Devil's Hopyard

IF CONNECTICUT PLACE-NAMES give any sort of an accurate indication, nobody ever beat the Devil for leaving a calling card all over the map of the state. With a half-dozen or so such geographical locations, there are legends explaining that the name came about because the Devil either visited or lived there, while for the rest, the devilish address seems to have stuck because they look like spots where the Evil One would feel right at home. But those who know Connecticut history will understand where in the devil such an extraordinary number of diabolical designations really came from. For no people ever had a more devil-may-care attitude than those zealous old Puritans who trooped out of the Boston area in the 1630s to establish a worldly paradise in the Connecticut River valley. Those founders and the true believers who followed them were convinced that the Devil might really be lurking behind every bush -- and that it paid to advertise his presence and power. Give or take a few places -- it's easy to overlook the Prince of Darkness -- there appear to be some thirty-four Connecticut locations which either bear the Devil's name or nick-name (no pun intended), or are identified with his traditional home stomping ground. Leading the list of places named for the Devil are Dens with five, followed closely by Backbones with four, and Footprints, Rocks and Kitchens with two each. The entire list includes: Devil's Den (Plainfield,* Weston, Monroe, Franklin, Sterling) Devil's Backbone (Bethlehem, Plymouth, Bristol, Cheshire) Devil's Footprint (Montville, Branford) * See separate chapter in this book. Devil's Rock (Old Saybrook, Portland) Devil's Kitchen (Burlington, Thomaston) Devil's Hopyard (East Haddam) Devil's Meditation (shared by Middlebury and Watertown) Devil's Island (in the Quinebaug River above Danielson) Devil's Gap (Brookfield) Devil's Gorge (Weston) Devil's Jump (Derby) Devil's Plunge (Morris) Devil's Pulpit (Hamden) Devil's Mouth (Redding) Devil's Wharf (Deep River) Devil's Dripping Pan (Branch Brook) Devil's Belt (all of Long Island Sound girdling Connecticut) When two Satan's Kingdoms (New Hartford, Bethany), a Satan's Ridge (New Hartford), a Tophet Ravine (Roxbury), a Hell Hole (Simsbury), a Hell's Hollow (Plainfield) and a Purgatory Brook are added to the roll of satanic spots, it becomes pretty obvious that in Connecticut's topography, anyway, the Devil never took the hindmost. Of all the places in Connecticut bearing the Devil's name, the one with the greatest variety of legendary etymologies is the 860-acre state park in East Haddam known as the Devil's Hopyard. Here, the combination of booming Chapman's Falls, pothole-scarred rocks, the unearthly quiet in the dark glen below the falls and the steep, cave-pocked cliffs flanking turbulent Eight Mile River makes a likely setting for the growth and development of legends. Then, too, the "hellish" appearance of the Hopyard's gorge was probably enhanced for the early English settlers by local Indian tribes, which are said to have used Devil's Hopyard for religious rites and powwows. It probably wouldn't have taken much to convince those devout Puritans that the Indians they saw dancing around a midnight campfire were really evil demons paying their respects to the Head Man. The "hopyard" part of Devil's Hopyard evidently has solid foundation in historical fact. At some time prior to 1800, there was a malt house near a small tributary of Eight Mile River called Malt House Brook, on the farm of one George Griffin. Although the malt house was abandoned prior to 1814, during the period of its operation, Griffin grew hops in a small clearing -- the "hopyard" -- beside the road running through the area now called Devil's Hopyard. But the Devil's presence in this hopyard is not so easily explained. The most widely-circulated legend tells of the many times Satan has been seen, sitting on a huge boulder at the top of Chapman's Falls, playing his violin while the evil witches of Haddam stirred a "hell broth for a charm of powerful trouble" in the cauldron-like potholes formed in the rocks below. Another story reports that a lone traveler, while walking through the Hopyard one night, saw some weird, shapeless forms leaping from ledges and trees near the falls. Later, these phantoms accosted the terrified man, who then beat a hasty retreat to the nearest tavern, where he related his experience to anyone who would listen. Some say that the traveler had spent too much time at the tavern before he took his ramble through the Hopyard. Another story, one which demonstrates the folk inclination to rationalize the unexplainable through legend-making, claims that the "Devil" portion of Devil's Hopyard is a corruption of the surname Dibble. According to this still-lively tradition, there once was a hopyard located along Eight Mile River operated by a man named Dibble, who had a farm near Chapman's Falls. Dibble, they say, was a notorious bootlegger, who combined his home-grown hops with many secret ingredients to make a potent but illegal brew. This he sold to thirsty locals, including any teenager who asked. It is said that one Haddam mother who found her young son in a drunken stupor induced by too many draughts of Dibble's delight called the