In any case the trail has been blazed, or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, the channel has been buoyed for him who is destined to produce a suitable volume when the Second Division shall have arrived at its twenty-fifth anniversary. That the command may continue to prosper and that it may ever be as efficient and successful as in its most honorable days is the earnest wish of its chronicler.
Thanks are expressed to Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Charles L. Hogan and Quartermaster Palmer (the division librarian) of the actives and to Victor F. Morgan, historian of the Veteran Association, for aid given in the collating of material for this little volume. Thanks are also given to Captain Louis F. Middlebrook and Mr. Fred E. Bosworth.
In the early nineties the so-called, and perhaps miscalled movement for “Naval Reserves” came into Connecticut. In 1893 it gathered shape in New Haven and on the petition of Edward G. Buckland and forty-four others. General Edward E. Bradley of New Haven, adjutant-general under Governor Luzon B. Morris, issued an order for the formation of the First Division, Naval Militia, C. N. G. In November of that year a division was organized, a month pregnant with meaning in the annals of the naval establishment of Connecticut, for it marked the institution of a branch destined to endure and to be a just cause of pride to the state of Hull, Gideon Welles and Foote.
The formation of the First Division followed barely two years after that of the First Naval Battalion in New York state. Massachusetts had preceded the Empire State by more than fifteen months, and Rhode Island by about a year, and when the command in New Haven organized, the states which boasted naval militia organizations were Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The total strength of the naval militia in these states was about 2,100 officers and enlisted men.
It was in March, 1890, that the first command of the kind appeared in Massachusetts, and in the following May that the Naval Battalion, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, pioneer among “Naval Reserve” organizations in the United States, was organized. From that germ has grown a system which now includes naval militia bodies in twenty-three states and has on the rosters between seven thousand and eight thousand officers and enlisted men; and has recorded several times that number of alumni who are in part trained for the country’s hour of need on salt water.