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Why the Borough is not a Character-Free Faux-Picturesque Suburb (Yet): Two Reasons to Start With There is probably no greater cliché than to note that the world is ‘a-changing’, to dredge up from my addled brain a 60s folk idiom for no particular reason, and it is no doubt equally trite to note that this change, however inevitable, seems, at least to many of us, [Editor’s note: clear throat sententiously here] not always for the best. Almost an island, Stonington Borough has been able, perhaps thanks in part to its geography, to keep some change at bay. Precious and limited land availability has kept away big-box stores and national chains like CVS and UBS, for instance, although we’ve not been able to keep our own Borough shops from closing in the face of economic and personnel difficulties, as in the recent case of Stonington Lumber. Not to mention the shutting down of the Velvet Mill and the Monsanto plant several years ago, as these industries moved south or abroad. The Borough has been spared the haphazard development that blights Route One, but I daresay that’s more due to neglect than careful intent. Still, it is a pleasure to walk up and down Water and Main Streets and be surrounded by old and older houses and buildings that are visibly well cared-for without being unbearably precious.
I can’t remember when the celebration of the Feast of the Holy Ghost by the Portuguese community actually began in Stonington – according to Betsy Wade Boylan’s fantastic article published in the Stonington Historical Society’s quarterly bulletin Historical Footnotes of 1987 which can be read and enjoyed again here, it was some time before the founding of the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society in 1914 but at all events, it is a Stonington Borough event of long standing. Has it changed over the years? Of course. Most of the Portuguese families of the Borough have moved out, but the Holy Ghost Society on Main Street remains the traditional center of a now far-flung community – I had the nicest chat on Sunday with a woman who lives in Sacramento, California, who came back to Stonington for the Feast and to visit with family – she admired the impressive gowns (“Must’ve come from New London” she remarked with a wicked grin) and said how much the Feast meant to her, even though she now lives on the other side of the continent. The Feast of the Holy Ghost is one of the things that, importantly, keeps Stonington from becoming just another attractive retirement community for rich retirees from Manhattan and Fairfield County. Like the Blessing of the Fleet and the Historical Society’s free-form 4th of July parade, the Feast of the Holy Ghost is an event that defies in some small but real way the commercial and cultural homogenization that afflicts so much of life here in the United States and elsewhere (allow me to note that the Supermarché Casino in Cagnes, on the French Riviera, feels very, very much like our own Stop ‘n Shop on Route 1, which of course is both a blessing and a curse, I think).
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