Stories

There have been many visitors to the Shaw Mansion through the years, some quite famous and many not well known at all. Jane Perkins, the last member of the family to live in the house, would tell stories handed down to her by the family. The original wing of the house was wood, and on the orders of Capt. Shaw the door was always left unfastened and a fire burning in the fireplace, so that any Indians in the vicinity would have a warm place to sleep.

A frequent visitor around 1775 was a young schoolteacher named Nathan Hale. It is said there is still a letter in existence that he wrote to a young woman visiting the Shaws inviting her to accompany him to view the sunset on the rocks behind the house. Unfortunately, the letter was sold out of the visitor’s family many years ago.

General Washington was a visitor in 1776. (Read article)

In 1824 General Lafayette, on his noted visit to the United States, spent an August Sunday in New London, attending two church services (Congregational and Episcopal) and dining at the Mansion as the guest of Judge Elias Perkins.

In 1924, the one hundredth anniversary of the visit was celebrated with a pageant in which “Lafayette” laid a wreath at the “tomb of Washington”—the root cellar in the back yard of the Mansion.

[Information in this section from Rogers, Ernest E., Connecticut’s Naval Office at New London, 1933. Published by the Society.]

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