“Gatsby in Connecticut” is garnering plenty of attention. The New Yorker called the film about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Westport sojourn “one of the best of 2020.” Thanks to Amazon Prime, plenty of folks have seen — and enjoyed — it.
F. Scott and Zelda arrived here in the early days of Prohibition. From all indications, Westporters paid about as much attention to the booze ban as my generation did to weed laws.
Apparently, our town had a long history with drink. Seth Schachter found this postcard from 1912. Liquor was legal. But it looks like Westport went way beyond a drink or two.
And no, this is not just any “West Port.” The message on the other side is postmarked here.
Out of curiosity, I Googled Baltic, Conn, which I had never heard of before. As of 2010, the population was 1,250. For further information, see —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic,_Connecticut
Dan I vote that postcard be made into a flag, smaller than Miggs’s Westport Town Flag, and that would fly just beneath it on the same pole, and may they wave forever!
It’s not a Westport postcard; https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uTyFR3Vk8B4/XKpDhBHJLgI/AAAAAAAAS_E/o0WJFravpBgCkIe_yMOmbkUfVWNamq5dwCLcBGAs/s1600/Dry.jpg
IT’S POSTMARKED WESTPORT,CONN
It’s a “Stamp your town’s name here” postcard, that was stamped with “West Port” [explains the gap btwn West and Port] and sent from Westport. Still pretty cool – certainly from my “collector of Westport post cards” perspective
Some of our well most known and beloved families in town made a boatload (no pun intended) of money during prohibition.
The final major boatload stop was Long Island which is I think why F. Scott Fitzgerald gravitated away from Westport to Long Island to live. He was attracted to a bigger and more constant source of booze, parties, gambling and new wealth.
In the 1960’s I recall an old relative mentioned to me that the Beachside Inn was Westport’s first watering hole during the post civil war period.
What about the pre-Revolutionary War Disbrow and Marvin Taverns?!
Yes, Dan. In fact, Fairfield/Green Farms was truly a hotbed of revolutionists whose families settled here a hundred or more years earlier. The taverns were popular locations for traveling revolutionists and locals to meet up, discuss and drink heartily. It appears later during the post revolutionary War period, the locals life was more mundane, and the area no longer thrived as a hot spot for travelers until several years after the Civil War when summertime visitors discovered the area.