Merlin Classics

Directions Website

Merlin Classics Travel Vintage USA — Enjoy, Learn, Shop, Live. www.merlinclassics.store Every purchase supports local hunger relief.

🌎 Wear Local. Feed Local. Stay Classic.

Merlin Classics — Retro hometown apparel made on demand with clean, vintage logos for city and state pride. Shop by city, state, or item → merlinclassics.store/collections/all-items

10/26/2026

What’s with Yale and the lobstermen?
⠀
Part I of III — link in bio
⠀
Nothing, except that the lobstermen’s town is where Yale was born.
⠀
Clinton sits in the quiet middle of the Connecticut shoreline, between Guilford and Old Saybrook, where the Indian River runs down through the village to a harbor sheltered by Cedar Island. For three centuries the town lived on that water: oysters and clams off the flats, schooners at the wharves, lobster pots off the point, and for most of the last century enough bluefish that it called itself the bluefish capital of the world and threw a festival every summer to prove it.
⠀
It was Hammonasset to the people who were here first, Kenilworth to the English who bought it in 1663, and Killingworth once the spelling wore down. The southern half took its own name in 1838: Clinton, after a New York governor who dug the Erie Canal and never set foot here. Charles Morgan, who did, was born on a Clinton farm in 1795, went to New York at fourteen, built a shipping and railroad empire, and sent the money home for the school on Main Street that still carries his name.
⠀
But the oldest story in town is the one on the bronze by East Main Street: a minister in a black gown who, in 1701, was asked to run a brand-new college for the colony of Connecticut, and whose congregation would not let him leave. So the college came to him. For six years, Yale was a parsonage a short walk from the water.
⠀
Everyone knows Yale is in New Haven. It wasn’t, at first.
⠀
Wednesday: Yale was born in Clinton. New Haven got it later.
⠀

10/24/2026

The witches went away. The need didn’t.
⠀
Part III of III — link in bio
⠀
A thing a whole colony looks for that hard doesn’t stop existing just because it was never there.
⠀
Elizabeth Clawson walked home in October 1692 and lived twenty-two more years, dying in 1714 at 83. Connecticut’s last witch trial came in 1697 — Winifred Benham of Wallingford, acquitted — and the colony quietly struck witchcraft from its capital laws in 1750. The women were neighbors, not witches. But the witch had been conjured, and conjured things are hard to put back.
⠀
So she stayed in the stories: the cunning woman at the edge of the village, hat and broom, drawn in the fine black line of the old engravers. And the fear that made her found new work. In 1741 the fits came back — revival preachers swept Connecticut and ordinary people fell to the floor and cried out exactly as Kate Branch had, except now it was called grace, and the Assembly’s answer was a law to jail the preachers. That same year, forty miles west, a sixteen-year-old servant told a New York court that the city’s enslaved men were plotting to burn it; on her word, thirty-four people were executed. Nobody called it witchcraft. It had the same shape.
⠀
The witch herself did fine. A scholar in 1921 announced she’d been a pagan priestess all along — wrong, but a great many women decided to become her, on their own terms. The 1950s gave her a sense of humor and a little black dress. And every October she flies low over the one harbor where nobody ever managed to hang her, lands barefoot on a wet dock, and goes where she likes.
⠀
Seventy-six Stamford neighbors signed their names in 1692 because they knew what they were looking at. The question every generation gets is whether it still does.
⠀
New York, 1741: that story is coming.
⠀

