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02/22/2017 07:30 AMAsk anyone in town where Stony Creek lies and they’ll tell you it’s a quaint village about one mile west of the Guilford-Branford coastal town line. But ask Nona Bloomer where the Native Americans sited the town boundary-dividing waterway named Stony Creek, and she can definitely answer, “the mouth of Guilford’s Little Harbor.”
It’s a pretty impressive discovery, once you realize that even Guilford’s founding fathers got it wrong. All of this information, and much more on the very changeable Branford/Guilford coastal boundary line of the last 375-plus years, will be revealed in Bloomer’s upcoming talk at the Guilford Free Library, “From Oiockcommock to Hoadley’s Creek: A Topsy-Turvy Tale of the Guilford-Branford Coastal Boundary.” The free talk is set for Wednesday, March 8, at 7 p.m. at Guilford Free Library.
As Nona discovered, for well over three centuries, the waterway and natural coastal boundary line described as “Stony Creek” was at the wrong location on land deeds and maps—but that bit of history actually comes into play a little later in this story. First, let’s find that long-lost “Stony Creek.”
Nona’s exploration of the “topsy-turvy” Guilford/Branford coastal boundary can actually be traced back to 2003, when she was tracking down the location of the border-dividing “Oiockcommock” or “Stony creek” on an Indian boundary map. The map was described by the Squaw Shuampishuh, who sold land to Guilford founding father Henry Whitfield in 1639. The simple rendering uses a straight line to depict Long Island Sound and shows watercourse boundaries branching off and heading toward inland areas.
“In an effort to translate Oiockcommok river as Stony Creek, I found it did not make sense,” says Nona.
What she did figure out was that the map, for all those years, had been interpreted upside-down. Once Nona made the correction, which was simply that, “north was south,” she was also able to spot the true location of Oiockcommok, which was quite a distance east of today’s Branford town line. In fact, the dividing waterway was located in the mouth of Little Harbor in Guilford.
Once Nona realized what she’d found, the “Stony creek” boundary, as originally described in the 17th century records, finally made sense. It was explained as “a straight line from the mouth of Stony creek to the centre of Pistapaugh Pond, where in a single monument, was the corner boundary of the four towns of Guilford, Branford, Wallingford and Durham.”
“Even if you look at how the proper name ‘Stony Creek’ is written, going back to the 17th century town records in Branford; they may capitalize ‘Stony,’ but ‘creek’ has always been small letters,” says Nona. “So the creek had no name. Even in the land records, they refer to somebody living ‘by a creek,’ but the creek was described as ‘stony.’ It was just an adjective. So ‘Stony creek’ referred to an area next to the creek, to a place.”
Today, there is a Stony Creek River, which empties into Long Island Sound and is part of Jarvis Creek in the Jarvis Creek Marsh, well inside the Branford town line.
As for the little creek that makes up the modern Guilford/Branford coastal boundary line? That’s Hoadley’s Creek, and it’s visible at high tide from Nona’s kitchen window.
She and her husband, Kent, have enjoyed many decades living in their historic home, once owned by members of the Norton family. Theirs is very first house on the Guilford side of the Guilford/Branford coastal border line. It’s also a hop, skip, and a jump from an unnerving zig-zag corner of Route 146 that threads a railroad overpass.
That railroad pass figures into the Nona’s March 8 talk, too. Thanks to a 19th-century engineer working for the railroad, many maps showed the Branford/Guilford coastal boundary as two very discordant town lines, with a very noticeable gap between them.
The title of her March 8 talk is also the title of Nona’s latest issue (No. 6) in her ongoing historical research series, “The Guilford Papers.” In No. 6, Nona gives new information to help shed proper light on the true history of the movable Guilford/Branford coastal town boundaries.
Beyond the issue of where the natural border creek actually did lie, the boundary was also altered, by design, at other points in time. One such change arrived after members of the Norton family and their neighbors were summarily cut off from Branford by the new railroad line in the early 1850s. Suffice it to say, had things gone differently, the Bloomers would be Branford residents today, without ever moving from their beloved home.
Another border change was initiated about 20 years later, after pink granite quarryman John Beattie bought a piece of the peninsula that was half Guilford, half in Branford, making his taxes doubly abhorrent. Beattie petitioned to make his home wholly a part of Guilford, igniting a legislative-level battle between selectmen of the two towns. For years, Guilford and Branford wrestled with the slippery boundary within the watery wedge of land. That final line, which gave up more Branford land ownership to Guilford, was settled in 1885.
That’s not the end of Nona’s topsy-turvy story. There’s also what Nona describes as the “Rogue Boundary,” developed using a rail company surveyor’s property line, which came to light after four acres of salt marsh property came up for purchase in late 1944. While Guilford had updated its maps to include only Hoadley Creek as the dividing border, turns out the rail surveyor’s lines were still in play on two different Branford town maps. The change was finally settled for good in 1980, when the two groups of town selectmen amicably walked the wetlands and came to an agreement.
Nona, now retired, was a long-serving librarian at Guilford Free Library who painstakingly managed its Edith B. Nettleton Historical Room. In 1983, Nona began researching and periodically publishing, through Guilford Free Library, “The Guilford Papers” series. The series has gone on to become a valuable reference tool covering several areas of Guilford’s history.
Nona’s penchant for research is backed by a Radcliffe College bachelor’s degree in American Intellectual History. At the time Nona earned her degree, Radcliffe functioned as the female coordinate institute for then all-male Harvard. She describes her major as a discipline that is “closely related to nature; the way nature connects and divides,”
Between her education and her location, Nona is perfectly suited to tell this topsy-turvy tale.
“I have an intellectual interest in the role of nature, as well as living here, in the midst of it,” she says.
Nona thanks Guilford Free Library for publishing No. 6 in “The Guilford Papers” and is looking forward to sharing her talk. She’ll include a slide show featuring the paper’s map-like graphics showing the changeable borders (drawn by Benjamin Ganz). As always, the latest issue of “The Guilford Papers” will be added to the Historical Room for future reference.
“It’s just one more story for the historical room that has so many of its stories to tell,” says Nona.