brewmaster "a devil" for keeping the boy supplied with spirits. Also, Dibble had a reputation for throwing festive, if not riotous parties at his home, where young and old alike helped the generous host reduce his inventory of bathtub beer. As a corruptor of youth, then, he was in the same league as Old Nick, and "going down to Dibble's hopyard" came to have a connotation which local parents understood all too well. The fact is, however, there is no record of anyone named Dibble ever having lived within thirty miles of the Devil's Hopyard. Yet another diabolical story connected with the Devil's Hopyard concerns the wayward son of a Congregational minister in Millington, the nearest village to the Hopyard reserve. Although the remarkable saga of Abraham Brown was apparently concocted in the fertile imagination of Judge Hiram Willey (his "romance" appeared in four successive issues of The Connecticut Valley Advertiser, in the summer of 1909), it has circulated so long in oral tradition that it now qualifies as a true folk legend. Today, those who relate the tale, originally entitled "Weird and Romantic Devil's Hopyard, A Story of Religious Bigotry A Century and A Quarter Ago and When Witches Hovered Near," are probably unaware of its literary origin. Anyway, today's legend-tellers give every indication that they believe Judge Willey's fiction to be historically accurate, and offer it frequently as an explanation for the "Devil's" presence in "Devil's Hopyard." According to this well-known story, there once was a Millington parson named Obadiah Brown, who lived north of the Devil's Hopyard. He had two sons: Rufus, a paragon of Puritan virtue, and Abraham, an unholy terror because he did not fear God and professed a kind of fatalistic belief. "If I am foreordained to be damned," said Abraham Brown, "I shall be damned. And if I am foreordained to be saved, I shall be saved -- and nothing I can do will prevent one or the other." Conducting his life on the basis of that creed, Abraham developed early into quite a free spirit. He sat in the Millington meeting house during Sunday services and, with motions and grimaces, imitated his father in the pulpit, much to the delight of the children in the congregation. Once, he was observed spitting down from his front row seat in the gallery upon the bald head of a deacon. He even broke into the church one day, stole the sheepskin cover off the pulpit Bible and wore it under his clothing to protect his backside from floggings administered by the schoolmaster. Since the church had been securely locked, it was thought at first that the theft of the sheepskin had been the work of the Devil. In fact, one parishioner said that on the night the sheepskin disappeared, he had seen in the moonlight a strange-looking creature fly from the window over the gallery. "It looked very much like Granny Whipple," said the observer, referring to a local woman with a reputation for being a witch. But the investigation into the theft finally came to an end when the missing sheepskin fell out of Abraham Brown's britches one day, during a particularly vigorous thrashing by his teacher. Convicted of stealing the holy coverlet, Abraham was sentenced to a year in jail. Here, so that he might finally learn to read and redeem his soul at the same time, he was given a primer which illustrated each letter of the alphabet in a pious little precept: A In Adam's fall / We sinned all. B Thy life to mend, / God's Book attend. However, after Abraham had completed his prison term, the jailers found written on the wall of his cell a bit of graffiti which suggested that the youth may have learned well how to read and write, but that he had not been completely rehabilitated: All men sinned in Adam, Some in Hell and some in HADDAM, The chief end of man -- Keep all you've got and get all you can. When Abraham came home from jail, his father was anxious to hear about his son's jailhouse redemption. Instead, Abraham told the stern minister that he had enjoyed reading the silly catechism and Bible stories to the Indians who shared the lockup with him. Moreover, he said, he agreed with the Indians' opinion of Puritan doctrine: "Ugh," they said, "heap big lies." Abraham also told his father that he thought the Indians' concept of a happy hunting ground was far superior to his father's vision of Hell and that the Indians' ideas about the future life, in general, were more rational than those of the framers of the Westminster Catechism. Upon hearing such heresy, Obadiah Brown turned Abraham out of his house, ordering him never to return. Abraham sought refuge in the home of a neighbor, Squire Robert Shaw. Here he met a man from Cuba who was about to leave for Havana. When, the Cuban offered to take Abraham with him, the homeless youth accepted his offer. Before they departed, however, the Cuban suggested that he and Abraham have one parting bit of fun with the Rev. Brown. So, having obtained from Squire Shaw a bull's hide with the horns still attached, the Cuban wrapped it around him and, with young Brown beside him in the wagon, drove furiously past the house of Obadiah Brown, shouting and whooping wildly. Since Abraham disappeared shortly thereafter, the legend became current that the wayward lad had finally been taken