10/21/2026

Who were the Stamford witches?
⠀
Part II of III — link in bio
⠀
They lived in your neighborhood. Their lineage lives among you.
⠀
April 1692, the Wescot house out by the cove. Kate Branch, seventeen, a servant, fell to the floor in fits and started naming names. Half a dozen women at first. Two were charged: Elizabeth Clawson of Stamford, who had feuded with the Wescots for years, and Mercy Disborough of Compo. In June both were bound and lowered into the water at Fairfield. Water rejects a witch, the thinking went — sink and you are innocent. They floated.
⠀
Stamford answered on paper. On June 4, seventy-six of Clawson’s neighbors signed a petition for her. In 1692, putting your name beside an accused witch’s was not a safe thing to do. Seventy-six people did it anyway. The trial opened September 14 at the Fairfield meetinghouse under Deputy Governor William Jones. The jury could not agree. The case went to Hartford and came back. One week after it opened, Salem hanged its last eight.
⠀
Then the court asked the colony’s ministers for a written opinion on the evidence. The ministers called the water test unlawful and sinful, threw out the midwife’s examination because no physician performed it, and ruled that Kate Branch was not a witness you could hang a woman on. October 28: Clawson, not guilty. Disborough, guilty — twice, after the magistrates sent the jury back — and sentenced to death. Then a reprieve. Then, when Compo pointed out the jury had changed between sessions, the sentence fell apart.
⠀
Salem hanged nineteen that year. Stamford let them go.
⠀
Saturday: the witches went away. The need didn’t.
⠀

10/19/2026

Stamford has a witch. She’s ours, and we’ve had her since 1692.
⠀
Part I of III — link in bio
⠀
Nobody in Connecticut was a witch that year. Something else was wrong, and it had been wrong for a while.
⠀
A war with no end in sight. Since 1689 the French and their Wabanaki allies had been burning the northern frontier — Schenectady in 1690, York, Maine in the winter of 1692. Refugee families came south with their children, and some of those children would become Salem’s accusers. To a Puritan, the French, the devil and the forest were one enemy.
⠀
A colony without a government. Massachusetts had lost its charter in 1684, thrown out its royal governor in 1689, and spent three years with no lawful courts until a new charter landed in May 1692. Connecticut had hidden its own charter in an oak tree and quietly kept its courts running. Remember that for Wednesday.
⠀
Then the ordinary disasters. The 1690s were the coldest decade anyone alive had seen. Harvests failed. Smallpox came through Boston in 1690. And the one group with no voice in any of it — older women, widows, women who stood to inherit with no brother or son in line — were exactly the people who got named. The accusation didn’t take their land. It removed the question.
⠀
Connecticut knew how this ended. It had already hanged eleven people for witchcraft, beginning with Alse Young of Windsor in 1647 — the first in the English colonies — and finishing with the Hartford panic of 1662–63.
⠀
Then, in April 1692, a seventeen-year-old servant girl in a house by Stamford’s cove fell to the floor.
⠀
Wednesday: who were the Stamford witches?
⠀

10/17/2026

More than a mile of trees, and nobody agrees who planted them.
⠀
Part III of III — link in bio
⠀
Most people meet Poʻipū through a tunnel. Turn off the highway onto Maluhia Road and the light changes. Tall swamp mahogany, a eucalyptus from Australia, lines both sides of the road and closes overhead into a green ceiling that runs more than a mile toward Kōloa. Maluhia means peace, or serenity. On a quiet morning it earns the name.
⠀
The most-told story is tidy. In 1911, Walter Duncan McBryde, a sugar and pineapple man whose family name is all over the south shore, finished landscaping his estate at Kukuiolono and had about five hundred trees left over. Rather than waste them, he planted them along the road as a gift to the community.
⠀
It’s a lovely story. It isn’t the only one.
⠀
Another version credits the Knudsen family, then the big landowners along this stretch, who are said to have planted the trees to firm up a soggy road that bogged down wagons. A third says the rows were a windbreak for the cane fields on either side. Each version has its tellers, and none has a signed planting order to settle it.
⠀
What’s not in dispute is that the tunnel used to be longer. Before the main highway was cut through, the canopy ran roughly three times its present length. Part of it was lost to the road that now delivers most visitors to its doorstep.
⠀
And the timing fits the era. In the early 1900s, Hawaii was planting trees everywhere: along roads, on hillsides, around homes and fields. On plantation-era Kauai, the land was shaped for sugar, sometimes with dynamite, sometimes with a shovel and a row of saplings.
⠀
Sugar is gone from the south shore now. The trees outlasted it, and they still do the one job everyone agrees on: they mark the way in.
⠀
Whoever planted them, the road still says peace.
⠀

