GROTON — The GOSA website has posted a 1,500-word article by Nelson Merritt about the Fort Hill Farm where he grew up, a 75-acre portion of which now is The Merritt Family Forest. Also added to the website is a newspaper article describing Mr. Merritt’s remarkable post-farm career as an engineer with significant achievements in submarines, aviation, and outer space.

Nelson A. Merritt

His account begins: Mr. Merritt, who was president of the family firm of F.L. Merritt Inc. when it sold the tract to GOSA in 2008, covers the history and geography of the land, along with his family’s ownership and farming of it starting in the mid-1800s. Mr. Merritt wrote the article this year.

The farm that I was born and raised on was called Fort Hill Farm, thus named because it was located on the very site of the original fort of the Indian Chief Sassacus, the ruling chief of the Mashantucket Pequot Indians.  The farm itself was around 270 acres, one of the rather large ones in eastern Connecticut.” Links to both articles are included in the Merritt section that appears on the right side of each page directly under the headline “GOSA In-Depth.”   Direct link to farm article.

The news article — from the Danbury News-Times — tells of Mr. Merritt’s involvement with the Nautilus submarine, air traffic controls systems, and the Apollo moon mission.

It begins:

DANBURY — Nelson Merritt got the assignment of his life in 1963 — to help design a flight simulator to help astronauts train to fly to the moon.

The tricky part was this: The spacecraft, called the Apollo, only existed as a name.  Direct link.