have been farms.

Most of it would have been open.

Very few trees.

You would have seen fields, hay You would have seen sheep pastur some land planted with corn, a few chickens, few cows.

The farms typically were 60 to 150 acres i They were small family farms, widely spread out.

And that was really to right up into a war, World War Two.

Eastern Connecticut Farms played a critical role in the developme region's huge maritime trade to Indian Islands of the Caribbean.

Farmers from Lebanon and from ot communities up north of Norwich would send their goods to see if we look to the early 19th cen The most important products have been sent to Seattle and Connecticut was livestock.

After that came the produce of t That could have been flour, it could have been cornmeal and other products, lard and sal pork, salt, beef.

Those were large, important expo After that came codfish.

And that brings us right back down to the coast.

The maritime economy was sustained by agriculture.

It was an immense quantity of ma that was brought to the West Indies, sailed out of Norwich.

Primarily, also out of New Londo All for the consumption of the a and to some degree the people that worked on it.

unloading at the large West Indi plantations.

After Connecticut vessels often sailed on to West Africa and brought back cargoes of slav Africans were a presence in eastern Connecticut from early in the life of the co Many African slaves labored in r of eastern Connecticut, some on large plantation style f One of the things that surprises a number of people is the issue of slavery, Connecticut's connec to it, and southeastern Connecti heaviest concentration of people of African ancestry during the colonial period in the 1617 hundreds.

And you could find those individ engaged in bond service work, in people's households, in the fields, working around th And the documents from that time clearly reveal the strong African presence ther As these seaport towns developed So did the inland towns to suppl with goods for shipment without the building of the whar in New London in Norwich.

You never would have had, you know, development inland, had a very advantageous position because it could, by being inlan nor which sort of cut off the trade goods coming in from the inland area, ship them out of Norwich instead of New London.

So actually Norwich grew at the expense of New London during the 18th century, in the and in the 19th century, because of the manufacturing, it also outstripped New London.

The maritime trades have always a significant part of eastern Connecticut's economy Starting here in Norwich and working your way south throu legit gales, Ferry, Montville, N and then of course Groton, Mystic and Stonington and all th South of here were all very rich for maritime activity, whaling, shipbuilding, and almost every other occupatio think of connected to the mariti It sustained the southeastern Co area from the very beginning and today through obviously companie like General Dynamics Electric Boat still building sub Shipbuilding.

Shipbuilding was a leading industry in eastern Conn during the 18th and 19th centuri The local waters were there embankments and protected.

Harbors and rivers and estuaries were ideal for locations for shipbuilding o and a nice connection there to t is that in the holes of these ve in the timbers themselves, Conne was going to see, eastern Connecticut was going to see not just southeastern Connecticu but also the trees of of the qui we're going to see.

Fishing has been a continuous co and riverside activity.

The Stonington fishing fleet dat at least to 1750.

The fleet has been greatly dimin in recent years, buffeted by the fisheries market forces and incr governmental regulation just a few miles west of Stoning New London found its first great wealth in whaling.

New London was involved in whali from the colonial era sporadical It really took off and became a fully engaged whaling port, so beginning about 18, 19, and it r for the better part of the next New London, for a period of time was the second largest whaling port in the world, only behind New Bedford.

And of course, that meant we needed to have hundreds and thousands of men to work on those ships.

We'd find young men coming from the urban centers and from the hinterland, coming New London, signing on the whali We would also find men coming ba from other parts of the world.

those in the London whaling vess as they as they crossed the Atla Join those, and they would come back to Lond African-Americans as well.

We could look to 1850 and we find that 60% of the empl of color in New London or marine almost all of them doubtless are So the community began to grow a and become more diverse through this maritime contact.

Native Americans, for example, made up one third of the crews of many of these vessels that we to the west Indies.

And black Americans as well were were quite prominent in tha In fact, there was some all black crews sailed in and out of New London.

So when it came to whaling, when it came to different types of shipping and trade, you could find a strong African People of African ancestry worked aboard ship found that there was a greater s of equality aboard ship, even in some cases where people were as a matter of fact, than you wo on land because people had to depend on for survival.