10/14/2026

Poʻipū once had two blowholes. Sugar only wanted one.
⠀
Part II of III — link in bio
⠀
On Kauai’s south shore, the waves don’t just hit the coast. They go under it. Swells drive into a lava tube beneath a flat black shelf, the pressure has nowhere to go, and the water escapes through a narrow hole in the roof. Early Hawaiians called it a puhi, a blowhole. Today it’s Spouting Horn, and on a good swell it throws spray forty or fifty feet into the air with a hiss and a low roar.
⠀
Hawaiian legend explains the sound. A great moʻo, a lizard guardian of this coast, is said to be caught in the puhi, and the moan you hear is the moʻo, still held in the rock.
⠀
For a long time the coast had more than one voice. Island lore remembers a second blowhole nearby, bigger and louder than the one that survives.
⠀
That would have been fine, except for what grew behind it. Kōloa, just up the road, is where Hawaii’s commercial sugar industry began in 1835, and over the following decades cane spread across the south shore, right up behind the rocks. Salt and sugarcane don’t mix. The wind carried brine off the plume and over the fields.
⠀
The story told on Kauai is short. Around 1920, plantation officials had the bigger blowhole dynamited so the spray would stop reaching the cane. A squared-off hole in the rocks nearby is still pointed out as what’s left of it.
⠀
Whether or not every detail holds, the shape of the story fits the era. Plantation Kauai rearranged the land for sugar: ditches, roads, fields, even rows of trees.
⠀
The sugar is gone now. The surviving horn isn’t. Stand at the rail at Spouting Horn Park and watch the timing. The wave goes under, the shelf goes quiet, then the rock exhales. Some afternoons the spray catches the sun and hangs a rainbow over the lava.
⠀
They silenced one. The other is still talking.
⠀

10/12/2026

Hawaii’s sugar story started on twelve acres just up the road from Poʻipū. How? 👀
⠀
Part I of III — link in bio
⠀
On September 12, 1835, a young New Englander named William Hooper started clearing twelve acres near Kōloa, a few minutes inland from Poʻipū. His firm, Ladd & Company, had leased about 980 acres from the Hawaiian kingdom to try something no one had made work for long in the islands: growing sugarcane and milling it for sale abroad.
⠀
It was a hard start. Hooper was a merchant, not a planter, learning cane as he went, with a crew of Hawaiian workers who cleared and planted the first fields by hand. There was hardly any cash on the island, so the company printed its own scrip, spent at the company store on cloth, tools and goods from the ships.
⠀
The first mill was crude, with wooden rollers turned by animals. It started producing in November 1836. Within a year the wooden rollers were swapped for iron, the animals for water, and the plantation shipped its first real crop: about two tons of sugar and thousands of gallons of molasses.
⠀
In 1841 a new mill went up beside the Waihohonu stream. The company itself went under within a decade. The industry did not.
⠀
Other plantations followed across every island, and sugar became Hawaii’s largest industry for more than a century. It drew workers from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, whose families helped make Hawaii the place it is today. The Kōloa plantation, under a string of owners, kept growing cane until 1996.
⠀
The 1841 mill’s stone chimney still stands in Kōloa, a National Historic Landmark at the edge of town. It’s easy to drive past.
⠀
By the early 1900s, the cane had reached the coast at Poʻipū. And the coast pushed back.
⠀

