Story of Bride Brook wedding told for generations
While some stories in a town’s history remain tucked away in attics or filed unobtrusively in archives waiting to be discovered, the wedding at Bride Brook has earned recognition in East Lyme and beyond.
The story goes that a couple from Saybrook planned to get married during the winter of 1646-47, but snow prevented the magistrate, who was supposed to marry them, from reaching them.
Undeterred, the couple sent a runner to Pequot, which was part of the Massachusetts colony, to ask John Winthrop, a magistrate, to marry them instead, according to East Lyme Town Historian Elizabeth Kuchta.
Winthrop agreed, but he only had jurisdiction in Massachusetts, so he met the couple at a stream, then called the Sunkipaug, the dividing line between the Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies, she said.
Standing on one side, Winthrop was able to marry the couple, who were across the stream in Saybrook, part of the Connecticut colony. The area is today part of the town of East Lyme.
Their story has been retold in ceremonies, books, articles — and even reenacted at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. A 1671-72 deposition by then Gov. Winthrop over a boundary line serves as a record of the wedding.
A boulder, with a bronze tablet that tells the couple’s wedding story, stands near Bride Brook in a small clearing on the side of Route 156 in East Lyme, roughly across from Rocky Neck State Park.
The couple of the Bride Brook wedding are Lt. Jonathan Rudd and his bride, whom many researchers believe may have been Mary Metcalf, Kuchta said.
The Rudd family unveiled and presented to the town the marker near Bride Brook, during a ceremony held by the East Lyme Historical Society on June 5, 1925.
The Rudd descendants were received at the nearby Thomas Lee House, with the Boy Scouts of Niantic meeting them at their cars and forming a guard of honor at the memorial boulder, and the descendants also ate at a luncheon attended by the Girl Scouts of Flanders, according to the program.
The ceremony, which took place at both the Lee House and the memorial, included speeches, a reading of a C. B. Martin’s Bride Brook poem, and singing by the Niantic Glee Club, according to the program. Governor John Trumbull held a reception for the descendants afterwards.
In 1935, when the state celebrated its tercentennial, East Lyme reenacted the Bride Brook wedding. Rudd descendants played the couple during the pageant, in which about 300 people participated, according to newspaper archives.
Kuchta said she thinks the story of Bride Brook has captured the attention of so many because it’s such a love story and there aren’t too many love stories recorded from that time period.
“And this couple wanted to get married — and they weren’t going to let anything stop them from getting married,” she said.
What: The monument at Bride Brook.
Where: In a grassy area on West Main Street (Route 156) near the Bride Brook wildlife management area and across the street from Rocky Neck State Park.
Why: The monument memorializes a wedding that took place during the winter of 1646-47 across Bride Brook.
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