Historically, the heyday when th economy was at its height and at its richest would be the early and mid-19th And if you look around the south Connecticut area, you'll see tha the architecture of the region r that time period more than any o Many of the other public edifices around the towns and the cities all reflect that.

It's pretty clear that southeastern Connecticut, b on the shoulder of the sea, gives it a different character.

It gave the people who lived her different sorts of lives and different concerns.

It will always be a part of the of this community.

When the Industrial Revolution took hold in the 19th century, eastern Connecticut quickly beca a center of the emerging textile Eastern Connecticut was blessed with these rivers that were not that you couldn't possibly dam t and use them for more for water, But not so small that I could do is get a sawmill or gristmill ou We have a lot of those middle sized streams like the Shattock which could produce several hundred horsepower that could be adapted to use in production.

Eastern Connecticut's rivers and their broad banks soon attracted investment from just across the state borde It comes out of Providence very first decade of the 19th century with Samuel Slater and the Brown developing small factories for the spinning of the thread.

They're small scale.

I mean, they're employing 20, 30 At first they're only spinning.

They're not weaving for another generation.

Within 20 years, there are full weaving mills that are larger in They were literally scores and s of mills throughout eastern Conn 4/5 of the textile mills of Conn are located in eastern Connectic By 1818, Connecticut boasted 67 cotton mills led by Windham C Throughout the region, thriving mill villages were established i communities.

By 1820, Connecticut was second only to Rhode Island in the percentage of its populat engaged in manufacturing.

These mills eventually provided for tens of thousands of workers during the 19th and early 20th c The town of Putnam grew from a rural outpost to a large town with five textil mills supporting its economy.

very first, the mills was succes From the One of the first railroads in the United States North, which was the railroad, had arrived here in 1839, and from there on the mills were secure to expand.

So as a result, we now have five extant mills on this river and within a mile of each other.

And the last river built in 1872 I worked in two of the mills mys when I got out of high school in and this was our future of work in the mill.

We called a building university instead of a building mill, and we were going to marry, have kids, stay in Putnam all our liv We make a go of it.

The development of the industry feeds on itself.

You have the capital, you have the expertize and you have the workforce.

And it's all right there in close proximi And it was good for several gene even though the rest of Connecti had developed many industries fi hats, brass industry and so fort In 1880, textiles was still the one manufacturing enterprise in Connecticut as a whole, and that was because it was so i here in eastern Connecticut, each of these textile mills empl hundreds of workers, some of the such as the one in Willimantic, thousands of workers.

And in an area that's as rural a that was an immense impact.

Very little other industry took in this part of the state.

As eastern Connecticut's mills grew, area railroads expan in order to profit from the grow in raw materials and finished go The prosperous 19th century Conn mill economy depended on purchas ever more raw materials.

Most cotton mills in New England depended on Southern cotton for their very life.

The raw southern cotton is produ by slave labor, purchased and then shipped north, and then turned into thread clot and other items that people wore every day in Am The Poornima Mill in Taft ville, completed in became the largest single cotton in the country.

It was one of the last of the gr New England mills to shut down i Like countless others, Prime Duda emigrated with his fa from Canada to Taft.

Phil He later started a photogra to supplement his middle income.

His youngest son, René, took over the business in 1935.

My father started in 1882.

The photographer in my Father's On my day, he was telling a stor that had of them that happened i I used to go over there and take a picture of it and take pictures of them, have a parade and we take pictur all the streets were beautiful.

I mean, right near every house had white picket fen They had trees at an oak tree and an elderly, you know, alternating up and down every street and liv TAPPER We knew everybody knew ev You could walk up and down every and tell you who lived in every you were with neighbors, you see And so it was a pleasant experie working on the mill.

In fact, a lot of the kids in sc were anxious to get to the sixth and go to work at the mill.

I graduated from grammar school There was 660 people in the scho Eight people graduated.

So it gives you an idea of everybody want to go to work in And that's what they what they were they were brought well at the mill with nothing but every, every bit of income that they had came from the mill.

All the businesses that it came from the mill Yeah.

on Tuesday night that was, that was payday and everybody came in with an op envelope and gave it to the pare Yeah.

And I handed my pay envelope until I got married at 27 years In Willimantic, the American Thread Company drov a booming city economy that lasted until the 1930s.

