Jasperflynn: Created page with "== About == The '''History of Verdant''' spans more than three centuries, from the founding of a small witch trial refugee settlement in 1662 to the modern town of Verdant, Connecticut as it exists in the SSU's present timeline. Verdant has two distinct histories running in parallel: the public version promoted by the Verdant Historical Society, the Chamber of Commerce, and Eastern Tsuga College, and the true history preserved by House Subconium and documente..."

2026-04-22T19:28:19Z

Created page with "== About == The '''History of Verdant''' spans more than three centuries, from the founding of a small witch trial refugee settlement in 1662 to the modern town of Verdant, Connecticut as it exists in the SSU's present timeline. Verdant has two distinct histories running in parallel: the public version promoted by the Verdant Historical Society, the Chamber of Commerce, and Eastern Tsuga College, and the true history preserved by House Subconium and documente..."

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== About ==
The '''History of Verdant''' spans more than three centuries, from the founding of a small witch trial refugee settlement in 1662 to the modern town of Verdant, Connecticut as it exists in the SSU's present timeline. Verdant has two distinct histories running in parallel: the public version promoted by the [[Verdant Historical Society]], the Chamber of Commerce, and [[Eastern Tsuga College]], and the true history preserved by [[House Subconium]] and documented primarily in the personal diaries of [[Eleanor Ashburne]].

The public history presents Verdant as a quaint, progressive safe harbor with a colorful and charming past. The true history is far stranger and far darker.

== The founding era (1662-1710) ==

=== Founding (1662) ===
Verdant was officially founded on October 13, 1662, though the settlement existed before its naming. [[Eleanor Ashburne]], accused of witchcraft in Wethersfield during the Connecticut Witch Trials, fled north with her husband [[William Ashburne]] on October 1, 1662, the night before her planned arrest. They arrived at an existing cluster of ramshackle huts on October 11. A handful of others had already gathered there, similarly persecuted. Two days later Eleanor convened the group and named the settlement Verdant.

Eleanor practiced what she called "white magic," healing, fertility, and protection. She was the settlement's spiritual and practical leader from the beginning. The community was predominantly female from its earliest days, roughly four women for every man, because most of those fleeing persecution were young women sent away by frightened families. This imbalance shaped Verdant's earliest social norms profoundly, including an early embrace of fluid sexuality and non-traditional relationships.

=== The Hemlock Veil (1667) ===
By 1667 Verdant's population imbalance had created a specific problem: fertility. Despite the community's connection to natural magic, many women were unable to conceive. Eleanor searched old texts and found an enchantment said to bestow fertility. On May 1, 1667, Beltane, the Celtic fire festival of fire and fertility, she gathered the women of Verdant and they cast the spell together under moonlight at the site of what is now the [[Verdant Scholars Memorial Grove]].

The spell worked but not only as intended. Within months Eleanor recorded unexpected consequences: a current of desire and romance swept through the community, dissolving the boundaries of traditional relationships. The fertility enchantment had become something broader. [[The Hemlock Veil]] has shaped life in Verdant ever since.

=== Marguerite Delacroix arrives (1668) ===
On July 6, 1668, [[Marguerite Delacroix (Gen 0)|Marguerite Delacroix]] arrived from Quebec, accompanied by two men delivering wooden crates. Eleanor's diary records immediate suspicion: Marguerite's possessions were too pristine, her knowledge of Verdant's location too specific. Eleanor let her in because that was what Verdant was for.

Over the following two decades Marguerite became indispensable. She funded infrastructure, built trade connections, and became first William Ashburne's lover and then Eleanor's. In 1691, Marguerite became pregnant with William's child. She made a peculiar request during labor: Eleanor was to preserve the placenta and collect the birth blood. The baby was born on October 31, 1691. The next morning Marguerite vanished, taking the placenta and blood.

Eleanor and William named the baby [[Margot Delacroix (Gen 1)|Margot]] in January 1692. The founding Delacroix naming pattern, sustained across nine generations, originated with Eleanor's act of grief.

=== The Salem connection (1692-1693) ===
Marguerite had not simply abandoned her daughter. She had been building an underground network to route Salem Witch Trial refugees to Verdant's sanctuary. She returned on May 12, 1693, bringing [[Tituba]] with her, beaten and broken. Tituba recovered in Verdant and on November 13, 1693, took the name Sarah Osgood in tribute to two women she had been forced to accuse during the trials. She and other Salem scholars founded a school in the nearby hemlock grove, the origin of [[Eastern Tsuga College]].

