Bushnell Park in Hartford was the first publicly funded park in the United States. The civic action to create the park was by a vote of the citizenry of Hartford in 1854, making the origins of Bushnell Park earlier than Central Park in New York. It was designed by the landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann (1829-1893) beginning in 1859 at the request of Dr. Horace Bushnell. Weidenmann’s final plan was completed by 1861. Early surviving photographs from 1870 or earlier show it as a purely landscape park adjacent to the College Hill campus of Trinity College. The site had previously been occupied by tanneries and shanties along the branch of the Park River which flowed through the valley. The river was commonly called the Hog River because it served for the effluent of the hide tanneries when this area was a slum.
Bushnell Park did not become an open air sculpture collection until a decade after the end of the Civil War. The two first sculptures were commissioned in 1874, one by T.H. Bartlett of Dr Horace Wells, the Hartford doctor and inventor of anesthesia, and the other by J. Q. A. Ward of General Israel Putnam, Connecticut’s first civilian soldier to rush to fight for the Revolution. Today, Bushnell Park is the central concentration of public sculpture in Hartford.
The Park River was buried in an underground tunnel in the early 1940s as part of a flood control project. This overzealous solution has had the unfortunate effect of removing the picturesque centerpiece of the meandering river which formerly passed under the bridge of Keller’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil War Memorial and gave the park its distinctive undulating northern boundary.
The Stops
Starting at stop #1, this Walking tour is 1.2 miles long.