They made incredible profits, massive profits.

In fact, in 1864, the Willimantic lighting company which was the company in those m was the biggest company in Connecticut, produced the best cotton thread in the wo So this is why Willimantic is kn as the Thread City.

Where we sit now is a really goo a representation of all the weal and the prosperity and the inten of the industrial revolution.

You see in these magnificent mon That money was was no was no object to these people So on one side, you had the real ostentatious we and then on the other side, you had the little mill villages all around here with immigrants.

There were three and a half thou people working at the mill in 19 by the 1920s, they'd built three or four extra The American Thread Company had it purchased every thread, r New England, close them all down Same process happens today and made willimantic the headquarters of of American While some former mill workers look back on the mills with nost mill work was often grim, with l low wages and dangerous conditio And they would work 60 hour week in the mills in shocking conditi where you couldn't breathe.

They would die of brown lung from breathing in all the cotton the noise you could see, the dir there would die of exhaustion an In the late 1870s, there were terrible outbreaks of Hundreds were dying every summer with the weather because they had no running wate For many immigrants, however, working in was a huge improvement over their previous lives.

I worked in every department of Working in the mill in those day you know, was not a lot of people say that is like that.

It was a drudgery.

It wasn't very a but today's conditions involve Yes, but in those days, we had no comparison.

And my father lived on a log cab and there was eight children that not like had they came here, they have brand new houses and they had seven rooms and there was 12 children alive in my family.

So we had to sleep, three in a b and I slept in that bed for year And it wasn't a drudgery.

It was there was a real, real im over their farm alive system.

The first to work in the mills in the early 1800s, where the children of area Yankee Farm spurred by the potato famine of Irish immigrants poured into Con with many going to work in the m But perhaps the most dramatic im to eastern Connecticut was that of the French Canadians to escape poverty, one third of the population of Quebe to New England during the 19th c to find work in the mills.

Many communities like Plainfield and Grosvenor Dale became primarily French-Can These people came down in droves It was Darvel became a French-Canadian communi I mean, French-Canadian in a true sense of the word.

I mean, we have French families If you all want to do business and travel, which a few of the merchants from Norwich came up and they had to talk French sing words to the masses before I even knew there was I knew the a Star-Spangled Banner.

Willimantic typified the immigration experience.

The Irish came in the 1850s and sixties following them came the French C In the 1900s, there were many Eastern European Polish, Ukrainians, Latvians, Li Russians, Italians, Czechs.

And after the 1950s and sixties, a lot of Puerto Ricans came.

So each immigrant group that came, I think, just did suf some discrimination.

They were impoverished.

They were the new kid on the blo They lived in distinct neighborh in town and were discriminated a Eventually they would assimilate into American culture and all have jobs and houses and speak the language.

And then another group would com In the 20th century, immigration patterns began to af the Connecticut countryside, as many Yankee families sold their farmland to Slovak, P and other immigrants from Easter in the early 20th century, numer Eastern European Jewish immigran established farms and communitie like Colchester, Lebanon and Moo So there is a real flip in the e makeup of the farming part of ea Connecticut that occurs in the 1 tens twenties and thirties.

And that's why we have the ethnic diversity that we really have in these tow In the last two thirds of the 20th century, one mill after another closed or relocated to the south, many mills were claimed by fire, either accidental or by way of a persistent unemployment, declining population and pockets of rural and urban poverty plagu many old mill towns in the regio In Putnam, as in many riverside mill towns, major floods in 1936 and 55 hastened the steady decli In the 55 flood.

They all went.

It was a domino action from Mass and we lost all of them.

And from there on, there wasn't textile company in Putnam.

Now we lost a thousand people in after the 55 flood in our popula So a lot of people are working like during World War Two, they went to work at Electric Bo and Pratt Whitney, 50 miles west if you will, making any money in You were going there.

So there was a lot of low pay in this area for many ye Once booming, Willimantic suffered a typical f The Depression.

It's in the thirties, and then the postwar boom passes northeastern Connecticut.

Because the interstate highway system doesn't come here Willimantic suffered once the railroads disappeared in the and then the mills left in the s and eventually closed in in the This decline just kept going and going and going.

