Lover’s Leap Then and Now

Description

“Lover’s Leap was just a lovers’ lane to us back in high school, in the early 60s.” The setting of the book is introduced autobiographically through memories of the author’s childhood, and teenage years in the Lake Candlewood-Housatonic Valley area, during the Springtime of Rock ‘n Roll. The subject matter deepens as his adult life quest to discover esoteric knowledge pertaining to the Old Algonquin Civilization leads him to discover a stone obelisk, which had been the centerpiece of a desecrated monument for a highly important Algonquin leader (the Grand Sachem of the Lower Housatonic Valley). That “Stone of Oweantinoque” had long stood, as almost a sacred shrine, above Metichewan Waterfall — until it went missing in the late 1880s. Chief Waramaug passed on to the realms of Spirit in 1735, at the same time the Earlier American river culture was being submerged by supplanting white colonists. Old villages on Long Island Sound, and villages going upriver to Sandy Hook and beyond — all the way to the Berkshires — were extinguished. The book opens a window into the early 1600s, when Dutch traders were showing up at every river inlet where they could find Indians to trade with for furs, at the time when the Old New Netherland Colony was just being planted and drawn on maps along the Connecticut shoreline — from Manhattan to Rhode Island (1609 -1624). Then, in 1664, the English invaded New Amsterdam and took the Dutch Colony by force. After that, what had been New Netherland became part of the Thirteen English Colonies. “Lover’s Leap Then and Now” offers glimpses of the Old Dutch American Colony, mostly unknown to people today, and the indigenous Algonquin Civilization which had flourished for millennia up and down the Atlantic Seacoast (from Maine to the Carolinas) for thousands of years before the white man. Also compiled in this volume, as “Bonus Stories,” are two very rare accounts of the first explorers who came in contact with Algonquins along the Connecticut Shore, on Block Island, and at Narragansett Bay: “Verrazano’s Letter,” and the “Tale of Henry Hudson.”