Grab a Beer For This One
Dr. William T. Cogswell Statue, Vernon
December 2025
Everything about this statue is funny to me.
And, fortunately, it’s apparently funny to almost everyone else too. The fact that it still stands here in the center of the Rockville downtown section of Vernon is also kind of funny. The fact that there are more articles and pages about this statue than other, far more important statues in Connecticut, isn’t as funny, but… okay, yeah it is.
But heck, there’s a memorial statue in Hartford wherein the memorialized shares a surname with this guy in Vernon that’s way more important, but there’s scant information online about the Alice Cogswell statue at the site of the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons – the first school in America dedicated to such people.
As best as I can tell, this Cogswell isn’t related to that Cogswell. Born in Tolland, this Cogswell became a dentist at age 26. When the California Gold Rush started, this Cogswell family decided to go west and offered dentistry services to miners. This Cogswell invested in real estate and mining stocks, becoming one of San Francisco’s first millionaires.
This Cogswell is Dr. Henry Daniel Cogswell and he was also a crusader in the temperance movement. He believed that if people had access to cool drinking water they wouldn’t consume alcoholic beverages.
Huh?
Yeah. It was his dream to construct one temperance fountain for every 100 saloons across the United States. Cogswell erected elaborate granite fountains in many cities across the country including here in Vernon. Many were installed without official permission. Most were considered ugly and demolished when Prohibition was repealed.
See? That’s funny.
In Washington DC, the fountain has been called “the city’s ugliest statue” and if that weren’t bad enough, many of the fountains were installed incorrectly leading to a hot, high velocity water jet rather than the cool slow stream promised by Cogswell. This, of course, meant that most fountains had bacterial contamination and were subsequently shut down.
Although the D.C. statue survived mostly unscathed, the San Francisco one was torn down by “a lynch party of self-professed art lovers” and one in Vernon was thrown into Shenipsic Lake. In Dubuque, Iowa, a statue of Cogswell that sat in Washington Park was pulled down by a group of vandals in 1900 and buried under the ground of a planned sidewalk. The next day the sidewalk was poured and the object was entombed.
Our Vernon statue was eventually melted down for scrap metal during World War II.
Enter philanthropist Rosetta Pitkat, a lifelong resident of the Rockville section of Vernon. She helped fund the resurrection of Dr. Cogwell in 2005, albeit with a fiberglass replica. (It was refurbished in 2025 and feted in a ceremony led by the mayor of Vernon, Dan Champagne.
Seriously. Champagne!
In all, Dr. Cogswell was able to erect 31 of these odes to himself – and temperance… and fetid water… around the country. Most were in big cities, but Rockville got so lucky because Dr. Cogswell’s cousin lived there.
The next time you drive through downtown Rockville, you can now tell your carmates who that guy holding the glass of water up in the air is… and how ridiculous he was.
CTMQ’s Statuary, Memorials, Monuments, & Plaques
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