Silver Lake To Ridge Wildfire; Then By (Bye?) Ben Kennard’s House

No guarantees. Let's go see.

Silver Lake (Peat Works is different name for this place) Meriden, Connecticut. The old way, backroads to find a vantage point. On the Meriden portion, a community. To the lake to watch helicopters dip and carry water to the nearby fire on a ridge; Berlin. Dry, dry as tinder conditions and homes, businesses, interlinked forests, ridge tops.

The route taken on the way back past, Broad Street, Arch Street.

Oh Ben Kennard. Your house now has boarded-up windows now; here's hoping someone will find and love this home again. Soon the structure may be lost; with it the history of you and your Dayton Place stables, excellence.

At the corner of Arch Street and Broad Street, Meriden, CT. Oct. 24, 2024. The former home of the late Ben Kennard, horseman.

About Benjamin Leighton Kennard: Benjamin Leighton Kennard, son of Benjamin Champion Kennard and Justina C. Baldwin, was born in Meriden, New Haven Co., Connecticut on Dec. 22,1878. He died in Meriden on Oct. 17, 1953 and is buried at Walnut Grove Cemetery, Meriden, New Haven Co., Connecticut. He was a horseman and teacher of riding and ran for many years a riding stable on Dayton Place in Meriden.

Publication: Norwich, New London, Connecticut, USA Date: “June 23 1916 HIGH CLASS SADDLE HORSES BOUGHT IN MERIDEN. For the Use of Officers of Troop B of Hartford. Meriden. Conn., June 22. Eleven high class saddle horses were purchased here today by the officers of Troop B of Hartford from B.L.Kennard.”

The animals were of the highest class in New England and were the entire number in Mr. Kennard's stable. They were immediately taken to Hartford, from where they later were ridden to Niantic.

Publication Norwich Bulletin 8/1/1921 Camp Mystic [BL] Kennard riding master of Meriden has again brought his well-trained saddle horses to camp. [Daughter Ellen attended this camp].

Source: Geni.com.

B. C. Kennard, 1889. Made by H. Wales Lines Company. Photograph of Benjamin C. Kennard's Stick style home in Meriden, Connecticut. It is a three story house with a stone foundation, two covered entry porches, two chimneys, and a gabled roof. From: An Historic Record and Pictorial Description of the Town of Meriden, Connecticut: And Men who Have Made It… A Century of Meriden “The Silver City.” (p. 5). Benjamin C. Kennard was the assistant treasurer of the Edward Miller & Co. in Meriden, CT. The City of Meriden Plan of Conservation & Development update, Community Character and Historic Resources (2007) lists the house on the Historic Properties Inventory as located at 684 N. Broad Street. Linked to source, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History eMuseum.

Aero view of Meriden, Connecticut 1918</em> from the Library of Congress, linked to source (incredible details to zoom in on).

Detail and context. Aero view of Meriden, Connecticut 1918 from the Library of Congress, linked to source (incredible details to zoom in on).

Wisps of a story remain from those told by my mother; of riding to the general vicinity up Buckwheat Hill to St. Stanislaus Cemetery from Dayton Place with a group on horses led by Ben Kennard. Her horse, Shadow (?), squabbled with another equine en route over who went first, and in the ruckus, my mother was thrown.

“Baldy (her nickname then; who knows why), you get back on or you'll never ride with me again,” said Kennard. She got back up, walked over and swung up in the saddle.

Imagination stirs words into seeing, in my mind's eye — a young woman (yes in her jodhpurs and riding boots, the shirt there's no details) walking up Arch Street, past the Kennard home most likely, to the stables and then as part of a a small group riding along, across Liberty Street, Meriden, to cross East Main and then to Parker Avenue, up Ann Street to the hill and cemetery once upon a time. Less vehicles, houses. Horses were then not an uncommon sight. Much less vehicles then.

Up on “the hill”–an ornate fence with two gates: One for those on foot, a ladder-like portion and a double width for vehicles. Three hitching posts. No need for the latter now as there was back then. Locally known as the “Indian cemetery” this portion enclosed by a fence and this gateway. More about it, here.