Just as the as the Puerto Rican was sort of settling into these That's when a lot of the mills began to closed down, downsize, go south, and then go overseas.

And so with that, left is a a pretty large unemployment prob Most mill villages lost populati as the industry began its long d today, the once dominant old mil still helped shape the character of the region.

Many communities have one or mor and various stages of disrepair or reuse, often with adjacent neighborhoods.

A former worker housing.

Up until really 20 years ago, there wasn't a lot of building in this part of the state.

So you had farmhouses on the rur you had a few commercial centers like Willimantic and Danielsen a and then all there was left was mill villages.

These villages had a tremendous of uniformity about them.

So the majority of people 20 yea still lived within these mill vi They owned the houses.

Now they fixed them up.

They weren't all identical anymo But still you had these mill vil geography of the area still real divided up into mill villages.

We have the I'm from De Ville, I'm from Arag I'm from Baltic, I'm from Brusse I'm from Hanover.

People still think of these as t defining the places, even though no one works in text mill anymore.

As the mills faded away in eastern Connecticut, a new economic engine, the defense industry emerged.

East Hartford aerospace manufact and Whitney employed as many as 47,000 Connecticut workers during the Vietnam War years.

Today, the state workforce stand at about 11,000.

In the Southeast, the Coast Guar the naval sub base and sub maker electric boat constitute t of the region's defense communit E.B.

greatly prospered during th 20th century conflicts, becoming the region's largest employer an industry, peaking at 25,000 empl And Connecticut employment level plummeted with the end of the Co to about 9000.

Today.

The defense industry, through em and through the neighborhoods that it supported, really gave p a sense of place and belonging, whether it was Pratt or Ivy or any of the other smaller subcontractors over which was so important.

The fact that that's not there as much as left some people sort of unmoored in a way, I thi you know, maybe searching a litt You know, they wonder what the f will be like for their kids.

They know it will be different t their lives where their parents They almost always write about people with a sort of an Eastern Connecticut identi And and also in eastern Connecticut mentality.

I think a lot of people who are raised in eastern Connecticut end up stayi That's certainly is is the case I think we tend as Eastern Conne people to be independently minde sort of set in our ways.

I don't think we are particularly acquisition all.

I think a lot of it has to do with who our grandparents were.

For many of us here in eastern Connecticut, our grandparents came in steerag They were propelled, I believe, measures of gumption and despera One of the really nice things ab part of the state is you have a lot more ordinary people from working class backgrounds, even if they' personally working class.

I mean, you can talk to someone that that's worked in a as a metallurgical engineer And he still remembers well his his grandfather, they worked in The other part of it is it's far enough aw from the cosmopolitan centers that it's not a trendy place.

It's like small town America use A continuing challenge to eastern Connecticut's sense o as suburbanization and in some areas, gentrificatio In some eastern towns, especially in the Connecticut Ri and on the shoreline, have evolv into largely upper middle class Say Madison.

Guilford are not unlike, say, Oh, I'm Old Saybrook, Essex Ches They tend to be almost almost exclusively high income a you know, very white populations very well-educated.

There isn't a lot of diversity.

In the Hartford region.

The growth of the suburbs has changed the demographic prof of many Eastern communities.

And there's a real differentiati between sort of the more blue collar places like Manchester and East Hartfor which are now really becoming ho for immigrants and the much more basically suburban fringe towns which have stayed homogenous demographically as they've grown We, I think, have some towns that aspire to be, say, like Farmington and Avon and Sim But we do not, I think, have the the concentrations of wealth east of the river that are west of the river.

The population centers of the st or on the west bank of the river We're on the east bank.

So I think there's still a bit o difference.

On the other hand, we're not so as a matter of social or economi that we go across the river.

We think the people are from Mar or something.

30 years ago, east of the river was very dependent on west of th both in an employment and a commercial sense.

That's completely different toda I think Manchester is as much a center of an area now as is Ha We've gained thousands of people who've moved out of Hartford and comes to the river looking for a better place to li We've got the Buckland Hills Mal and in Manchester, which is probably the commercial the retailing center anyway, for almost in the northe quadrant of of Connecticut, we've got the University of Conn which is a bigger force in the state than ever.

