First things first as the calendar page turns to 2023

It’s 2023. Let’s dive right in where this week intersects with some local history of not so long ago, in 1907.

Some history

That’s the year the Sperry heirs, led by U.S. Congressman Nehemiah Sperry, set about to donate the land their family had owned since the 1600s to the Town of Woodbridge. Here’s the old gent, in his younger days.

Shall we hear from Nehemiah himself? He is writing to the Selectmen of Woodbridge, the town of his birth, proposing to gift to the town what remains of his boyhood home and the surrounding lot of land which also contains Sperry Falls, to establish Sperry Park.

But how does this episode in 1907 connect to the first week of January in 2023, some 116 years later?

Some news

On Monday, January 3rd 2023 the Sperry Park Committee met to consider a project being proposed by a local high school senior. Ordinarily meant to meet annually, the committee has not gathered since mid-2020 when it last met by telephone conferencecall due to the public health conditions that prohibited in-person meetings in the pre-vaccine initial months of the COVID pandemic. (Another echo in time, shifting us again — this time from 2020 to the 1918 influenza pandemic when Nehemiah’s only grandchild dies “of disease” while in active service as a 2nd Lieut., Aviation Section, Signal Corps. serving during WWI).