The Acorn Club was
founded in 1899 by a group of young men interested in Connecticut history and
the early books and manuscripts that reveal that history. Among the founders
were librarians, book collectors, genealogists and a heraldic artist. Within
two years, the membership had grown to 25, the prescribed limit, and included a
lawyer, scholars and business leaders. Among them were businessman Lucius A.
Barbour, who sponsored the Barbour collection of vital records at the State
Archives and Yale scholar Hiram Bingham, the future governor of Connecticut. Librarians,
college presidents and professors from Yale, Wesleyan, Trinity, and the
University of Connecticut have continued to play an important role in the club’s
activities, along with publishers, collectors and the State Historian.
The first publication
was a rare colonial imprint of Samuel Stone’s A Short Catechism, printed
by Samuel Green in Boston in 1684 for John Wadsworth of Farmington. It had been
written by Stone for the guidance of his First Church, Hartford congregation
and was one of only two copies of the pamphlet known at the time. One
hundred facsimile copies were produced, to be sold at two dollars per copy.
Appropriately for the Charter Oak State, the pamphlet bore a wood engraving of an acorn, created by William F. Hopson of New Haven, who was to become a club member in the first year.
In the following years, the club has produced 37 publications through the efforts of 150 members who have served over the course of the last century, gathering together and publishing significant primary source materials about the history of the state.
Appropriately for the Charter Oak State, the pamphlet bore a wood engraving of an acorn, created by William F. Hopson of New Haven, who was to become a club member in the first year.
In the following years, the club has produced 37 publications through the efforts of 150 members who have served over the course of the last century, gathering together and publishing significant primary source materials about the history of the state.
Mission Statement: Its purpose shall be to issue either as
reprints or as original publications rare printed materials and unpublished manuscripts
of antiquarian, historical, or literary interest relating to Connecticut either
directly or indirectly.
A History of the Acorn Club
By Richard Buel, 2022
The five men who met together on May 19, 1899 in the Connecticut Historical Society to establish the Acorn Club gave the new organization a decidedly youthful character. The oldest by a dozen years was only 46, while the average age of the first slate of four officers was 29. They quickly recruited a prominent exception, Charles J. Hoadly, to be the club’s first honorary member. As state librarian, Hoadly had edited eleven volumes of the Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut as well as two volumes of the State Records, in addition to producing numerous essays on the history of Connecticut and its eastern neighbors. When Hoadly died a year later, the club’s executive committee committed the organization to issuing a memoir of his life and career, a pledge that W. N. C. Carlton, the club’s first secretary redeemed in 1902.
The club found it easy to recruit and maintain a group of twenty-five members its original constitution called for from an array of professional men who were both interested in the state’s past and loved books. Over the years members have included officials like the director of the Connecticut Historical Society, the state librarian, and the state historian, together with a wide range of Connecticut history buffs, including those associated with the publishing industry, academic historians, college librarians, lawyers, and even the occasional artist, doctor, clergyman, and college president. Several club members have achieved civic prominence and one, Hiram Bingham, even served briefly as the state’s governor before being elected a U.S. Senator. Over the years it has been predominantly a men’s organization, but women are currently approaching parity with men in the membership, and the club’s most recent past president was a woman with a background in publishing.
The original constitution stated that the organization’s function was to publish important texts bearing on Connecticut’s past. No distinction appears to have been intended between manuscripts produced by members, previously unpublished manuscripts, and the reissuing of previously published works. (For a listing of all publications, some of which are available online, visit our Publications page.)
The club’s first venture was to reprint 100 copies of Samuel Stone’s Short Catechism (Boston, 1684) in 1899. At the time only two copies of the original were known to exist. But the following year the members showed how willing the founders were to cultivate different genres by issuing three imprints. In addition to Hoadly’s essay, The Hiding of the Charter, it also reprinted Albert Bates’s A Bibliographic List of Connecticut Laws from the earliest issues to 1836 and published Lion Gardner’s previously unpublished Relation of the Indian Wars. It maintained that pace through 1902, issuing first a reprint of Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Colony to 1702, followed by W. DeBosse Love’s essay on Thomas Short: Connecticut’s First Printer, followed in turn by yet another Hoadly essay on The Warwick Patent, in addition to Carlton’s memoir about him.
As Hoadly’s influence receded after his death, however, the flow of club publications began to slow. A bibliography of books printed in Connecticut between 1709 and 1800 appeared in 1904 followed by the publication of the diary of a Connecticut soldier during the French and Indian war in 1906. Then eight years elapsed before the appearance of the first of four publications between 1914 and 1917. Thereafter, the two World Wars along with the Great Depression seriously interrupted the club’s publishing activities until 1949. During that three-decade interval, only four imprints appeared, the most important being Ephraim Kirby’s reports of cases adjudicated in the state’s superior court between 1785 – 1789 from a hitherto unpublished manuscript.
The drought only came to an end in 1949 when Thompson Harlow, then Librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society, started printing some of the unpublished responses of Connecticut towns to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science’s 1800 request for statistical information about them in the historical society’s possession. Between 1949 and 1961 eighteen of them appeared, though in no discernable order and without any editorial input beyond a brief biography of each compiler. A thirty-eight-year interval followed that flurry of activity in which only three publications bore the club’s imprint.
If output was any measure of its vitality, the club clearly needed to find a new direction. That was provided in the mid-1990s by Harlow’s successor, Christopher Bickford. Bickford discovered that the Connecticut Historical Society possessed a substantial body of literature by visitors to Connecticut about the state over the centuries. Because of its uneven quality, the entire membership was recruited to review this literature with an eye to selecting its best representatives. Connecticut Observed (1999) was then assembled from member-selected excerpts from the titles that had made the cut. The project attracted the interest of Bruce Fraser, then director of the Connecticut Humanities Council and a club member, who offered to have the council assume half the costs of the project in return for half the imprints. The arrangement allowed the club for the first time to realize a substantial profit from one of its projects, selling all 500 copies from its share of the press run.
This financial success led the club to embark on a succession of similar, thematic issues constructed in a similar fashion, and an agreement with Wesleyan University Press in 2007 to include future club imprints in its Connecticut History series reinforced this new trajectory. In the past twenty years three of the club’s four publications have followed Bickford’s model. Original Discontents (2007) collected selections from contemporary pamphlets and newspapers about the drafting of the state’s 1818 Constitution. The Peopling of New Connecticut (2011) pursued a similar course in relation to the settling of the Western Reserve between 1800 and the 1830s. Club member Ron Spencer masterfully selected and edited the diary of Civil War Navy Secretary Gideon Welles in A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln's Cabinet (2014). And most recently Country Acres and Cul de Sacs (2018) drew on selections from Connecticut Circle, a magazine that appeared between 1938 and 1952, to present a comprehensive picture of life in the state from the great hurricane of 1938 through World War II and its immediate aftermath.
Unfortunately, the scale of this last project also led to costs exceeding those of any project the club had previously undertaken, which consumed the nest egg it had enjoyed for many years. While the club’s new circumstance will force it to devise more modest publishing ventures in the future, the participation of so many of its members in the Country Acres and Cul-de-Sac project suggests that it will have plenty of support in doing so.