New Haven Independent

The portrait is just a few feet away from 20th Century views of a game Morris had never heard of: baseball, at Lighthouse Point. Yet over these same fields and outfields the British soldiers who burned his family house likely marched.

From baseball to the British invasion of 1779, worlds are bridged neatly in a new compact exhibition titled East Shore Reflections . It debuted last week to a crowd at the New Haven Museum.

The exhibition contains about 150 items, including Queen Anne furniture from the Pardee-Morris House, Indian arrowheads, paintings, some 30 photographs, and postcards on loan from the extensive collection of local collector Joe Taylor that are on view for the first time.

East Shore Reflections is a title that sounds passive. In fact the exhibition is tight and sparkling. It runs through Feb. 28.

The exhibition initially focused only on the house alone, saidcoordinator Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, who is also the museum’s photo archivist. He’s pictured with Lorinda Morris Hathaway, Amos’s married daughter

Thens the coordinator rode his bike on research trips from his East Rock home to the East Shore. He got to know the topography of the area in a way that influenced how to shape the exhibition. It became clear to him that the Pardee-Morris House should be shown in the context of the area’s fuller history and development.

The result is an exhibition that time travels 300 years and includes living New Havners represented and involved in the exhibition too. So he commissioned contemporary photographer Kelly Jensen to take pictures of four emblematic East Shore locations, including Beacon Hill.

Beacon Hill was so named because “beacon fires were lit [there] to warn the Nine Squares the British were coming,” said Bischoff-Wurstle.

That area is long forgotten by many New Haveners, he said. It’s up in Fort Wooster Park behind the Quinnipiac Memorial on Townsend Avenue. Yet it is a part of the East Shore heritage, as is Lighthouse Point Park, Fort Nathan Hale and other iconic locales.

“It’s a new direction for the museum,” Bischoof-Wurstle said of the show, meaning exhibitions that celebrate neighborhoods of the city. He said he hopes down the road that the Hill and Fair Haven might get similar attention.

If the museum’s Director of Education Benjamin Breton had his druthers, the next neighborhood of New Haven to receive a special exhibition will be Newhalville.

That’s because 80 percent of the student groups visiting the museum are African-American. He said he’d like an exhibition to teach kids how their area once flourished through the carriage factories of George T. Newhall, and then how the jobs left.

“When you teach that about their neighborhood, their eyes light,” he said.

It was East Shore’s turn Thursday night. Breton took special pride in the artifacts related to the Quinnipiacs, about whom he has published.

In this deed from 1706, the English get the Indians to sign over some of their reservation land. One of the Indian signers making his mark is Rhumtam, nicknamed with extreme lack of colonial political correctness for the amount of rum the fellow consumed.

Yet another signer is Shambisqua. She might have been a sachem of the tribe. According to Breton, the Quinnipiacs had a more valued and balanced view of the value of women than did the colonists.

According to both Bischoff-Wurstle and President Walter Miller, East Shore Reflections was in the pipeline long before the recent brouhaha on how the museum has maintained the Pardee-Morris House, which it owns.

Other highlights of the exhibition include photographs of the electric trolley system that linked the Lighthouse Point area to the rest of the city until 1947 and how today’s public parkland there emerged from a failed amusement park and a dying housing development.

Any lessons for today?