History
Judges' Cave and the Regicides Trail (which traverses the length of the ridge), receive their names from two judges Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, who had signed the death warrant of Charles I of England in 1649. After the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II of England in 1660, the pair of regicides fled to the area to avoid arrest and hid in a boulder cave on the crest of the ridge intermittently over the summer of that year.
Other notable historic events include the portrayal of the ridge by 19th century landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church in 1849.
The General Assembly of the state of Connecticut established An Act Concerning West Rock Ridge State Park, which established the park when the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) purchased 600 acres (2.4 km2) of land from the city of New Haven in 1975. This act gives the DEP the right of first refusal to purchase private land sold within the West Rock Ridge conservation area. The intent of the act is to allow the state to increase the size of the park, which is about 1,600 acres (6.5 km2).
Read more about this topic: West Rock Ridge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)