And this, because she also included descriptions of her rides, that the area was swampy, swaths of willows grew in the low-lying areas of Yale Avenue, Parker Avenue.

More to add dimension to a place known long before Europeans set foot on the continent.

“As already noted the whole territory of Meriden was famous for its game and was used by the Indians as a hunting ground. Many localities still preserve names indicative of this fact….  at Swamp, south of the junction of Charles street and Parker avenue; Deer Hill, now called Meeting House or Buckwheat Hill…” — page 59, An Historic Record and Pictorial Description of the Town of Meriden, Connecticut and Men who Have Made It by Charles Bancroft Gillespie, George Munson Curtis · 1906 (available online and fully searchable via Google.)

(Fascinating too, the value of swamp land called “hoppe lots” for material used in making hoops — and the brooks and tributaries named. Wetlands, guessing by the species that thrived there.)

Grateful for many reasons, not the least of which is for my mother's love, stories, awareness. A camera nearly always on hand and used often. Also, my dad for finding and loving her. The late Al Civali relating his riding from home to the less-well-known wild parts of Hubbard Park.

Emily as a young girl in her oldest sister's wedding.

Like stories of Dayton Place and Ben Kennard in Meriden, Connecticut.

Two gates and a stile of a ladder in between. Buckwheat Hill but also known locally as the ‘Indian cemetery' and would like to know why.

Research turns up connections. H. Wales Lines and proximity to another family story thread, this one involves my grandfather losing his wife, then their farm. But he kept their four children together, moved to 10 Park Street in Meriden. Not a great apartment apparently, as related by his oldest daughter, Stella, now gone too. But her tales recorded, distilled to accompany photographs she shared.

While looking at maps (the housing they occupied on Park Street is now gone), noticed how H. Wales Lines Co. is within easy walking distance, just over to State Street.

So much yet to learn. Right here. Now. Write and do not waste time.

10 Park Street, Meriden, CT.


H. Wale Lines and thoughts of a shed on the hill, one of three structures built by my grandfather. How did he find his new home and is this company a link which led to his relocation to the very east side of Meriden? A wilder place with possibilities he grew into reality.

Park Street. Mill Street. Cedar Street. Paternal grandfather and four children lived for a short while on Park Street. Maternal grandfather, a blacksmith working at Chalker & Fenn (“which began as a carriage repair shop in 1886, became the first auto repair business…” thank you Lynne Turdin, you and your work This Week in History so missed) on Mill Street.

H. Wales Lines Company (1864 – 1983) “In 1864, H. Wales Lines and his uncle, Charles Perkins, formed Perkins & Lines, a building company, in Meriden, Connecticut. In 1878, Perkins withdrew from the company, which was renamed H. Wales Lines & Co and was headed by Lines and Henry E. Fairchild. It underwent another name change in 1888, when it became the H. Wales Lines Company, with Lines as the president and treasurer, Henry E. Fairchild as vice-president, and Lewis A. Miller as secretary.

“Throughout its iterations, the firm remained a supplier of wholesale and retail building materials and supplies, and employed contractors, engineers, and draftsmen to realize building plans submitted by architects and engineers.

“In Meriden, many of the town's residences, manufacturing buildings, banks, churches and schools were built by H. Wales Lines Company or one of its predecessors. The company expanded to build all over Connecticut, with buildings, many of them industrial, in New Haven, Naugatuck, Bridgeport, New London, Mystic, and more. Philadelphia, PA, and various towns in New York and New Jersey also employed the building company.

“H. Wales Lines died in 1927, after a long career as a businessman and politician (he served three times as the mayor of Meriden), and was succeeded by his grandson, Wales Lines deBussy, also a politician. DeBussy stepped down to vice-president in 1935. Charles H. Phelps then took over as president. The company dissolved in 1983, after more than 100 years in business as ‘the company that built Meriden.'”

Surfacing now. Blink, blink.

Horses. History.

What is saved, what is gone. Who will remember? Well, the story now writtem, pulled out of memory and accompanied by images, context in digital form now. It exists.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with recent images taken.

“Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.”–Gian Carlo Menotti