Share Your Colt Park Memories at Linden Place Exhibit

I can’t imagine there’s a resident of either Bristol or Warren, here for more than a handful of years, who doesn’t have some memories, some great connection to Colt State Park. Maybe you were married in the outdoor chapel, or played your best soccer game ever on one of the fields down by the town beach. Maybe you caught an enormous striper off the boat ramp, or earned a personal best time in a foot race. Or maybe you just have great memories hanging out with friends in the summer sun, or late into the evening, sneaking an illicit beer and diving behind an old stone wall when the police patrol came by. (Terribly inappropriate youthful behavior that I am only aware of through third-hand stories.)

 I have great memories of riding horses with my sister and friends in the park and along the bike path, when it was still a train track. I’ll never forget the wild look in my mother’s eyes after she went for a ride and we neglected to tell her we had conditioned the horse to all-out gallop through the lower soccer field (which my kids’ coaches now refer to as the “horse field,” ironically.) And I remember a few great summers in the 1980s when they held concerts on that hillside over the bay and it seemed half the town was there, dancing to Crosby, Stills & Nash at least two (or was it three?) summers in a row. And I think there were a few years in there when they set the July 4^th fireworks off on the town beach, which provided a great view from the sand, as long as you didn’t mind a few embers.

Of course most of us have only been around for a small fraction of Colt Park’s history. Long before the grass was covered with hoopties every summer weekend, long before CSN, and long before Governor Chafee v.1.0 acquired the farm for the state park system in the late 1960’s, it was Colonel Colt’s Farm, Private Property, Public Welcome. And it was spectacular.

Colonel Colt, many of you may know, was a very successful industrialist, the Chairman of U.S. Rubber and founder of the Industrial National Bank, whose mother was a member of Bristol’s DeWolf family. Colt purchased the property to raise and house his prize Jersey cows and Berkshire sows. A beautiful stone barn was built to house the animals and the hundreds of awards they won, a Casino was built for social events, magnificent Percheron draft horses worked the fields and the buildings and grounds were immaculately maintained. The welcome public could not only picnic and fish at Colt’s farm, they could visit the gleaming barn and sample the milk. According to one guest, “If I were the biggest liar in the world, I could not exaggerate the magnitude and the wonders of the Colt Farm".

From May 6 – 31, visitors to Colonel Colt’s Linden Place home will be treated to an exhibit of rare photographs, documents, and artifacts from the early days of Colt Farm, sourced from the collections of historian Ed Castro and the Bristol Historical Society. The exhibit will open on Thursday, May 5, with a reception and talk with Castro, former Chief Marshal and a lifelong Bristolian.

Please contact Linden Place at 253-0390 to RSVP for the opening night and gallery talk, and be sure to check out the exhibit and see what our wonderful park was like back in the day.