On September 6, 1781, Benedict Arnold reduced New London to a pile of smoldering rubble. Bank Street was especially hard hit. Nearly half of all the businesses and residences incinerated by the British were located on “the Bank.” But life goes on, and this story is about two of those properties and the people who rebuilt there.

Samuel Brown, possibly a soldier in the Continental Army, owned a place at 116 Bank Street. After the Revolution, he and his wife, Sarah, qualified as “fire sufferers,” state residents eligible for free Ohio land as compensation for wartime losses. (This land had been claimed for Connecticut by colonial charter.) Whether the Browns resettled in the “fire lands” is unclear, but in 1786 they sold their lot to John Shepherd.

John, one of the founders of Methodism in New London, had a bake shop on Water Street. He operated a mill at Windmill Point (near Shaw’s Cove) where he ground his grain. John had a contract with the Continental Army to supply bread for the troops, and on days when there were extra loaves, he sold them to private citizens. One eyewitness recalled that wartime food shortages were so severe that sometimes 150 people vied for just one loaf.

When Arnold’s men torched Water Street, John became a fire sufferer, too, but instead of moving to Ohio, he bought the Browns’ property, and by 1790, he’d built a fine home on the Bank. He lived there until 1829, when he fell from his second story veranda, his favorite spot for viewing the waterfront. John’s granddaughter, Nancy Minor, and her husband, possible abolitionists, inherited the property.

When the building passed out of the family, it was repurposed variously as a grocery store, barber shop, an improvised processing center for the casualties of an 1846 steamship accident, and a sailors’ boarding house. Today it’s occupied by New London Ink, a popular tattoo business.

Nearby at 130 Bank Street, James Lewis had a shop and wharf before the British leveled the street. In 1828, whaling Captain John Deshon purchased the property from Lewis’s estate and built his mansion there. Around the same time, just a few doors down, the Whaling Bank (now home to the Muddy Waters Café) was under construction; another relative, Daniel Deshon, served on its board of directors.

John Deshon’s son, George, grew up on Bank Street. He attended West Point (where he roomed with Ulysses Grant), but after graduation, instead of following a military career, he became a Catholic missionary in New York. George was a disciple of Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulists, the oldest order of Roman Catholic priests in America. Today, Father Hecker is being considered for canonization.

In the more distant past, the Deshons’ ancestors were French Huguenot refugees originally named Deschamps. John Deshon’s uncle, also named John, was a prominent New London man: a West Indies trader, a privateer; a member of the Committee of Correspondence (a colonial governance body during the Revolution); and one of the men responsible for improving city fortifications. When New London incorporated in 1784, he was one of its first aldermen. Coincidentally, he also owned the mill where John Shepherd ground his flour.

If all that weren’t enough, "Uncle" John represented New London at the General Assembly, working on the Ohio land program. Fewer people than expected seized this opportunity, but if you’re traveling in Ohio and are surprised to see signs for New London and Groton, these are places where some arson victims began their lives all over again.

The Deshon House is currently vacant, but since it left the family’s hands in 1893, it’s been occupied by a clothier, a radio repair shop, a plumbing supplier, an antique store, and a textile business. Plans to demolish it and the Shepherd House have recently been halted, but their future remains uncertain.

Along with other early 19th-century Bank Street properties, these buildings symbolize New London’s resilience and adaptability in response to tragedies and changing times. They aren’t just old. They tell important American stories.

Note: This column is based on information from New London Landmarks, complied by Thomas Couser and Mary Beth Baker, assisted by the New London Public Library and the New London County Historical Society.