Who Did It – and Why?
The Riddle of Thankful Arnold House

Elizabeth Malloy
As told to John Fiske

The Thankful Arnold House, Haddam, Connecticut.

There’s a mystery in the walls of Thankful Arnold House in Haddam, Connecticut. It’s unsolved to this day, and Elizabeth Malloy believes it will always remain so.
Elizabeth Malloy, who likes to be called Lisa, is the Director of the Haddam Historical Society which runs the Thankful Arnold House as a historical museum. Not even its strongest proponents would call the house distinguished: on the contrary, its charm lies in its ordinariness – it is an utterly typical home of an utterly typical family in early New England.

Joseph and Thankful Arnold
and their house
It was a small house when it was built in 1795, just two bays and one room deep, a footprint of about 15 feet by 14 feet. There was a shop in the basement level, a parlor/kitchen on the second floor, and a sleeping or storage loft in the attic. Its builder, Linus Parmalee, quickly ran into financial problems, and in 1798 the house became the property of Joseph Arnold and his young wife, Thankful. Joseph and Thankful were among the first generation of United States citizens. Both were born at the beginning of the War for Independence, Joseph in 1774, and Thankful in 1776.
Joseph and Thankful Arnold met many of the requirements to be considered members of the local elite. Both came from families of original proprietors, he was descended from one of the proprietors of Haddam itself, and she came from a Chester, Connecticut, family that traced back to Plymouth Colony. They began their married life modestly and as their family grew, so they enlarged their little “starter” home.
Joseph ran a merchant’s business in the basement and from there expanded his commercial interests and became involved in turnpike building, commercial fishing sites, quarrying, money lending and real estate.
The Arnolds’ prosperity was echoed in their family; they had 12 children, of whom 10 survived early childhood. The house clearly needed to be enlarged. In 1800, they added two more bays, doubling the size, so that each floor had two rooms. In 1810, they moved a small building, probably an outbuilding on the property, to abut the west side of the house. They also built a new kitchen along the back of the house under a lean-to, transforming the structure into a “salt box.”

Some of the treasures from behind the wall.

The mystery
The wall where the outbuilding joined the main house is the source of the mystery. In the 1960s, the Haddam Historical Society took possession of the house and began to restore it. Behind the plaster, just where the outbuilding joined the back parlor, the restorers made a surprising discovery – the wall cavity, which was wider than in a normal interior wall, was filled with hundreds of pieces of broken pottery. Their first priority was restoring the house, so they put the shards into boxes, and stored the boxes in the attic. There they lay, neglected and forgotten for nearly 40 years. About seven years ago, some members of the society rediscovered the boxes and the riddle they posed. Who had filled the wall with broken dishes, and why?
First, they had to identify what they had. They laid out all the shards on tables, and sorted them by color, design and type. Academics came to help, Robert Gradie, of the University of Connecticut, was particularly involved. The bulk of the pottery was creamware, imported from England, but there was also some local redware (Lisa told me that a bedpan is her particular favorite) and some Chinese export porcelain. The pottery was made between 1780 and 1850, almost exactly Thankful’s life span, so it is reasonable to assume that it was her pottery that ended up in pieces behind the wall. But why?
Joseph’s death in 1823 had left Thankful with financial problems, and she had to take in boarders. One theory is that she needed a discrete place to hide her garbage so as to keep the house neat and tidy. The house was in the center of town, and she would not have wanted a waste heap in full view of her neighbors or her boarders. So she hid the broken pieces in the wall cavity, which she could easily reach from the attic. I commented to Lisa that she must have been incredibly clumsy to have broken this many dishes. Lisa smiled and nodded.
There is another theory, which is that the dishes were whole when they were dropped into the cavity. Thankful, or her daughter Nancy, who ran the house after her mother’s death, thought they were old fashioned and wanted new, up-to-date china for her home, and this was the easiest way of disposing of the old. In support of this theory is the fact that the volunteers have been able to reconstruct more than 30 dishes from the shards.
The third possible explanation is somewhat similar. It again assumes that Nancy did it, but for a different motive. As the oldest surviving daughter, she had devoted herself to helping her mother raise her siblings and run the house, she never married, and may well have felt that her whole life had been spent in a form of domestic servitude. Thankful died in 1849, at the age of 73, and Nancy became mistress of the house. To put her mark upon her new and welcome status, she trashed the dishes, on which she had served so many meals and had washed so many times, and in their place bought brand new ones that were hers and hers alone. The old dishes symbolized her servitude: the new dishes told her that the house was now hers, and that she was mistress of it.
This would not have been such an eccentric thing to do as it might seem to us today. Lisa, who specializes in the domestic history of New England women, explained that it was a common practice in the period for a second wife to buy new dishes. As she replaced the first wife in the household, so she replaced the first wife’s dishes. It was a symbolic way of taking possession.
Personally, I’m drawn to this final explanation. I love the image of Nancy climbing into the attic and gleefully hurling those darned dishes down the wall cavity. If this was indeed the way it happened, and we’ll never know for certain, then what the restorers found inside the wall was not just a pile of shards, but Nancy’s Cinderella past that she had “thankfully” put behind her.