Old Lyme to begin celebrating the country's 250th anniversary
Old Lyme — A group has begun work to educate residents about the town's place in the country's 250-year history, its role in the American Revolution, social progress and development of the country's founding ideals.
The town's America 250 Committee is scheduled to launch its website March 15, an auspicious date in town history, said committee member and Selectman Jim Lampos.
March 15 is the birthday of David Ruggles, an abolitionist born 1810 in Lyme, which then encompassed Lyme and Old Lyme. He was the first Black publisher in the country, a founder of the nonviolent civil disobedience movement and associate of Frederick Douglass.
He published books, articles and pamphlets denouncing slavery, opening what was likely the first Black-owned bookstore before a group burned it down. He was a major conductor" of the Underground Railroad, aiding at least 600 Black people to freedom, including Douglass, according to the New England Historical Society.
"We have amazing stories to tell," Lampos said.
"We want our residents to have a lot of pride in the town," added committee member Cheryl Poirier.
The celebration will last through July 4, 2026, Poirier said, and more information on festivities is to come. The town is going to take part in a nationwide event, "Two Lights for Tomorrow" this April, Poirier said. It commemorates Paul Revere's midnight ride warning of the British Army's approach before the battles of Lexington and Concord, both in Massachusetts.
Yet another historical figure from Lyme the group will tell residents about is Stephen Johnson, a pastor and pamphleteer who was a main opponent of England's Stamp Act, which imposed an extra tax on paper materials produced in the colonies, Lampos said.
"Our country is based on an idea, that we're created equal with inalienable rights," Lampos said. "That was first codified in one of Stephen Johnson's pamphlets. The ideology of the Revolution can be traced to Old Lyme.
Poirier said about 100 Lyme troops marched from Connecticut to one of the two first armed conflicts of the American Revolution, the Battle of Lexington, including Black soldiers and men from the Nehantic Tribe. The group also plans to tell residents more about the history of the town's Black residents, and of its precolonial inhabitants, the Nehantic, and of important suffragists and artists the committee says deserve more attention.
The group will have free tours of local landmarks and historic houses, Lampos said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Politico
25 minutes ago
- Politico
Poll shows low-profile New York City comptroller race narrowing in the home stretch
NEW YORK — A new poll shows the race for New York City comptroller tightening, with Justin Brannan narrowing the gap in a contest still led by Mark Levine. And with less than two weeks until the Democratic primary, nearly half of New Yorkers remain undecided in the race to be the city's top fiscal watchdog, according to the poll Brannan's team commissioned and shared in full with POLITICO. It was conducted by Public Policy Polling, and queried 573 likely primary voters between June 6 and 7, with a 4.1 percent margin of error. Levine, the Manhattan borough president, led Brannan — the City Council finance committee chair — 30 percent to 19 percent among likely Democratic voters, according to the poll. That same survey showed state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani leapfrogging Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary. The 11-point gap was smaller than a May 27 survey from Honan Strategy Group that had Levine at 38 percent and Brannan at 13 percent, a shift that left the Brooklyn lawmaker's team feeling bullish. Both surveys found 44 percent of likely voters undecided. 'A race that was once considered locked up is now anything but,' Brannan campaign adviser Alyssa Cass wrote in a campaign memo shared with POLITICO. 'As nearly half the electorate remains undecided, Brannan is the candidate with the most room to grow and the clearest path to an upset.' Brannan's team believes the tides will continue to shift in his favor. They cited the smaller gap that came after 10 days of going on air with a television ad along with a niche stat from their poll: Of voters who had seen Brannan's ads, they preferred him 40 percent to 37 percent. Those viewers, however, made up a small slice of the electorate at 23 percent. And it was unclear how many of those people knew of Levine or his campaign. Levine's camp countered that the polls have consistently shown him ahead of Brannan by double digits. And they touted the endorsement Wednesday night of a major municipal labor group. 'Mark has all the momentum in this race. We just earned the endorsement of the United Federation of Teachers, representing hundreds of thousands of NYC public school educators — adding to the 180-plus elected officials, faith leaders, labor unions and community groups backing our campaign,' Campaign Manager Matt Rubin said in a statement. 'Right now, we're focused on connecting with New Yorkers where they are — on the streets, at subway stops and at their doors.' A person on Levine's team also took issue with the survey methodology, suggesting it over sampled Brannan's home borough of Brooklyn — especially with affluent voters — and under sampled Black voters Levine is doing better with. The Public Policy Polling showed few New Yorkers have barely tuned into the contest: More than half of those surveyed had no opinion about the favorability of the two candidates, and around half of the likely Democratic primary voters had not seen an ad for either. Brannan and Levine were the only two comptroller candidates to qualify for a pair of televised debates, which mainly showcased how little they differ on policy. During their first meeting, they engaged in several back-and-forths over President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, but had a conspicuous aversion to talking about Andrew Cuomo, who at the time had been leading the mayoral Democratic primary in every poll.