There was a survey, I think, that UConn did ten year that found a huge percentage of the population in this area connected to the university, eit by employment or by somebody in having gone there or planning to I do think east of the river probably has as great a sense of as ever right now.

In the last few decades, economi in many Eastern communities has been accompanied by significant racial and ethnic You know, 20 years ago, Manchest really almost exclusively white That's been a big shift in the l ten years because it used to be that were the really the main co for immigration to Connecticut.

Now it's places like suburbs east of the river.

You know, Manchester and East Hartford are really and to some degree are really small But those are the places where immigrants are really in N are really coming into Connectic Our largest minority population in Norwich is Haitian and that migration began several years ago.

So that migration just expand it when th needed workers and next to that would be the Asian communit Tax money in the last two years would probably have an increase over 3000 Asians coming into the to work at predominately here co and many of them still work here during the week and return to their homes in the New York area on weekends But many of them settled here and they'll be part of our commu for years to come.

This has come so quickly in a very short period of time and at a time when we have a state budget cris as well as major problems on the federal level.

So this impacts the entire regio And I think the issues transportation, school cost, housing is absolutely something that has and is being addressed by the Council of Governments and our economic development organizations.

Suburbanization has long been a factor in changing eastern Connecticut.

Each passing decade continues to bring more suburban style development to eastern tow Glastonbury.

Manchester, certainly South Windsor.

All of those towns were at one t a lot more like eastern Connecti in the sense being heavily depen upon farming where there was ava water power in Manchester, the C mills, Glastonbury, Cotton Hollo they had the sort of textile man that you see here.

But let's face it, they were very close to what once was a very prosperous and powerful city.

And the life of that city spread beyond its borders.

The population of Glastonbury, n grew by 262% from 1950 through 2 In recent years, the town has ad from 150 to 200 new homes a year The Rose family has been farming in Glastonbury since 1910.

Back then it was a farm town.

There was different villages in Glastonbury and there was usually a mill aro and the people there worked and might work there in the winter and doing their farming in the s there was a small farm, there wa farms and Glastonbury tobacco wa And you know, and then tobacco kind of petered although it made a resurgence fo And just recently all the dairy farms are gone and there's some some fruit and vegetable farms left.

made the biggest change in this when the aircraft kept growing.

Pratt Whitney They ended up hiring quite a few of these people.

Values got up so high that it wa selling out the development.

We're changing all the time as to how we do things.

You know, we've been in this pic your own probably 30 and close to 35 years, I think.

And people that are still farmin now, they hear because they like So if people really supported local agriculture, I don't think most farmers would Glastonbury, from my experience, is that town on the east side of that is that is most similar to the towns that you think of i on on the west side of the river the West Hartford, the Avon's, the Simsbury and Far You share a lot of the attractio of eastern Connecticut, which is a very rural, rural atm And we have some very rural area of this community.

Certainly it's an issue for us.

How much residential growth can this community handle?

It's put a tremendous pressure on our on our educational system and our infrastructure as a whol The largest challenge for us has been balancing the tax rate and keeping up with that need for infrastructure.

To me, Marlborough, Heber and Portland are probably of years behind Glastonbury in t of growth and some of the things we're seeing happening in town.

But they're a little farther dow too, so it's moving in their dir The latest are suggests that during the 1990s the state consumed land at a rate of about nine times the rate of population growth in the places that's being felt or like really more than anywhere else in the state is kind of the eastern the river metropolitan fringe, you know, towns like Willington, Coal, Chester, I mean, just houses sprouting in like nobody's business out there And it's creating a lot of probl in terms of fiscal stress on the It's a real problem because the way local government are financed in Connecticut, it doesn't really respond well i that are growing very fast.

And farming community of Colchester now an easy commute to Hartford, the old New London, Norwich and the casinos is one of the fa growing towns in the state.

The neighboring town of Lebanon starting to feel the effects of Agriculture is still the largest industry in Now we have much larger, highly scientifically managed, technologically advanced farms.

90% of the people in Lebanon commute out of town to business.

And in the old days, you would have found that 90% of the people stayed in Leba to work on their farms.

Lebanon is seeing enormous increase in development, particu the last five years.

It's now over 7000 people.

