Connecticut’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary was an uncertain prospect until a recent flurry of private philanthropy, but it opened this week with modest support from the state amid shrinking federal spending on cultural and historical endeavors.
Yes, there will be fireworks on the Fourth of July in Bushnell Park in Hartford, a tall ship will sail into Greenwich Harbor in June, and New London and Groton will burn Benedict Arnold in effigy in September. But many of the activities will be driven by local historical groups struggling for funding.
“It’s nice if we can get $1 million to do tall ships or do fireworks, and I support those things totally,” said Andy Horowitz, a University of Connecticut professor who serves as the state historian and acted as master of ceremonies for the kickoff this week at the Old State House.
But he sees little of the public funding for research and preservation so evident during America’s last big birthday bash, the Bicentennial in 1976. Horowitz said that is a legacy of the Bicentennial, albeit one that is fading.
“In the Bicentennial in 1976, the federal government funded and created the infrastructure for state and local history that we still use today,” Horowitz said. “A majority of historical societies open today were founded in the Bicentennial era.”
Former Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, who was appointed by Gov. Ned Lamont to chair the America 250/CT Commission, acknowledged difficulty in getting funding or significant attention for the celebration.
“It feels like on Jan. 1 this year, everybody woke up and said, ‘Oh, its 2026!’” she said.
Corporate and private donors have pledged about $3.5 million towards the celebration in Connecticut, with another $250,000 in direct state funding from the Lamont administration, $100,000 from the House speaker’s office and $750,000 in grants administered by the Connecticut Humanities Council.
Merrill feared a flop until Lamont enlisted Francisco Borges, the former state treasurer, to lead a fundraising effort.
“Frank was amazing. He just knows everybody,” she said.
CT Humanities, the nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is administering the effort. Jason Mancini, the executive director, said $2 million of the pledged donations have come in.
The One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress at the behest of President Donald Trump had $150 million for the 250th, Mancini said.
“That’s been a bit of a mess. It was supposed to go towards the America 250 Commission, the national commission that was created by Congress,” Mancini said. “They’ve seen, as I understand, $50 million of that, and then $100 million has gone towards Task Force 250.”
Task Force 250 is the White House group created by an executive order 10 days after Trump took office. It has taken charge of events in Washington D.C., including plans for a triumphal arch and a “Garden of Heroes,” 200 life-sized statutes to be installed on parkland along the Potomac.
“None of the state commissions have seen any of that money,” Mancini said.
At the Old State House this week, all of that went unmentioned. The mood was celebratory and a bit self-congratulatory.
“All right, happy birthday America, right here at the Old State House, almost as old as the country itself,” Lamont said in brief remarks. “And move over Virginia. Move over Boston. This is Connecticut. We were the heart and soul of the founding of this nation, and that’s what this celebration is going to be all about.”
A placard outside the Old State House marks the spot where George Washington met with the French military leaders, Comte de Rochambeau and Marquis de LaFayette, in 1780 to form the alliance that would bring down the British at Yorktown a year later. They had a further meeting in Wethersfield.
Connecticut was known as the “provisions state” during the Revolution, a supplier of food and arms, often moved by privateers who sheltered in inlets and harbors along its coast. It made Connecticut a target for British raiders, who attacked and burned a supply depot in Danbury. Benedict Arnold, then a continental general, led an attack on the redcoats in Ridgefield as they withdrew to the sea.
But Connecticut lacks the colonial cache of Massachusetts and its revolutionary figures like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, both of whom have been named by the White House as slated for inclusion in the Garden of Heroes. No Connecticut figure from the colonial era is on the list, not even Roger Sherman.
Sherman is a founding father from Litchfield, the only person to sign all four of what are considered the “great state papers of the United States”: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
At the Old State House, Horowitz betrayed a subtle subversive streak as the master of ceremonies at the 250th kickoff, sharing anecdotes underscoring a common complaint of some in the humanities — that the U.S. has lost interest in funding the research necessary to update and illuminate its history.
He relayed an account of the New Yorkers who listened to a reading of the five-day old Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776, then tore down a gilded lead statute of King George III astride a horse.
“They hauled it to the home of Oliver and Laura Wolcott in Litchfield, where they and other Connecticut townspeople melted the statue down and recast it as 42,000 musket balls for the cause of democracy,” Horowitz said. “Now I tell that story today because it reminds me that history isn’t meant to stay up on a pedestal. History is the creation of the future out of the past.”
He also told the overlooked story of Lemuel Haynes, born illegitimate in what is now West Hartford, the result of a tryst between a white woman and a Black man. He was raised as an indentured servant by a family that educated him, served in the revolutionary militia and became the first ordained Black minister in the U.S.
It is a story in which a historian, Ruth Bogin of Pace University, also is a hero. In 1983, while researching a book on egalitarian ideology, she found one of Haynes’ sermons in a box at the Houghton Library at Harvard. It was titled, “Liberty Further Extended.”
“In 1776, Haynes had written this,” Horowitz said, “and I quote: ‘What is precious to one man is precious to another, and what is irksome or intolerable to one man is so to another, considered a law of nature. Therefore we may reasonably conclude that liberty is equally as precious to a Black man as it is to a white one, and bondage equally as tolerable to the one as to the other.’”
“I share it today to say this: We can always discover new things about the past, and doing so can transform how we understand ourselves in the present,” Horowitz said. “In this case, I think it reminds us that the Golden Rule has always been radical.”
Haynes was a pastor in Torrington for three years, a Black man leading a white congregation, as he would later do for the majority of his life in Vermont. Horowitz said the story of Haynes and his sermon were inspirational.
“I hope we can also take inspiration from the historian who kept digging for new truths, from the audiences who listened to Lemuel Haynes,” he said.
Those are stories that Merrill appreciates.
“There’s always a temptation at a moment like this to go back to the tried and true, you know, dressing up like Benjamin Franklin and so forth, and reenacting things and retelling those stories we all know,” she said. “But it’s also a moment we can start to tell stories that maybe haven’t been told or haven’t been told well enough.”
In an interview, Horowitz said Lamont’s complaint that Connecticut gets short shrift to Massachusetts reflects not only the Bay State’s early role in the revolution but in documenting it. He also suggested that UConn might benefit from funding for a colonial historian.
“The great irony of Massachusetts history is that what happened in Massachusetts was important, but really what happened is that for a century, Harvard was one of the few universities that taught history, and they had a bunch of people who were America’s most important historians, by dint of being some of the only few,” Horowitz said.
In other words, they told their story.
“And they researched their ancestors and neighbors, and they said, ‘These are the most important people in American history.’ And so they gave us these people. And now everyone sort of regards it as an axiomatic truth,” Horowitz said. “But if Yale had been doing that, then you wouldn’t be thinking as much about John Adams.
“You’d be thinking a lot more about Roger Sherman.”
