A gem on the waterfront
President Andrew Jackson wanted all new public buildings to embody America’s strength, conveying the idea that they, like the young nation itself, would last forever. With this in mind, Robert Mills, the first American-trained architect, was hired to design the Custom House on Bank Street in New London. Already possessing impressive credentials, Mills would later go on to design the Washington Monument.
The city council was so pleased with Mills’ proposal that they proclaimed that the finished product would be a “gem on the waterfront.”
The new custom house was intended to be both dignified and fireproof. The latter quality was important because its predecessor, a wooden structure, had been torched by the British during the Revolution. That earlier building was on Winthrop Cove. The custom officer’s residence was nearby on the south side of Main Street (today’s Eugene O’Neill Drive) between Shapely and Hill Streets (both victims of urban renewal).
In the early 1770s, as colonial fury mounted against the Crown and the appetite for war increased, it must have been miserable to be a British customs official. After the First Continental Congress called for a boycott of British goods, the job had to have been nearly impossible and probably dangerous. When a mob of New Londoners destroyed a chest of imported tea in a bonfire on the Parade (yes, we had a Tea Party, too!), they were sending Duncan Stewart, the British duty collector at the time, a clear message. Frances Caulkins, in her book “The History of New London,” reported that Stewart was highly unpopular, and hastily departed the city for Loyalist-leaning New York before returning to England.
Fast forward to 1789 when newly elected President George Washington appointed his friend, General Jedediah Huntington, to be the first American duty collector for the port of New London. Without a building for his headquarters, Jedediah worked in a shabby one-room office above a store on the corner of Bank Street and the Parade. Frances Caulkins observed disdainfully that although Jedediah never complained, the accommodations were unworthy of the importance of the position and the magnitude of the revenue that customs brought in. I imagine she also felt that the accommodations were unworthy of this distinguished war hero. Jedediah died in 1818, years before a fitting edifice could be constructed.
The new building was finally erected in 1833. Granite for the structure came from quarries in Waterford and Westerly. You can distinguish between the two sources because the Waterford granite, which comprises most of the building, is darker than the Westerly stone which adorns the cornices and frames the windows. Wood from the USS Constitution was chosen for the beautiful and massive front door. The roof originally featured an observation platform and iron railings, but was destroyed in the ’38 Hurricane. (There’s a fund-drive going on now to replace the current roof.)
In 1983, the Custom House became a museum and headquarters for the New London Maritime Society. They shared with me a detail from an 1876 city map that gives a bird’s eye view of how the building and much of Bank Street looked before the railroad came through in the mid-19th century. You can see the pier where the customs collector could quickly jump into his small boat and go right out to inspect the cargo of incoming ships. In the 1870s, barges, carrying riprap for the Race Rock lighthouse foundation, moored at an adjacent pier. Once when a barge’s boiler exploded, the Custom House became a makeshift hospital and morgue for the dead and injured.
In the famous Amistad affair, that schooner was anchored near the Custom House while the fate of the Africans who overcame their captors was being decided. After the trial, in which they were exonerated, the Amistad and her non-human cargo were auctioned off from the Custom House steps.
The history of tariff collecting in New London is replete with colorful stories, none more so than the life of Jedediah Huntington, the first U.S. customs official in the city. That position wasn’t Jedediah’s only civic gig. Far from it. We’ll explore his personal sacrifices and public service in another column.
Many thanks to The New London Maritime Society, The New London County Historical Society, New London Landmarks, and Tom Schuch, local historian, who went out of his way to search old maps fur me.
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