Collections : [Bridgeport History Center, Bridgeport Public Library]

John and Maggie Lathrop were a married couple living in Bridgeport in the mid-19th century. The correspondence between the two, sent when the two were dealing with health issues and were forced apart, offer insight into the everyday on goings of Bridgeport in its early history.

Rev. Robert Beach was a minister at Howard Avenue Methodist-Episcopal Church in Bridgeport, and the son of the colonial Beach and Silliman families. This collection contains material relating to both families in the form of photographs and some documentation, as well as some personal papers.

Benjamin Swan served as the minister for a number of congregations in Fairfield and New Haven counties in the 1830s through the 1890s. While this collection has some material related to his personal life, it primarily contains the genealogical research he conducted for various local families, typically colonial. He was an active member of the Fairfield County Historical Society.

This collection reflects the interests of Charles Marsh as collector himself. As a Bridgeport resident in the early 20th Century, he had a keen interest in P.T. Barnum and the circus, Bridgeport as a town, and his family's history. Most important are the family photographs located in series I, as many photographs contain lengthy descriptions on the back and identify streets as well as those pictured.

This collection of Bridgeport Fire Department material is an artificial assemblage of ephemera related to Bridgeport fire departments. It contains unidentified photographs of firemen, several program books, and information about fire alarm boxes in the early 1950s.

: Edna M. Richardson was an active part of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Bridgeport Historical Society, which starting in 1957 began a campaign to save the remarkable and well known Harral-Wheeler House. The collection documents the local level campaign to save the home.

Containing Elstein's thesis, "The McLevy Complex: analysis of voting behavior in Bridgeport, CT" and other research papers, this small collection offers insight and research into Bridgeport's socialist mayor six years after his last term in the position.

The International Association of Fire Fighters was founded in 1918 for paid full-time firefighters. Due to the inherent nature of the work, firefighting requires strong protections and regulations. This collection focuses on those efforts during the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

Running from Greenwich to Milford, Connecticut, the Merritt Parkway is one of Connecticut's most unique places and one of the few highways to be placed on the National Historic Register. In 1973, a proposal was brought up that would extend the Merritt an additional twolanes on either side, making it an eight sided highway. This caused outrage, and the Save the Merritt Association was founded on June 20, 1973. It was successful in its attempts to prevent this from happening, and dissolved in 1976 with the creation of the Merritt Parkway Commission

Charles Augustus Wheeler served as the superintendent of the City of Bridgeport Police Department from 1927 to 1944 and was an active member of a number of police organizations at the state and national level. His tenure in Bridgeport saw changes made to transportation, traffic, and more. The collection contains his assembled clippings that document these changes.