The problem is that the land that they need houses on is the prime agricultu The most recent transforming for in the region has been the devel of two huge Indian owned casinos Mashantucket Pequot.

That's Foxwoods and the Mohegan They are the most visible elemen of the region's emergence as a tourism and entertainment c Casino profits have enabled the descendants of, the region's fir to reconstitute growing native c with governmental and cultural infrastructures.

The casinos also have generated about 23,000 jobs, making them the largest employer in the region.

That really saved the region in terms of jobs.

Now, granted, there are much low jobs there, service jobs.

They don't involve the same skil that were evident in the trades in electric boat, but they certainly have created industry that has been very productive for the region.

70,000 people a day on average visit the casinos which generate nearly $400 million annually for the state.

Clearly, the Indian casinos are to change the culture of southeastern Connecticut.

Certainly the towns of the immed North Stonington and much larger than Preston, are very much aware of the chang that are being brought to their communities.

This is going to spread.

Well, I think there's incredible on the communities to try and maintain their qualit 15 years ago, we had less than 2 calls a year for our ambulance and fire departments combined.

Since the casinos, we have over a year for volunteer fire depart The same with police protection.

There's tremendous pressure on subdivisions in which to add pressure to your school system.

in southeastern Connecticut feel that politically in Hartfor Many people they feel that the state of Conn ends at the Connecticut River and they forget about southeastern Connecticut.

For example, City of Bridgeport more from the Mohegan Mashantuck Peacock formula than all 20 town in southeastern Connecticut comb The region's most serious proble the revival of its aging small c The primary issue in New London is how do we pay for basic servi while at the same time remaining the home community to a number of nonprofits and not for profits?

54% of our land base here in New London is nontaxable That can be a tremendous burden.

It's been a real juggling act.

It's worst problem is it only ha six and a half square miles.

So there's not much land on which to put economic develop But there are some at the state and there's some down in the Fort Trumbull area near a new state park.

But apart from that, all they ca really do is renovated downtown.

It's the best port in Connecticu And to have a downtown right on with a major transportation hub is is incredible.

If the public and private planne and developers can work intelligently together, then it could be a very charming with a large middle class population, residential population, downtown Norwich, once the richest city in the state and now one of the poorest, is profiting from its position midway between the two casinos.

This city was a city without a f until the casinos came.

We are the housing center for both casinos.

The housing impact has some nega Rents have risen very rapidly, but when rents rise, then landowners have money to put into renovations.

And with the flow of money into our professional offices lawyers, accountants, into the m small firms that do construction and particularly something like million investment in downtown N we now are on the uptick we have for the first time a growing pop Now the groups that are coming h are of all kinds.

Yes, we have people living here bed and clean toilets at the cas but we also have middle managers who come here and buy lovely Victorian houses at very favorable prices for Con All this is very important and p revitalization of the city.

When the mills left town Willimantic, the economy nosediv after years of prosperity.

Local leaders have been striving to revitalize the town, in part by evoking past triumphs of loca One legend from the 1700s involv hundreds of bullfrogs whose nois mating rituals were mistaken for cries of Indians about to attack It's very eastern Connecticut to put those giant spools of thread on the two ends of the on either side, and that to put those Volkswagen sized big frogs on top of the sp To me, that gives a tribute to h and local legend, but it also is a tribute to this self-deprecating sense of humor.

Willimantic has lots of problems and lots of issues, but it is more than just those drug addiction and poverty and b Nobody's denying that.

But there is also in this commun a very.

I think typically eastern Connecticut sense of community.

And also there are solutions afo in this town.

As I think a country western son The good thing about hitting roc is that you have nowhere to go b Absolutely.

That's the way we fe And we consider.

Ourselves the gateway to the nor We're the urban center, if you w for much of the rural area of eastern Connecticut.

And you talk about all of the tr here, the undiscovered treasures, and we're trying to put those on and we focus on the retail distr and we try to work outwards from But it's going to take time.

And what will be critical will b well we market ourselves as a diverse community with a lot of opportunity to take part in and various acti and much of it centered on the student populati and becoming a college town, if you will, with Eastern Connecticut State University being home right here in Willimantic and UC Seven miles up the road.

