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Willimantic is best known locally for its frog legend and for its illegal heroin trade.
The "Battle of Frog Pond" was an incident around the time of the French and Indian War in which the citizens, after a long night of drinking, heard a tremendous racket outside. Assuming the worst, they grabbed their arms, they proceeded to fire into the night, until the noises stopped. Congratulating each other on a job well done, they went to sleep, only to discover the next morning that the Willimantic River had dried up, sending a vast army of bullfrogs in search of water in which to spawn. Thus, the citizens were confronted with a field full of dead frogs, and the legend was born. The story is apocryphal, and most likely well embellished by local color. Nevertheless, the town has recently erected a Frog Bridge to commemorate the incident, featuring frogs atop spools of thread.
The thread spools are included in the bridge's design because Willimantic was, at one time, known as "Thread City". The American Thread Company had a mill in Willimantic on the banks of the Willimantic River, and was at one time the largest employer in the state as well as one of the largest producers of thread in the world. They brought in a series of immigrant labor groups, including the Irish, French-Canadian, Polish and Puerto Rican. (As an interesting side effect, the town has two Catholic churches, St. Mary's and St. Joseph's, because two of the Catholic groups refused to share a church.) The mill was vacated in 1985, and the town has had no major industry to replace it since then.
The Hartford Courant released a series of articles in October 2002 entitled Heroin Town [1], detailing the history of the drug trade in the city. The series provoked an outraged response from the townspeople, who saw themselves as victims of, at best, yellow journalism.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 11.6 km² (4.5 mi²This article is about the unit of measure. In England, the Square Mile is a traditional name for the City of London. A square mile (symbol sq. or mi is an imperial unit which is the area of a square whose side is one mile (or 5,280 feet). A square mile is). 11.4 km² (4.4 mi²) of it is land and 0.3 km² (0.1 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 2.23% water.
Willimantic is the home of the Willimantic foot bridge (established in 1907Events January events January 6 Maria Montessori opens her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome Casa dei Bambini in San Lorenzo). January 14 An earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica kills more than a 1,000 January 23 Charles Curtis), which is the only bridge in the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in to connect two state highways, as well as crossing all three major forms of trainsportation (road, rail, and river).