[[William Ashburne]] died in the illness of winter 1693-94, which killed approximately a third of Verdant's population.

=== The Order of the Hemlock (c. 1694) ===
Marguerite returned in April 1694 with relics and tomes and founded the [[Order of the Hemlock]] in Verdant. The Order took on formal responsibility for the Hemlock Veil's decennial renewal and for protecting Verdant's occult infrastructure from outside threats.

=== The Verdant Fire (1702) ===
On April 30, 1702, Beltane eve, an intolerant mob attacked Verdant and destroyed roughly a third of the settlement. Eleanor recorded it as a direct consequence of Marguerite's aggressive public promotion of the town's occult identity. Verdant's council voted to end the public practice of witchcraft. Marguerite moved to a separate house in protest.

=== The 1706 Veil modification ===
On November 1, 1706, Marguerite performed a solo Samhain ritual deepening the Hemlock Veil's founding enchantments, driven by guilt over the Verdant Fire. Eleanor felt an immediate surge of vitality and desire on waking the following morning. The modification has been incorrectly attributed to the Order of the Hemlock in secondary sources. It was Marguerite's personal act.

=== Eleanor's death (1710) ===
[[Eleanor Ashburne]] died on June 21, 1710. Her final diary entry records that the first Margot, then 18, was pregnant and in a relationship with two partners. Eleanor found peace in seeing the community continuing. Her final words were shadowed by a question she could not answer: whether her love for Marguerite had been genuine or magically manufactured. She died not knowing. The original diaries passed into the Delacroix family vault.

== Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1710-1900) ==

=== Formal incorporation (1740) ===
Verdant was formally incorporated on April 30, 1740.

=== The founding of Eastern Tsuga College (mid-1800s) ===
The Verdant Scholars school founded by Sarah Osgood and the Salem refugees in 1693 evolved over subsequent generations into a formal institution. [[Eastern Tsuga College]] was founded in the mid-1800s, taking its name from the Eastern Hemlock trees surrounding it.

=== The Delacroix line continues ===
The [[Delacroix Family|Delacroix matrilineal line]] continued through the first Margot's descendants across seven more generations, each inheriting the family vault, the artifact collection, and the House Subconium seat. The naming pattern, Margot, Marguerite, or Margaret, persisted across all of them until [[Marguerite Delacroix (Gen 7)|Marguerite (Gen 7)]] deliberately broke it in the twentieth century.

== The Aetherion era (1900-1929) ==

=== The Elysian Road occultists (1900-1920) ===
Between 1900 and 1920, wealthy families with rumored occult ties built seven grand mansions on [[Elysian Road]], drawn by Verdant's mystical energies. Many had connections to the [[Order of Aetherion]], a Boston occult order whose philosophy was that magic should be industrialized and bound into portable artifacts. The Order's ultimate prize was [[The Hemlock Veil]].

=== The Darewright Jar (c. 1905-1917) ===
Aetherion leader [[Elias Roarke]] secretly funded [[Nathaniel Ashmore]], an ETC psychology professor, to research behavioral compulsion through objects. Ashmore unknowingly created [[The Darewright Jar]]. When experiments proved dangerously powerful and a student jumped from the ETC clocktower, Ashmore attempted to destroy the jar. Aetherion stole it. Ashmore was dismissed from ETC.

=== The Darewright Game (1917-1925) ===
Aetherion deployed the jar in Boston high society as the Darewright Game. By 1923 it had produced scandals, social ruin, and disappearances.

=== Roarke moves to Verdant (1925) ===
Roarke engineered a Darewright party at which he compelled the current owner to surrender the jar. He took it to Verdant and began planning his final move: turning the Hemlock Veil into a town-wide compulsion field. Between 1925 and 1929, Aetherion scholars developed [[The Anklet of Inevitable Accord]] from the jar's principles.

=== The Roarke operation (1929) ===
[[Marguerite Delacroix (Gen 7)|Marguerite (Gen 7)]] of the [[Order of the Hemlock]] had spent years as Roarke's mistress within a sanctioned arrangement, his wife aware of and accepting the relationship. When she judged the moment right, she proposed Roarke test the Anklet himself. The moment it locked onto his ankle she issued her commands. Roarke was compelled to kill his family, then himself. Aetherion collapsed. The wealthy families on Elysian Road abandoned their homes within a year.

Marguerite locked both artifacts in the Delacroix vault, specifically so neither would ever be used again.

