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In Memory of Nancy Phelps Blum
By William Haskell, Colebrook
 | | Photo/ Evelyn Danforth |
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A memorial service for Nancy Phelps Blum of Colebrook, who died on December 20 at her home and that of her Colonial ancestors, will be held on Saturday, January 5 at noon at the Colebrook Congregational Church.
She was born in the same week in June 1914 that saw the event which precipitated the First World War—the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary—and she lived to see the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in her home city, Manhattan. With her late husband, John A. Blum, she returned to Colebrook in 1991 to Phelps' Tavern, built in 1787 by ancestor Captain Arah Phelps as a public accommodation on the stage coach route from Hartford to Albany.
Mr. Blum, 87, was born in Winsted to Marion Pierce Phelps and Carrington Arah Phelps, and spent her youth on a property of almost 700 acres centering on the rich floodplain fields of Sandy Brook. The fact that there was no bridge over this river, which runs down from Massachusetts, made the tavern a well-situated stopping-place for travelers and a profitable enterprise until the coming of railroads. The death of Captain Phelps in 1844 led to the closing of the inn, and it began a new role as a private residence for the Phelps family.
Nancy Blum prized her heritage, which was unique. Her parentage were not the classic New England/ Connecticut Yankee stock, for, after generations of such ancestors, her mother was of as exotic an origin as could be. She was in part a Parsee, a sect that had been driven by Muslim persecution out of what is now Iran to India.
To honor and record her heritage, Mrs. Blum roused herself in the late 1990s—with failing eyesight and thumbs crippled by arthritis—to write not one but two books. They are One Old House … Its People and Its Place, recording the history of the Phelps, and Every Life Matters, which recorded as much as she could learn of the Pierce family.
The latter volume required field research in the libraries, newspapers and city offices of San Diego, CA. To do this, Mrs. Blum spent the winter of 1999-2000 living alone in a leased condominium south of the city, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She began that book: "In Madras, India, a healthy little black-haired girl was born, and in Colebrook, in northwestern Connecticut in the United States of America, a puny, red-faced, pale-haired boy. They would never meet in person, these two, but without them, I, Nancy Pierce Phelps Blum, would not be here to tell it, for one would become my maternal grandmother; the other my paternal grandfather. The improbability of this relationship is surely hundred-fold."
Decades and generations later, Nancy Phelps was a little girl in hand-me-down clothes, some made of feed sacks, wandering the great acreage with her father and grandfather. By this time, the Phelps Farms had declined to an almost subsistence level. She wrote of her father Carrington and mother "Peri": They could never afford a baby, so when my mother, after countless abortions, privately decided to keep one, it was a great surprise to all. My own life became city/ country so that I was more New England than Parsee, and anyhow, I had emerged the definitely Nordic-Phelpsian type so my grandparents could dote on the issue which so clearly carried on the blood-line."
She was to be, however, the last of the Phelps. She is survived by Jonathan Phelps Blum and his wife Elizabeth Chernak Blum of Stamford; and Timothy Alexander Blum of Santa Monica, CA. There are five grandchildren.
Nancy Phelps Blum once wrote of her mother and her death: "… at her request her ashes are scattered on the cat cemetery at the edge of the woods." As she talked this December to her many friends who visited her daily, Nancy Phelps Blum asked the same for herself.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Colebrook Land Conservancy, PO Box 90, Colebrook, CT 06021. This was one of half a dozen such organizations in which she was involved, including the Connecticut Historical Society, which now owns the original sign that once hung in front of Phelps Tavern. Of this sign, Mrs. Blum wrote: "Itinerant sign-painter William Rice … is especially known for his fondness for lions, and Captain Arah's is surely one of the most benign and elegant lions Mr. Rice ever painted. The sign is two-sided, and while one side shows the king of beasts gazing at the viewer with a bewildered and rather wistful expression, his feet planted solidly on terra firma, the other side depicts a huge eagle, wings spread, soaring over the Connecticut hills, glaring at the viewer with a ferocity of beak and eye guaranteed to terrorize."
She added that as a child this sign fascinated her, and she invented a theory: "And so I felt that Arah, with the cunning developed through several generations of New Englanders, chose to express a certain amiable cordiality toward these returnees (the Tories who had left the colonies at the beginning of the Revolutionary War) but not so fervidly as to offend his fellow patriots. Hence one side of his sign depicts the docile, well-tamed British pussy-cat and the other the fierce and triumphant eagle."
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