Hartford, Connecticut

Hartford
City in the United States
Bahá’í children's class in Hartford, 1957.
Location of Hartford
History: Firsts
-	Local Assembly	1948
Official Website		Facebook page
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Hartford is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut.

History

In 1916 it was reported that a Bahá’í community had been established in Hartford. As of 1931 there were seven Bahá’ís in Hartford, including Mabel Ives, who formally established an organized group, and in 1933 it was reported there had been some growth and an Assembly could potentially be formed. In 1938 a study group was formed with Mountfort Mills serving as its facilitator.

As of 1946 Hartford had five Bahá’ís and had maintained its formal Bahá’í group, by the end of 1947 there were six Bahá’ís, and in 1948 the Local Spiritual Assembly of Hartford was formed. In 1949 George Goodman, chairman of the Hartford Assembly, delivered a talk on the Faith at the Unitarian Church of Hartford which was filled to capacity for the talk, and the community began holding a weekly study course on Bahá’í administration for Bahá’ís and an informal study class for friends of the community.

As of 1957 the Hartford Bahá’í community was holding a weekly children's class on Sunday mornings, and in September 1959 the community launched an intensive teaching campaign centred around a series of lectures titled Five Living Faiths which invited representatives of various religious communities to give speeches including Firuz Kazemzadeh representing the Bahá’í Faith. In 1960 Mildred Mottahedeh delivered a talk on the Faith at a Race Amity Day event hosted by the Hartford Bahá’ís, and the community participated in a celebration of the founding of the United Nations sponsored by the Greater Hartford People-to-People Council.

The Bahá’í Faith received prominent coverage in the Hartford Times in 1963 when the newspaper published an article covering Mark Tobey, and the community commemorated Race Amity Day with a picnic and roundtable discussion. In 1965 the Hartford community was Connecticut's only Bahá’í community to hold a celebration of World Peace Day, and in 1966 the community held public meetings to teach the Faith as part of a week long teaching initiative for the Bahá’ís of Connecticut.

In 1971 the Bahá’í film It's Just the Beginning was broadcast on local Hartford television, and the same year the University of Hartford granted the Bahá’í community an exemption to its rule that organizations could only hire a campus space once a year allowing the community to use its premises as many times as required annually. In 1972 the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States launched a programme of Local Spiritual Assembly seminars in Hartford, intended to assist Local Assemblies in handling the affairs of Bahá’í communities, with Glenford Mitchell conducting a workshop.