We are using the history of Will to help us leverage the investme that's taking place here.

There's an opportunity here because there's value.

In Willimantic as in many easter the nature of the place itself is seen as an economic resource.

In 1994, the town of Willimantic the vacant American thread build for a $40 million redevelopment There's been about $34 million spent on the project to date.

It really is a long standing history of innovation, and that's, again, what we're trying to bring back We're really trying to work with a lot of startup companies out of the 15 tenants we have no Eight of them are new startup ve and a lot of these companies are technology related.

I think we'll end up with betwee and 800 jobs when we're all said If we can revive the mills, we can revive the town.

Many towns in the region are looking to cultural tourism as an opportunity for economic g The old mill town of Putnam has gained a wide reputation as a charming town and antique c People are genuinely enthusiasti that Putnam has become an antiqu It's been able to define the are as a destination and as a washed up mill town, but rather as a place where people love to come, where there's things to do.

And I've been told that some of the businesses that have located made their decision after visiti on a Sunday afternoon and seeing how vibrant the commercial district was.

Tourists and vacationers are not for eastern Connecticut.

Along the shoreline in the 19th upper crust vacation enclaves pr with patrons arriving rail and s In the 20th century, scores of f farther north, notably in the ri accessible town of East Haddam, took in summer guests, later converting farms to popular summer resorts in the Ocean Beach and other shoreline destinations have long attracted New London's Towns like Mystic Village, a of the region's significant mari heritage, the region's history i as one of its most valuable reso Major attractions like the Masha Pequot Art Museum, Mystic Aquari and Mystic Seaport, along with n historic home and other smaller bring the stories of eastern Con to hundreds of thousands of visi each year, traveling its roads, viewing the landscape and former mill villag Visitors can still get a vivid s of the region's rich history.

sense of getting back to history and nature.

There's a It gets you away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

It's just beautiful.

It's just a matter of time befor and more folks realize that, you we even though we are far away i we are really right in the middle of a lot of action If the two largest casinos in th less than 40 minutes away.

Deliberate efforts are underway to preserve the sense of place and special c of eastern connecticut.

The quint a bog should tuck it.

Heritage Corridor was establishe to help preserve the region's cultural historical and natural heritage.

70% of our landmass is still forests and farms.

And if you look at a satellite i of the East Coast at night or if you're flying on a plane up the East Coast in the evening and you look at the pattern of l versus dark, you'll see where the last big chunk dark sky country this close to the co We find that the kinds of resources that exis act in concert with one another to attract peop who are interested in a small to experience, a family experience, kind of getting back to their ro One of our more popular ventures as a heritage corridor is a prog called Walking Weekends that all people an opportunity to investigate an old mill or an archeological site or, you know, the bison farm, whatev it might be, with a guide that has some expertize and lear something about their resources and have a good time.

The very blessing of having all space is also a curse because we the most land is relatively low cost compared to other areas of southern New E where within an hour and a half of every major urban in southern New England, and that's an acceptable commute for people who want to live in this kind of an environment.

So I hope that our communities will be able to be proactive, be prepared for increased pressu for development instead of having to be reactive In the end, it's only fitting th a region so rich in history should turn to its past to renew once again.

One of my favorite quotes comes a Russell Baker book called Grow and he said that we should all realize that our our journey is not from the diaper to the sh but that we are connected through the umbilical cord to the generations past in ways that we both can underst and ways that we don't understan and can never understand.

And I think a town is like that, And I think an area, a region is like that.

So I think to recreate the past or to try to hold on to something in an unnatural way is not very productive.

But to have a sense of the past as you're creating the future, I think is a great idea idea.

The Mashantucket Peck White Museum, where you can walk through a 16t Pequod village and experience a time when the land was bountif But every day could be a challenge for surviva East of the River is part of the Connecticut Exper series co-produced by TV and the Connecticut Humanities C Together, we're exploring Connec rich history and culture.

Funding for the show comes from our title sponsor, the Mashantucket Pequot Art Muse Additional support is provided by the Community Fou of Southeastern Connecticut with thanks to Lucy Bartlett, Crosby and the Chronicle Printing Compa East of the River is a co-production of CP TV.

The Connecticut Humanities Council and Simon Pure Productio