Two key figures have shaped the story of Michael’s Dairy since its origin on the banks of New London Harbor. Chronologically, the lives of Alfred Mitchell and Michael Buscetto overlapped by not even one full year. Culturally, they had even less in common. Yet their stories are forever linked through the Dairy.

Michael Buscetto guided the transition of Michael’s Dairy from a family run dairy farm into today’s popular community ice cream destination on the campus of Mitchell College. He was the son of Italian immigrants Bernardino William Buscetto and Maria Rosario Buscetto. Bernardino and Rosie (as she was familiarly known) arrived in the United States from Morra Irpino, Italy on Feb. 20, 1908, on the immigrant ship Prinzess Irene. After a short stay in Westchester County. New York, the Buscettos moved their young family to New London County around 1914.

Bernardino was employed as a groundskeeper at the Harkness Estate in Waterford. He worked there until his death in 1939. In the 1920s, Bernardino and Rosie Buscetto purchased a home at 109 Thames St. in New London. By that time, they had four children. Their second child, Michael, was intrigued by the small herd of cattle maintained on the Mitchell Dairy Farm around the corner on Montauk Avenue. While still in grade school, Michael was hired as an assistant to dairy superintendent Roland Allen.

Michael Buscetto learned the dairy business from Roland Allen. Allen was born in 1898 and raised on his family’s dairy farm in Pomfret, Vermont. By 1920, the Alfred Mitchell family recruited Allen to apply his farming skills to the supervision of the growing Mitchell dairy farm. By that time, the dairy had combined operations with the Mitchell family’s larger farm holdings in Salem, known as the Woodbridge Farm.

City directories from the early 1930s show that the Mitchell family, with Roland Allen’s assistance, built the farm on Montauk Avenue into a diverse business operating under the name Mumford Dairy. The enterprise included not only a milk bottling operation, but an area-wide delivery service for milk, cream, butter and eggs and for a short time it operated a retail dairy store at 424 Montauk Ave. When Roland Allen left the farm in 1935 to open up a market of his own in Barnstable on Cape Cod, Michael Buscetto was ready to succeed him as dairy manager.

In contrast to Michael Buscetto’s modest origins, Alfred Mitchell came from wealth. Alfred Mitchell was born in 1832 to the Rev. Alfred Mitchell and Lucretia Mumford Mitchell of Norwich. Lucretia was the daughter of Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge and the great-granddaughter of Captain Nathaniel Shaw, the father of the Continental Navy. The Mitchell, Woodbridge, and Shaw families were well-respected in New London County and known throughout the United States.

Alfred attended Yale University but did not finish due to frequent illness. Alfred was a man of ambition, romance and adventure. He invested in the whaling business and spent several years in that pursuit in Hawaii and the South Pacific.

When the Civil War broke out, he learned that many of the men he had grown up with in the Norwich area were forming and joining military companies to support the war effort. Alfred began the long journey home and upon his arrival enlisted in Connecticut’s 13th Regiment, Company K in February 1862. He was commissioned as a captain.

Company K saw action at Georgia Landing, Irish Bend and the assaults on Port Hudson. Alfred’s letters home indicate that he was engaged in each campaign.

Following the war years, Alfred embarked upon new business ventures including goldmining in California and developing coffee plantations in Guatemala, neither of which met with success. He also established a ship chandlery in New York City, and while his New York City enterprise appears to have met with no more success than his earlier efforts, his time in New York did prove to be fruitful.

While in New York he called upon Annie Olivia Tiffany, daughter of the wealthy Charles Lewis Tiffany. The Tiffanys were manufacturers from Windham County before Charles Lewis Tiffany moved to New York City and opened his small stationery and gift shop that eventually grew into the most famous jewelry company in the world. The Tiffanys knew the Mitchells from their Connecticut days, and that connection paved the way for Alfred to call on Annie although he was 12 years her senior.

Things went well for Alfred with Annie, but not so well with her family. Annie wrote to her Aunt Lydia about Alfred, “I think he is the most interesting person I have ever listened to.” Her aunt immediately responded, “I know he is just the kind of man to fascinate a young lady to whom he took a fancy…(but)…I don’t believe he is the right kind of man for you to enjoy a happy married life with. He is too cynical, too whimsical, and I am not sure but too selfish…there is my warning.”

