eBay Tuesday: Mount Vernon House Postcard

One of the most interesting New London maps I've found to study is in the city clerk's office. It captures many aspects of New London's history, including the bustling port, the waterways not yet filled in, and vanished structures such as the long buildings used to make rope. Perhaps the feature that struck me the most was the mansions that once graced several areas of downtown.

Today's featured item by matchsets.com portrays such a structure, the "Mount Vernon House" of E.L. Palmer at the corner of Broad Street and Huntington Street. The postcard, mailed in 1905, includes a brief note ("Am on my last back-scratcher. Wish I had another!") and was sent to a man in a Navy yard in Washington State.

General Jedediah Huntington, a lieutenant who served alongside George Washington in the Revolutionary War, first built the house in 1788 as a replica of Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia. Huntington moved from Norwich to New London after the war, and entertained Washington and other famous people in the white painted brick house over the years.

The property was purchased by Elisha L. Palmer in the 1880s. Palmer fought in the Civil War and joined the Palmer Brothers company, a bed quilt manufacturer, at the close of the conflict. Palmer held frequent benefits on the mansion's spacious lawn, including yearly fireworks displays. The house remained in the Palmer family, with Elisha's daughter Emelie Gertrude Palmer living there until 1947.

A year later, the property was sold with the intention of razing it to build an A&P supermarket. Frederic Palmer, an East Haddam architect and nephew of Elisha, criticized the imminent loss of the property. He said several people had expressed interest in the property and retaining it as a museum, but that fundraising efforts were met with a cold shoulder. He said the mansion was the only place in New London that "gave even a partial sense of that historic past on which the city prides itself, and the last evidences of which have been permitted, step by step, to pass into nothing more tangible than the memory of the elderly and dry written records."

The A&P store is no longer at the intersection, but the brick building there has a number of businesses in it. Where the mansion once stood you can now shop at Fiddleheads Food Co-op and California Fruit, eat at Kamp Dog and Tony D's, and get temporary work at Labor Ready.

Although the corner did not fall to economic stagnation, the loss of the historic home rankled residents for decades to come. One 1975 editorial, pondering what the city would look like without Union Station, mentioned the loss of Mount Vernon and fumed that the "city and state officials who allowed this travesty should have been shot at dawn." A 1986 opinion said demolishing the Capitol Theater would be a poor decision on par with the destruction of Mount Vernon. And a letter in 2004 suggested that the site might work for the National Coast Guard Museum.

The postcard is five and a half by three and a half inches, with a starting bid of $9.09 plus $1.25 for shipping. The auction ends at about 12:29 a.m. on Saturday.

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