Town Historian To Be Honored As Parade Marshal

By Kaaren Valenta

In the vault at the C.H. Booth Library, Daniel Cruson bends over a bound volume of back issues of The Newtown Bee, a pen and note pad readily at hand, researching another page of the history of Newtown.

The town historian, to be honored this year as parade marshal for the 38th annual Labor Day Parade, is engrossed in his work, oblivious to passersby.

“There’s so much still to be done,” he says, pausing in his work, “but now we have the [computer] technology to literally take our history and make it available by keyword.  It’s an exciting time.”

Mr Cruson’s work has untangled the mysteries that have surrounded town benefactress Mary Elizabeth Hawley in the decades since her death in 1932 and documented more than three centuries of the growth and development of the town. So as Newtown entered the 21st century, the Newtown Summer Festival Committee decided the town historian would be the perfect person to honor at this year’s parade.

“With the millennium and the celebration of a new century, we decided it was appropriate to recognize the history of the town before we have a new beginning,” said Lisa Franze, co-chairman with Kym Stendahl, of the parade committee. “This year’s parade theme is Newtown: History in the Making.”

A passionate student of archeology and local history, Dan Cruson, 54, traces his interests back to his school days as a child growing up in Easton. He was in the first class to go through all four years at Joel Barlow High School after it opened in 1959 and, after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Trinity College in Hartford, returned to teach at Joel Barlow.

“I’m a graduate of the school, and I’ve been teaching there for 30 years. Talk about being in a rut,” he said, chuckling.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in education at Trinity College and later, in the late 1980s, earned a master’s in liberal studies with a focus in western intellectual history, at Weslyn. His thesis, Two Minds of Modern Man, explored dichotomy of thought and was awarded the Wrulwater Prize.

“Although we train ourselves to think in a scientific, rational fashion, there is another level of thought where faith, superstition, belief in the spirit of inanimate objects exists,” he explained. 

During his years at Trinity, he took courses in anthropology and spent his weekends working with the Archeological Society of Connecticut and with Doug Jordan, who later would become the first state archeologist. In his second year of teaching, Mr Cruson introduced a course on anthropology that has been taught every year since. Each fall the class has a working field trip, the last two years at Putnam Park where students have been uncovering the encampment of the soldiers of the Revolutionary War General Rochambeau.

“I was a charter member of the Historical Society of Easton when the group organized in 1968 because it was trying to save a schoolhouse,” he said, “and I was immediately made a trustee and vice president.”

Mr Cruson instituted a newsletter for the membership, wrote and published pamphlets on local history, and set up a monthly program with speakers, activities he continued when he later became president of the Newtown Historical Society and president of the Archeological Society of Connecticut.

He moved to Newtown in 1970.  It was a fortuitous move for the town, many residents agree, as it set in motion his exploration of local history here.

“I lived on the east side of town on an estate once owned by Louis Marshall who had a food store in Danbury,” Mr Cruson said. “Originally his family lived over the store, then they had a farm on Poorhouse Road in Newtown. The cottage was where the poor house used to stand, right on the Bethel-Newtown border.”

In the first class he taught at Joel Barlow, he met a student, Carolyn Wylie, who would later become his wife. “She graduated in 1971. We kept in touch and by 1978 she was out of college and living in Pittsburgh. We married in December 1979,” he said.

The Crusons bought a house in southern Newtown and lived there 10 years before moving to the north side of town to a house with room for three growing boys. Daniel, 17, is a senior at Newtown High School; Thomas, 13, is in eighth grade at the middle school, and Benjamin, 10, is in fifth grade at Hawley School.

Daniel Cruson became president of the Newtown Historical Society in 1989 and helped rejuvenate it, bringing it new vision with the assistance of a half dozen other residents who also were willing to donate their time and efforts. “It was my luck to step in and direct their energies. They were the movers and shakers on this project,” he insisted.

Over the following years Mr Cruson has written monthly articles on different facets of Newtown history for the society’s newsletter, The Rooster’s Crow, and produced biographical pamphlets on Mary Elizabeth Hawley and her grandfather, Judge William Edmond. He compiled a history of the Men’s Literary and Social Club of Newtown Street in 1994 for its 100th anniversary, and a history of Curtis Packaging in 1995. He wrote the Prehistory of Fairfield County, which formed the basis of a local history course he teaches at Joel Barlow. When he wrote Newtown Slaves: A Case Study in Connecticut Rural Black History, it revealed a part of history that had been conveniently forgotten.

“It was a shock for many people to find out that every minister up here had owned slaves,” Mr Cruson said. “Rev Judson had six.”

Mr Cruson identified and assembled the old photographs and wrote the copy for Images of America: Newtown, Images of America: Monroe, and Images of America: Easton-Redding, which was published this month.

Currently Mr Cruson is working on a history of Newtown Savings Bank for its 150th anniversary in 2005, a project he said has been made easier by the wealth of historical material saved in the bank’s vaults. “Arthur Nettleton kept scrapbooks on everything – obituaries of officers, events, not just financial matters,” he explained.

But Mr Cruson said he gets the greatest pleasure from watching other people become excited when they find history in their own back yard. “I like looking up information on old houses and helping people with genealogy,” he said. “I get calls all the time.”

He discovered the architect who designed the soldier’s and sailor’s monument at the head of Main Street when the architect’s family, who had the original plans in Arizona, contacted him because they wanted a photo of the monument. “And George Clark, a former resident who now lives in California, has provided incredible information including reminiscences of Doc Crowe at his drug store in Sandy Hook and the Brick Store. He’s a descendant of Homer Clark – of Homer Clark Lane.”

For the past two years Mr Cruson has been working with Booth librarian Andrea Zimmermann on an oral history project to record the memories of longtime Newtown residents. “It’s marvelous to speak to these people. It gives you a feeling that you are in touch with the past,” he said. “We’ve done 17 complete and still have a lot of others that we want to get to. We are supposed to wind up by the end of the year or early next year, but it may be ongoing, with a series of supplements.”

He is in the process of producing a 60-75 page pamphlet on the history of the schools in Newtown after tracing a rumor and finding that school registers dating back to 1878 were all in a vault in the middle school – a mother lode of information, he said.

   “I’m a local history junkie,” he confessed. “Call it ‘Confessions of a Bee Addict,’ like the classic Confessions of an Opium Eater.”

The Newtown Summer Festival Committee is still collecting donations to stage this year’s Labor Day Parade. Donations may be sent to the committee, c/o Fleet Bank, 6 Queen Street, Newtown 06470.