== Mid-twentieth century (1929-1969) ==

=== The Verdant Preservation Society ===
In the late 1940s the [[Verdant Preservation Society]] acquired the abandoned Elysian Road mansions, hoping to turn them into a tourist attraction. The effort failed. By the 1970s the properties saw fewer than 100 visitors annually. The VPS President was found decapitated in the basement of what is now [[Nyx Society]] House. The murder was never solved. It ended the VPS's resistance to selling.

=== Gen 7's death and the chain's breaking ===
[[Marguerite Delacroix (Gen 7)|Marguerite (Gen 7)]] died in 1969. She had raised her daughter [[Eloise Delacroix|Eloise]] entirely outside the Delacroix tradition as an act of mercy, giving her a different name and no knowledge of the family's true history. When Marguerite died, Eloise inherited the vault, the House Subconium seat, and no explanation.

== The Satanic Panic era (1970s-1990s) ==

=== The Greek ban and the Pantheon Pact (late 1970s) ===
ETC banned Greek-letter organizations in the late 1970s following hazing deaths. Fraternities and sororities relocated off-campus to the Elysian Road mansions, rebranded as Orders and Societies, and established the [[Pantheon Pact]] as their governing framework. The renaming was explicitly intended as a provocation toward the administration.

[[Eloise Delacroix]] discovered documents connecting Sarah Osgood to Tituba in the mid-1970s and provided a selection to the [[Verdant Historical Society]]. The Society commissioned [[The First Witch Statue]] and suppressed the Tituba connection.

=== The Veil lapses (1971 and 1981) ===
The Hemlock Veil renewal due in 1971 was not performed. The [[Order of the Hemlock]] had dissolved after Marguerite's death. Eloise held the seat but had no knowledge of her renewal obligations. The 1981 renewal was also missed.

=== The Satanic Panic hits Verdant (1980s) ===
The national Satanic Panic came to Verdant with unusual force precisely because the Veil had lapsed. The town lost its invisible psychic coherence. ETC's provocative course names, the town's occult reputation, its history, all of it had always been there but the Veil had made it charming rather than threatening. Without it, Verdant became legible as a target. Enrollment collapsed. Investigators trespassed. National media ran stories.

=== House Subconium reforms and the 1991 renewal ===
The Panic's intensity was the catalyst. Residual structure from the dissolved Order of the Hemlock, combined with the urgency of the town's visible vulnerability, drove the reformation of [[House Subconium]]. The reformed organization performed the Veil renewal in 1991, the first confirmed renewal since 1967, ending the lapse after approximately twenty years.

=== The 1992 article and the Safe Harbor rebrand ===
In 1992, [[Margot Delacroix]], then approximately 16, gave photocopied pages from Eleanor Ashburne's diaries to an ETC journalism student, bringing the Tituba connection into public circulation for the first time. The article directly contributed to Verdant's rebranding as "A Safe Harbor Among the Hemlocks." The "First Witch" nickname for the statue dates from this piece. The Verdant Chamber of Commerce officially downplayed the Tituba connection to defuse friction with Salem, Massachusetts.

== Modern era (1990s-present) ==

=== Margot Delacroix inherits (c. 2007) ===
[[Eloise Delacroix]] died around 2007. [[Margot Delacroix]] inherited the shop, the House Subconium seat, the vault, and no explanation. One of her first acts was to give [[Eleanor Ashburne]]'s original diaries to House Subconium for safekeeping. She has spent the years since rebuilding [[Delacroix's Tomes and Treasures]] into a serious occult enterprise and deepening her standing within House Subconium.

=== Making the Grades: Kelly's Unveiling (Fall 2022) ===
In Fall 2022, [[Kelly Spaihts]], a junior at [[Eastern Tsuga College]], misses a pop quiz in [[Professor William Taylor]]'s [[Psych 250: Sexology: Sexual Deviance or Sexual Culture|PSYCH 250]] course and enters a remediation arrangement that escalates across the semester. Kelly's story plays out against the ambient background of [[The Hemlock Veil]], which lowers inhibitions and heightens desire across the entire ETC campus without anyone's awareness. Taylor, a skeptic who does not believe in the occult dimension of Verdant's history, attributes his results entirely to his own methodology. He does not know the Veil is amplifying everything he observes.

The events of [[Making the Grades: Kelly's Unveiling]] are the first detailed account of Verdant's modern social world in the SSU.