Annie Olivia Tiffany did not heed her aunt’s warning. While Annie could have been the darling of New York society, she was not drawn to that lifestyle. Alfred offered her an alternative that was more pragmatic and connected to the natural world. They were married on April 27, 1871.

Alfred Mitchell had become familiar with the large estates rising from the west bank of the Thames River at New London Harbor during his childhood. His parents, Rev. Alfred Mitchell and Lucretia Mumford Mitchell, owned the Manmonook Farm, also called the Fort Farm, adjacent to Fort Trumbull. Although it was not Alfred but his brother Louis who inherited that property upon Lucretia’s death in 1843, Alfred was no doubt familiar with it and the other properties in the area.

The young couple first resided in New York but began to spend more and more time in New London. They purchased several large parcels along the harbor between Pequot Avenue and Ocean Avenue. These parcels included 9 acres from the George Rogers estate near Greens Harbor in 1879, and parcels from the Coit, Geer and Spaulding families in 1880.

At the same time, Alfred and Annie repurchased and restored the Woodbridge Farm and Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge house in Salem, ancestral home of the Mumfords.

It appears that Alfred and Annie first engaged in dairy farming to provide milk and other dairy products for their young family and staff, but over time the dairy operation expanded. City of New London tax records reveal that in 1910, the family owned eight head of “neat cattle.” That number rose to 10 in 1911, the year of Alfred’s death.

The number of cattle maintained on the Montauk Avenue dairy farm was reduced over the years to five in 1920 and six in 1925. But the reduction in the number of cattle did not indicate a reduction in dairy activity. To the contrary, the years between Alfred’s death in 1911 and Annie’s death in 1937 were a period of rapid growth, as first Roland Allen and then Michael Buscetto supervised and advanced farm operations.

Most of the livestock was kept at the much larger Woodbridge Farm in Salem, but the milk processing was carried out in New London. The combined operations were known as the Mumford Dairy, a name chosen to honor Alfred’s maternal ancestors.

It was also during this period that ice cream was first added to the offerings of the dairy. City directories indicate that ice cream was offered as a product at the dairy in 1934, while Roland Allen was still the supervisor. Buscetto family history, however, maintains that the idea to produce ice cream was the brainchild of Michael Buscetto solely.

As the decades passed, and milkmen and home dairy delivery services gave way to supermarkets, the ice cream production and sales side of the business flourished. Michael’s Dairy provided part-time work to many New London teens, and it became a favorite place to meet up on a summer night.

The Mitchell land in New London was sold by Annie Mitchell to a family run corporation in 1931 and, through a series of land transactions, was acquired by the New London Junior College on Jan. 10, 1938. New London Junior College then leased the dairy operations to Michael Buscetto in April 1939.

In 1942, New London Junior College sold some of the property it had acquired from the Mitchell family, including the land that contained the dairy, but the deed makes clear that the sale was subject to the existing lease to Michael Buscetto. In 1943 Michael Buscetto purchased the dairy outright. Michael Buscetto Jr. learned the business from his father and assumed more and more responsibility in running the dairy over the years.

Michael Buscetto Sr. died on June 27, 1989, after devoting his entire life to his family and the dairy.

In 1950, the trustees of New London Junior College changed the institution’s name to Mitchell College to honor Alfred Mitchell and his family. In 2016, Mitchell College repurchased Michael’s Dairy from the Buscetto family, and the college continues its operation as a retail ice cream shop to this day.

Researched, written, and edited by students in the New London Stories class at Mitchell College, Christopher Kervick, Instructor, Thames at Mitchell Program, Fall Semester 2022. Writers/researchers were Karl Andern, Artem Bogatikov, Humza Boghari, Mark Comstock, Paige Cornetta, Ruth Derezinski, Christian Frazier, Joseph Garry, Alexander Genden, Mia Larsen, Dev Mahesh, Colin Monninger, Jackson Rappel, Lucas Rydel, Zachary Stock, Jessica Sylvestre, Melissa Tucker.