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Challenge to Tampa Bay Senate seat revisits how it was created in 2022
The federal courthouse in Tampa on June 11, 2025. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix) Day Three of the federal lawsuit alleging that a Tampa Bay area state Senate district was racially gerrymandered focused in part on how that district was created in 2022. The suit, filed by the ACLU of Florida and the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Clinic at New York University on behalf of three residents of Tampa and St. Petersburg, alleges the Legislature packed Black voters into District 16 to reduce their influence in nearby District 18, in violation of their equal-protection rights. Democrat Darryl Rouson serves in SD 16, while Republican Nick DiCeglie is the incumbent in SD 18. The defendants are Senate President Ben Albritton and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, and their attorneys began their defense on Wednesday, bringing Jay Ferrin back to the witness stand in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa. Ferrin is now a senior adviser to the Florida Senate, but he served as staff director of the Florida Senate Committee on Reapportionment in the fall of 2021, when the districts lines were created. He discussed how he and his staff went about drawing up the Senate districts that year and the guidelines they followed. The reapportionment process beginning that fall was taking place under the guidance of Ray Rodrigues, who chaired the Senate Reapportionment Committee. Defense attorneys aired several Florida Channel video excerpts on Wednesday showing Rodrigues explaining how 'hard lessons were learned' following the Florida Supreme Court's decision in 2015 to throw out the GOP-controlled Legislature's maps after deeming them unlawful under the Fair Districts constitutional amendments adopted by voters in 2010. Rodrigues was insistent that he wanted the 2022 Legislature to conduct itself in such a fashion that the courts would not reject the maps lawmakers would produce. 'This map will withstand a court challenge,' Rodrigues declared on the floor of the Senate. That's what the trial taking place this week will ultimately determine. Ferrin testified that, after his staff created other Senate districts in the Tampa Bay area, there remained about 100,000 residents in Pinellas County who would have to be inserted into another Senate district. (With the population of Florida in 2021 at 21.5 million people, Ferrin said, his staff were tasked to draw approximately 538,438 voters into each of the 40 Senate districts). The resultant SD 16, which encompasses parts of St. Petersburg and Hillsborough County, is similar to the 'benchmark' map created in 2015 that was then known as Senate District 19. Ferrin denied that he was instructed to maintain that same configuration. He also said that under the rules promulgated by Rodrigues, he and his fellow staffers could speak about any new maps only with either the Senate's general counsel or other Senate members — and not the general public. He was not supposed to review public submissions. Florida senators were allowed to propose amendments during the reapportionment process, to add their own maps. Rodrigues and Democratic Sen. Audrey Gibson had filed such amendments, Ferrin said, but no senator had asked him to directly to create any Senate maps. ACLU attorney Nicholas Warren said at the beginning of the morning that he had sought to depose Rodrigues and fellow Republican and committee member Danny Burgess before the trial, but both had asserted legislative privilege, which shields them having to testify in certain lawsuits. In the afternoon, the defense called two expert witnesses who criticized the expert witness testimony and voting analysis that came from the plaintiffs on Tuesday. Steven Voss is a political science professor at the University of Kentucky. When asked to break down the political partisanship of the Tampa Bay area, he included four counties that make up the Tampa Bay metropolitan statistical area — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Polk and Hernando. Based on population, he said, five Senate districts could be folded into the area, and that three historically were reliably Republican while two would favor Democrats. Currently, that breakdown is four Republican districts and one Democratic — with Senate District 14, which Voss said historically favored Democrats, going to the GOP in 2022. Voss took aim at the alternative voting maps produced for the ACLU by Penn State University professor of statistics Cory McCartan. Those maps showed that a district could have been fairly drawn up exclusively in Hillsborough County while still protecting Tier-1 standards there and in Pinellas County. (That involves the Florida Constitution's Fair District Amendment, which says that districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice). Voss said that the result of McCartan's work was that he was 'cracking and packing' voters in his maps to ultimately help Democrats at the voting booth. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, also testified for the defense. He praised the composition of the Senate maps passed by the Legislature in 2022, saying it was 'pretty incompetent racial gerrymandering, if that's what's going on.' The trial is expected to conclude on Thursday. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Poll: Majority of Democrats give thumbs-down to their leaders in Congress
Most Democrats disapprove of how their party's lawmakers in Congress are handling their jobs, according to a new national poll. Fifty-three percent of Democrats questioned in a Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday gave their party's congressional members a thumbs-down, while 41% approved of their performance. According to the poll, conducted June 5-8, just 21% of all voters approved of the way Democrats in Congress were handing their jobs, with seven in ten disapproving. Head Here For The Latest Fox News Polling The 21% approval is the same as in Quinnipiac's February national poll, matching "an all-time low since Quinnipiac University first asked this question of registered voters in March 2009." The survey indicates 79% of GOP voters approve of the way congressional Republicans are handling their job, with 13% disapproving. Read On The Fox News App Where Trump Stands In Fox News Polling 100 Days Into His Second Term Among all voters, 32% approved of how GOP congressional members were performing their duties, while just over six in ten disapproved. Overall approval for Republicans in Congress has dropped eight points since Quinnipiac's February poll, with disapproval jumping nine points. The Democratic Party has been in the political wilderness since November's elections, when Republicans won back control of the White House and the Senate and defended their fragile House majority. And Republicans made gains among Black, Hispanic and younger voters, all traditional members of the Democratic Party's base. Since President Donald Trump's return to power earlier this year, an increasingly energized base of Democrats is urging party leaders to take a stronger stand in pushing back against the president's sweeping and controversial agenda during the opening months of his second administration. And their anger is directed not only at Republicans, but at Democrats they feel aren't vocal enough in their opposition to Trump. And that's fueled a plunge in the Democratic Party's favorable ratings, which have hit historic lows in several surveys the past couple of months. The new poll from Quinnipiac also indicates a decline in Trump's approval ratings among voters nationwide. Thirty-eight percent of those questioned in the survey said they approve of the way the president is handling his duties, down three points from Quinnipiac's early April poll. Fifty-four percent in the new poll gave Trump a thumbs-down for his handling of his job as president, down one point from the April survey. Trump's approval ratings were mostly above water as he returned to the White House in late January, but his numbers soon slid underwater in many national surveys and remain in negative territory nearly five months into his second article source: Poll: Majority of Democrats give thumbs-down to their leaders in Congress
