To celebrate New Haven’s 387th birthday last week, we plunked some waxy riddles onto an early colonial history-themed cake and invited you to blow them out, with each of three lucky solvers set to win a $50 gift card to a restaurant of their choice.
Those winners will be notified today and announced in a forthcoming edition. Meantime, let’s reveal the answers and see how everyone did.
The first riddle—“Meeting in the middle, between a crypt and a steeple, this flock flies straight to the Colony’s first people”—points to the historical heart of the city: Center Church on the Green, originally named First Church of Christ. Established in 1639 before the New Haven Colony was even called, as it first was, “Newhaven,” Center Church embodies a lineage of worship that descends, unbroken, from the city’s English Puritan founders. The church’s famous basement crypt preserves numerous colonial-era graves, and its iconic steeple draws our eyes toward the heavens, as it has since the current meetinghouse was completed in 1814.
For those who found the answer to the second riddle—“This long water body still remembers the clan of the earlier ‘people of the long water land’”—it may have started with a Google search for the quoted phrase, which is more or less the English translation of “Quinnipiac.” That’s the name of the indigenous tribe that met and treated with the settlers upon their arrival, and the long body of water that still remembers them is, of course, the Quinnipiac River.
The next riddle—“The first reverend drank, but not to excess; he’d order just one at this tribute, I’d guess”—pings New Haven’s founding minister, John Davenport, and seeks an answer that’s both a tribute to Davenport and a place where you can buy a drink. The answer, of course, is John Davenport’s, the 19th-floor restaurant at the Omni Hotel. The riddle also dispels a common misunderstanding of history, in which the notoriously pious Puritans are assumed to have been teetotalers.
Speaking of historical confusion, the fourth riddle—“Our square of squares laid three by three was America’s first example of these”—was built on a locally popular premise that isn’t, apparently, correct. The intended answer, which we’re still accepting for the sake of the contest, is “planned cities” or similar (e.g. “city grids”), a claim that gains its credence from a 1641 design laying out the tic-tac-toe grid that still shapes downtown. But at least one other future American city had already, reportedly, laid out a series of contiguous orthogonal streets lined with buildings and infrastructure, first in 1572 and again in 1597: St. Augustine, Florida. Founded in 1565 by the Spanish, not the English, and joined to the United States with the induction of Florida in 1845, St. Augustine was wholly or partially destroyed numerous times throughout its history—by pirates, hurricanes, fires, imperial conflicts and invasive demolition and construction—which does raise the possibility that New Haven’s grid, being fundamentally unchanged for nearly 400 years, could be America’s oldest continually surviving city plan.
Okay, onto the fifth riddle: “From the ashes of a founder’s collegiate dream, this grammar-turned-prep school first rose on the Green.” Almost every respondent nailed the solution: Hopkins School, founded in 1660 on the New Haven Green using a posthumous gift of funds from former Connecticut Colony governor Edward Hopkins. It was John Davenport, however, who had tried and failed to establish a college in New Haven, and it was Davenport who secured and shepherded the funds toward establishing the grammar school.
The answer to the sixth and final riddle—“~200 years after the Colony perished, this Society took up its story to cherish”—was also widely identified: the New Haven Colony Historical Society. Founded in 1862, 197 years after the Connecticut Colony officially absorbed New Haven, it’s now better known—and acceptably so for the sake of answering the riddle—as the New Haven Museum.
Now that the answers have been revealed, keep an eye out for a possible winner’s notice today. And, win or lose, to everyone who riddled with us: We hope you had fun with it, and thanks for playing!
Written by Dan Mims.
