An Old Mystic original
Charles Q. Eldredge’s autobiography begins, “When I was four years of age I had a fall from the rear end of an ox-cart, cutting my forehead upon a stone as I struck the ground. … Some have said that this fall affected my brain.”
He was kidding, of course, yet it’s fair to say that Charles had an unusual mind coupled with a mischievous sense of humor. For example, as a school boy he fibbed to an unsuspecting teacher that his middle initial was “Q,” an invention that his classmates thought was hilarious and which later became part of his legal name.
Charles was born in Old Mystic in 1845 into an old New England family. His great-grandfather, Christopher, had been wounded at Groton Heights. Captains Thomas and George Eldredge (Charles’ cousins, I think), built mansions on Eldridge Street in Mystic. (The street sign is misspelled.)
Charles left home when he was 15 years old for a career in the lumber industry in Hoosick Falls, New York. When he retired around 1890, he moved back to Old Mystic, razed his small childhood home on River Road, and built a spacious new one, called Riverview, which still graces that beautiful location.
Charles was energetic and exuberant in retirement. In 1908 he built a stern wheel steamboat, The Mississippi, the first and only such vessel to ever operate on the Mystic River. When the trolley made its first trip into Old Mystic, Charles welcomed it with a salute from his cannon. But his big project was collecting souvenirs, a hobby that became a colorful second career. The collection eventually strained the capacity of his house (and perhaps his wife’s good nature), so Charles built a “Private Museum” to hold his treasures. He was the tour guide, public relations man, board of directors, and allaround one-man show.
In 1926 he published “A history of curios in the private museum of Charles Q. Eldredge, Old Mystic, Conn., containing items of tragedy, romance, war, murder, comedy, love, rum and prohibition gathered during the past seventy years.” The book inventoried many of the museum’s 7,000 objects, ranging from
the historically important to the delightfully silly.
A few items that especially caught my fancy include: the glass eye of a 582 pound sword fish; a photo of Grandma Chambers on horseback at age 93; an egg cup belonging to cannibals — its authenticity attested to by Mrs. Morton Smith; a photo of a shark found in the Mystic River in 1916; a candlestick made from a hippopotamus’ snoot; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbag; powder from a shell fired by the British during the Battle of Stonington; a box of stones taken from the brook where David filled his slingshot to face Goliath; a 4-foot cucumber preserved in copper paint; and the skeleton of a right whale captured in Hudson Bay. My favorite articles are a Roman sword and scabbard, which Charles claimed to have procured at great expense but then noted, in a conspiratorial aside to his readers, that the blade was marked “made in Connecticut.”
Charles died in 1937, and his collection was sold at auction. The charm of such an eclectic assortment all under one roof was lost forever, but you can still sample Charles’ wide-ranging interests and wit in his autobiography, inventory, and scrapbook, all held at The Indian and Colonial Research Center in Old Mystic. The scrapbook includes clippings about his life, his collection, and some of the columns he wrote for a local newspaper. His down-home musings and cornball but giggle-worthy jokes are real day-brighteners.
Charles experienced tragedies when his first wife died of typhoid fever and his 18 year-old son committed suicide, yet somehow he retained his zest for life and sense of wonder at the world. Not all the memorabilia in his museum were authentic (and that was part of the fun), but Charles himself was a genuine original.