More on Satan's Kingdom, New Hartford, CT

If you missed Part 1 about Satan's Kingdom with pictures, click here to read it first.

I had a few great comments on Satan's Kingdom, and here's some more information about it:

According to legend, Satan once used the rocky gorge of the Farmington River bearing his name as his exclusive playground. Here, he and his band of lesser demons gamboled away their days and nights, until the day finally came when the Angel Gabriel blew them all away with one blast from his golden trumpet. Gabriel and the good angels had decided that the rugged area was just too lovely to be cluttered up with demonic denizens.
Whether the tale of Gabriel's environmental beautification program is true or not is hard to say, but according to the historical record, the Satan's Kingdom district did, in fact, once serve as a refuge for a scattering of human beings who might easily have been mistaken for devils. Either attracted by the place's name, or -- more likely -- its isolated and inaccessible location, a notorious group of "Indians, Negroes and renegade whites" settled in the Kingdom, in the last years of the eighteenth century.
Using their settlement as both home and hideout, the inhabitants ranged the region far and wide, begging, robbing, vandalizing and stealing anything that wasn't nailed down. Before the nest of thieves was finally cleared by law enforcement officers -- Gabriel was not available -- they say that Satan's Kingdom had grown so evil that it was even giving the Devil a bad name. Anyway, the raid may have marked the beginning of the end for the Devil in Connecticut. This excerpt is from this website.

Ok, that's one interpretation of how Satan's Kingdom got it's name, here's another:

In the eastern part of this town there is a rough and mountainous district, formerly designated Satan's Kingdom, and the few inhabitants who lived here were in a measure shut out from the rest of mankind. An inhabitant of the town invited one of his neighbors, who lived within the limits of this district, to go and hear Mr. Marsh, the first minister who was settled in the town. He was prevailed upon to go to church in the forenoon. In the course of his prayer, Mr. Marsh, among other things, prayed that Satan's kingdom might be destroyed. It appears that the inhabitant of this district, took the expression in a literal and tangible sense, having probably never heard the expression used but in reference to the district wherin he resided. Being asked to go to meeting in the afternoon, he refused, stating that Mr. Marsh had insulted him; "for blast him," said he, "when he prayed for the destruction of Satan's kingdom, he very well knew all my interests lay there."  This excerpt was taken from this website.

Check out this post card of Satan's Kingdom.

 

Well, hope you enjoyed this bit about a place not too far from me!