10/10/2026

In 2017, a mountain fell on Highway 1 and made California bigger.
⠀
Part III of III — link in bio
⠀
The road the prison crews blasted out of the cliffs has never been a sure thing. Every few winters, the mountains ask for it back.
⠀
In February 2017, storms undermined the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge so badly it had to come down, cutting the heart of Big Sur off from the north. Then on May 20 the slope above Mud Creek let go. More than six million cubic yards of mountain came down at once, burying a quarter mile of highway and pushing roughly fifteen acres of brand-new land into the Pacific. It ranks among the largest landslides in California’s history. The map of the coast was redrawn overnight.
⠀
Big Sur was an island again. For months, residents lived the pre-1937 way — hiking a steep trail around the missing bridge, carrying groceries in on their backs.
⠀
The new bridge opened that October. Mud Creek took longer: rather than dig out the slide, Caltrans built the road right over it, and in July 2018, fourteen months after the mountain fell, Highway 1 ran end to end again.
⠀
It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. A 1983 slide built the little beach under McWay Falls, where the water used to drop straight into the sea. Regent’s Slide shut the road again in 2024, and it reopened only this past January.
⠀
That’s the deal on this coast. The otters survived because no road could reach them. The prison crews earned their way home cutting one through. The mountain still takes it back every so often — and every time, the road crews and the people who live here bring it home.
⠀

10/07/2026

California’s most photographed road was blasted out of the cliffs by men serving time.
⠀
Part II of III — link in bio
⠀
For a century the Big Sur coast said no. The mountains fall straight into the sea, and the only land route turned eleven miles inland to get around one creek. Ranchers rode out for their mail. The most famous coastline in California was, for practical purposes, unreachable.
⠀
The state approved a road in 1919 and crews broke ground in 1921. Then the money ran out. Work stalled at the end of 1924 with the hardest miles still ahead.
⠀
In 1928 the state found its workforce at San Quentin. Three convict road camps went up along the coast — Little Sur River, Kirk Creek, Anderson Creek — and the men in them earned 35 cents a day plus time off their sentences: about one day of freedom for every two on the cliff. Some of them, quite literally, blasted their way home.
⠀
They drilled, packed powder and cleared rock on ledges hundreds of feet above the surf, working alongside free crews hired for the job. Bixby Creek, the canyon that had forced the old road inland, got its concrete arch in 1932 — 714 feet long, 280 feet above the creek bed, finished under budget. The two towering buttresses at either end look like they carry the load. They are mostly there for looks.
⠀
On September 18, 1934, two convict crews digging toward each other from opposite ends met and knocked out the last wall of rock between them. For the first time since the survey stakes went in, the cut ran unbroken along the cliffs — paving, guardrails and bridges still to come, but the coast’s rock wall had been beaten.
⠀
In June 1937, sixteen years after the first shovel, the highway opened the full length of the coast. The wall had come down.
⠀
The cliffs had other plans. Saturday: the day the mountain took the road back.
⠀

10/05/2026

How do you hide an entire species for decades? 👀
⠀
Part I of III — link in bio
⠀
California wrote off its sea otters in the early 1900s. They hadn’t gone anywhere.
⠀
For more than a century the fur trade worked this coast cove by cove — Russian, Spanish, British and American hunters chasing the densest fur of any animal alive, one pelt worth a small fortune in Canton. By the turn of the century the otters were gone from every beach a boat could reach, and California called them extinct.
⠀
But one stretch of coast never let the hunters in. South of Carmel the Santa Lucia Mountains drop straight into the Pacific — no harbor, no landing, and the only road bent eleven miles inland to get around a single creek. Below those cliffs, in the kelp, a small raft of otters simply kept living.
⠀
In 1938, the year after a new highway finally opened that coast, rancher Howard Granville Sharpe looked down from his land above Bixby Creek and counted about fifty of them. That June, Life magazine told the whole country the extinct sea otter had come back.
⠀
Every southern sea otter you see from Highway 1 today descends from that hidden raft.
⠀
And the coast got something back too. Otters eat sea urchins; without them, urchins mow kelp forests down to bare rock. Bring the otters back and the forest grows back — part of why the kelp you see from the Big Sur turnouts runs so thick.
⠀
The road that revealed them took sixteen years of dynamite — and some of the hardest miles were blasted by men serving time. Wednesday: who built it.
⠀

Address

3400 Equestrian Club Drive
Wellington, FL
33414

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Merlin Classics posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category