by the Hopyard devil and carried off to the nether regions, there to fry forever for his sins. Not only did the story carry a clear warning to all the secret sinners in the area, but it also proved to the superstitious local farmers that the Devil was alive and well -- and waiting, in person -- down at the Hopyard. While the place-name legends about Devil's Hopyard dominate Connecticut's traditional devil lore, they are by no means the only tales about diabolical locations which circulate in the state. For example, they tell the story down around Portland about the young Mattabasett Indian who incurred the wrath of the Evil One by constantly disrupting the powwows with his incessant bragging and mockery of the gods. It seems the Indians held their powwows in a meadow beside the Connecticut River, near a spot in the river where there was a "blow-hole." Sometimes the water just seemed to blow up from the bottom of the river through the hole, throwing a great geyser into the air. Well, one day during one of the Mattabasetts' gatherings, the boastful brave was again making fun of the gods. And even though a chief warned him to stop lest the Evil Spirit come and snatch him away, he refused. He also told the old man that the young Indians no longer believed in spirits, good or bad. He even ordered the elder to stop talking such nonsense! At that the Devil exploded. Furiously angry at the young man for no longer believing in him, the Evil One came roaring out of the blow hole and grabbed the proud brave. The youth squirmed in his grasp, but the Devil jumped back into the water with him, and they both disappeared down the deep hole in the river. So hot with anger had the Evil Spirit been, they say, that his burning foot left a scorched print in the rock from which he had jumped. The Indian braggart never returned, but the Evil Spirit's cloven footprint can still be seen today on the boulder they call Devil's Rock. Devil's Footprint in Montville, located a few hundred feet behind the old Mohegan meeting house, is a rock with an imprint similar to the one on Portland's Devil's Rock. But the story explaining its origin is different. According to an old Mohegan Indian legend, the Evil One, who used to live in the Montville area, occasionally felt a need to leap over Long Island Sound to Montauk on Long Island, to visit his numerous subjects there. He used the Montville boulder, a rock several feet high and three feet across, as a handy launching pad, but because such force was exerted as he lifted off, he gradually dug in the rock a crevice about ten inches deep, in the shape of a cloven hoof -- the Devil's footprint. Incidentally, this story is true, because over at Montauk there is a similar boulder with an identical imprint. It's obviously the spot where the Evil Spirit began his return trips to Connecticut. A "footprint" in a stone found in the Weston valley called Devil's Den has given rise to several origin-legends. One tradition has it that when the Devil walked the earth in that area, he stepped on soft clay, leaving a footprint-like indentation too large to have been made by man. When the clay hardened into stone, they say, the footprint was permanently preserved. However, another legend claims that the Devil's Den valley of Weston was once so full of snakes, wolves, bears and other frightful creatures that colonial settlers in the area associated the place with the Devil's menagerie -- and fearfully told their children to avoid the place at all costs. Both versions of the story are still known today. Unlike the traditions associated with places named for the Devil, legend and history blend together in the accounts which explain the origin of Satan's Kingdom and Satan's Ridge, both in New Hartford. According to legend, Satan once used the rocky gorge of the Farmington River bearing his name as his exclusive playground. Here, he and his band of lesser demons gamboled away their days and nights, until the day finally came when the Angel Gabriel blew them all away with one blast from his golden trumpet. Gabriel and the good angels had decided that the rugged area was just too lovely to be cluttered up with demonic denizens. Whether the tale of Gabriel's environmental beautification program is true or not is hard to say, but according to the historical record, the Satan's Kingdom district did, in fact, once serve as a refuge for a scattering of human beings who might easily have been mistaken for devils. Either attracted by the place's name, or -- more likely -- its isolated and inaccessible location, a notorious group of "Indians, Negroes and renegade whites" settled in the Kingdom, in the last years of the eighteenth century. Using their settlement as both home and hideout, the inhabitants ranged the region far and wide, begging, robbing, vandalizing and stealing anything that wasn't nailed down. Before the nest of thieves was finally cleared by law enforcement officers -- Gabriel was not available -- they say that Satan's Kingdom had grown so evil that it was even giving the Devil a bad name. Anyway, the raid may have marked the beginning of the end for the Devil in Connecticut. from Legendary Connecticut by David E. Philips / ISBN 1-880684-05-5 / $17.95

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