Now here’s a tale of romance, death, whaling ships, scandals, questionable medicines and broken-hearted mothers.

The three old buildings up on the hill at the corner of Broad and Williams streets in New London are now a courthouse, city offices and a Methodist church, but, oh, if only all those walls could talk.

When my family moved to this area, those three buildings were part of the old Saint Bernard High School, now located (since 1968) in Uncasville. Students were bused to this high school from all around New London, Groton, Mystic, Westerly, Norwich, Waterford, Niantic and towns in between.

Today, the central Marion Hall as it was called at the time, and the then-St. Albert’s Hall – now a Methodist church – are sadly in need of a great deal of loving care. The old St. Edmund’s Hall is fine – but that’s because it has been completely gutted and modernized inside as a courthouse. Some remember those fine old floors and windows and doors, and all that elaborate interior detail. Now, sadly, mostly gone.

Trudging around these three old buildings a few years ago when pulling together some history on them, it was the guard at the entrance to the State of Connecticut Superior Court building who succumbed to my badgering and scrounged up an exceedingly dusty printout on the building. He decided I looked trustworthy enough to have a look around, so he ushered me through the metal detectors while keeping a wary eye.

I stopped at many a doorway and window to ask questions about the history of the building. Nobody knew anything.

Later, the guard’s small printout took me to scrounging around on the Internet and beyond.

The current Connecticut Superior Court brownstone building was at one time part of the Williams Memorial Institute, a school for girls, built by an astonishingly (for the times) forward-thinking little, old, broken-hearted, but incredibly generous and philanthropic lady.

Harriet Peck Williams was born in 1795. She married during the War of 1812, just when the British Captain Thomas Hardy (of Nelson and Trafalgar fame) had our own illustrious Stephen Decatur (of ‘the-shores-of-Tripoli’ fame) holed up in New London. She married the wealthy militiaman General William Williams, who’d met Napoleon on a trip to Europe (!), and came home to make his money in flour, cotton, and finally, whaling.

Harriet and her husband suffered the loss of several sons as babies, but the last son, Thomas, survived to adulthood and went with his father into the New London whaling business.

They made a fortune. Thomas planned on building a mansion for his bride Amanda on the high New London hill at what is now Broad and Williams.

Thanks to deep research done by former Williams Institute teacher Peter Emanuel, we learn the following: One day, down at the New London harbor after outfitting for an imminent voyage his firm’s whaler the “North Star,” Thomas walked off the ship at day’s end complaining that he had a “heat in the head.” He walked to a local barber and asked to have his head shampooed with cold water.

Alas, to no avail. Within hours, Thomas was dead of “congestion in the brain” – so the death certificate read. He was only 40 and had already buried four of his own baby sons. Amanda, Thomas’ wife, died not long afterwards of “nervous fever.”

And so, mother Harriet, devastated and brokenhearted – having now lost all three of her own sons and then her four grandsons, too – knew there would be no heirs, and none to pass on the Williams name.

Harriet’s Williams Memorial Institute was built with her trust in memory of son Thomas, exactly where he had planned on building his mansion. The institute was a very grand Richardsonian Romanesque building indeed, with turrets, arches, balconies and interior cast iron staircases.

The whole thing was built of granite, slate, ashlar and brownstone, replete with medieval faces looking out from carved capitals. Its third-floor open area was designed for “physical culture” and “symmetrical physical development” – whatever that was.

The institute thrived and was eventually moved in 1954 to the campus of Connecticut College. The brownstone building called the Williams Memorial Institute became St. Edmund’s Hall when St. Bernard High School was established.

Meanwhile, also on the same hill, is what is now the United Methodist Church. This was originally the mansion – now greatly stripped of much magnificence – built just before the start of the Civil War for New London’s mayor, and later Connecticut Congressman and then Senator Jonathan Newton Harris. Harris had made his fortune in a variety of endeavors, including as a grocer, ship chandler, southern cotton and railroad speculator, and finally on “patent” medicines – those purported “remedies” (mostly alcohol and opium) that were sold without the least regard to effectiveness or oversight. The country was crazy for them; the more you took, the better you felt. All, of course, to great detriment, as we know all too well today.

Harris controlled all sales for certain “medicines” west of the Allegheny Mountains. His house on New London’s highest hill was called “The Pain-Killer Villa.”

Harris’ ostentatious mansion (looks surprisingly similar to the Edward King mansion in Newport) was in the radical new Victorian Italianate-Islamic eclectic style, complete with towers, stained glass, gothic tracery, fretwork, Islamic plasterwork, Venetian windows, loggias, triangular jut-outs and an array of competing bracket styles all around it.

From his rooftop tower, Harris could see New London Harbor, and far out to Long Island Sound. His mansion was on every visitor’s tour of the highlights of New London.

Harris became so prosperous and successful he eventually built the huge Mercantile Building still standing in downtown New London on State Street, called the Lena Building for a time afterwards, and Harris Place now.

Harris’ “Pain-Killer Villa” would have been Harriet’s son Thomas’ neighbor, had Thomas ever built his own mansion.

Harris, himself, like the Williams family, was also a very big philanthropist, endowing schools and institutions as far away as Japan. But alas, he became involved in a particularly shocking and scandalous divorce called “the Harris Imbroglio” (think wrangling children, whispering servants, clandestine meetings with officers stationed at Fort Trumbull, horse-drawn carriage ‘assignation,’ ‘maternal imprudence’ and ‘infinite promiscuous kissings’), making the pages of both low- and highbrow newspapers across the country.

They read far worse than the Heard-Depp imbroglio of today.

But I digress….

Today the old Harris Mansion – St. Albert’s Science Hall to Saint Bernard High School students and the Palmer Building for Williams Institute before that – is now used as a church, stripped of many of its fantastical embellishments, dilapidated, and in need of quite a lot of repair, but still resolutely standing – although sorely threatened today and may be sold.

The Williams Memorial Institute grew, taking over the old Harris Mansion – they called it Palmer Building (both buildings are now on the Historic Register), and then built in the 1930s the center of what are the three buildings on the hill today. This center building – actually quite plain by comparison to its neighbors – was called Buell Hall then, after the Williams School’s first president, and later became Marion Hall for Saint Bernard High School.

Saint Bernard moved their boys to Uncasville around 1968 (the girls remained in New London for a while), and Marion Hall and St. Edmund’s Hall were eventually sold off to the state, while the old Harris mansion went to the United Methodist Church.

Harris, by the way, won the divorce case against his wife in 1865, although she had adamant supporters. She, although claiming physical and emotional abuse and much more, had borne eight children for Harris, but lost custody of them all, and was granted no alimony. She died eight years later.

Harris lived 30 years more, remarried, and was buried under the grandest of all the tomb monuments in New London’s Cedar Grove Cemetery.

Oh, imagine the rest of the tales that are not told...

G.S. Casale is president of the Willow Point Homeowners Association.