=== Making the Grades: Allie's Descent (Spring 2023) ===
The semester immediately following Kelly's, Spring 2023, [[Allison Branigan]] misses a class in the same PSYCH 250 course and enters Taylor's orbit through a similar mechanism. Taylor's closing line at the end of Kelly's arc, that next semester his project would be sharper and more controlled, refers directly to Allie's semester. The events of [[Making the Grades: Allie's Descent]] run concurrently with the Darewright Jar's early circulation on campus, though the two threads have not yet intersected in published canon.

=== Comply (Fall 2024) ===
One year after the events of Making the Grades, in Fall 2024, [[Haley Wegner]], a freshman at ETC and co-captain of the newly revived [[Cheerleading at Eastern Tsuga College|ETC Cheerleading Club]], enters [[Delacroix's Tomes and Treasures]] unaccompanied and is drawn to one of the [[Stones of the Rolekeeper]]. When [[Margot Delacroix]] catches her attempting to leave with it, she uses the incident as the trigger for placing [[The Anklet of Inevitable Accord]] on Haley's ankle. The Anklet compels truth-telling and compliance with verbal requests.

Margot removed the Anklet from the vault her grandmother had locked it in specifically so it would never be used again. Whether [[House Subconium]] is aware of this breach has not been established. The events of [[Comply]] are the most direct engagement with Verdant's occult artifacts in any published SSU work to date.

=== The Darewright Jar resurfaces (202X) ===
In 202X, [[Delacroix's Tomes and Treasures]] employee Maggie unknowingly sold [[The Darewright Jar]], compelled by a slip inside reading "Sell me." An ETC student purchased it and introduced it as a drinking game. The Darewright Game has restarted on the ETC campus for the first time since the 1920s. The modern [[Order of Aetherion]] at ETC, whose members know nothing of their organization's history, is the most likely vector through which the jar will eventually connect to someone who starts pulling on that thread.

== Timeline at a glance ==
{| class="wikitable" style="width:100%; font-size:13px;"
! Date !! Event
|-
| October 13, 1662 || Verdant founded by [[Eleanor Ashburne]], [[William Ashburne]], and fellow refugees
|-
| May 1, 1667 || [[The Hemlock Veil]] cast by Eleanor and the women of Verdant
|-
| July 6, 1668 || [[Marguerite Delacroix (Gen 0)]] arrives from Quebec
|-
| October 31, 1691 || [[Margot Delacroix (Gen 1)]] born; Marguerite vanishes with the placenta and birth blood
|-
| May 12, 1693 || Marguerite returns, bringing [[Tituba]] to Verdant
|-
| November 13, 1693 || Tituba takes the name Sarah Osgood; Verdant Scholars founded in the hemlock grove
|-
| Winter 1693-94 || William Ashburne dies of illness; a third of Verdant's population lost
|-
| c. 1694 || [[Order of the Hemlock]] founded by Marguerite Delacroix
|-
| April 30, 1702 || The Verdant Fire; a third of the settlement destroyed by a mob
|-
| November 1, 1706 || Marguerite performs the solo Samhain Veil modification
|-
| June 21, 1710 || Eleanor Ashburne dies; diaries pass into the Delacroix vault
|-
| April 30, 1740 || Verdant formally incorporated
|-
| Mid-1800s || [[Eastern Tsuga College]] founded
|-
| 1900-1920 || Wealthy occultist families build seven mansions on [[Elysian Road]]
|-
| c. 1905-1917 || [[Nathaniel Ashmore]] creates [[The Darewright Jar]]; Aetherion steals it
|-
| 1917-1925 || Aetherion deploys the Darewright Game in Boston high society
|-
| 1925 || [[Elias Roarke]] moves to Verdant
|-
| 1929 || [[Marguerite Delacroix (Gen 7)]] uses the Anklet to kill Roarke; Aetherion collapses
|-
| Late 1940s || [[Verdant Preservation Society]] acquires the Elysian Road mansions
|-
| 1969 || Marguerite (Gen 7) dies; [[Eloise Delacroix]] inherits without explanation
|-
| 1971 || [[Order of the Hemlock]] dissolves; first missed Veil renewal
|-
| Late 1970s || ETC Greek ban; orders and societies reform under [[Pantheon Pact]]; First Witch Statue commissioned
|-
| 1981 || Second missed Veil renewal; Satanic Panic arrives with unusual force
|-
| 1980s || [[House Subconium]] reforms
|-
| 1991 || Veil renewed for the first time since 1967
|-
| 1992 || Margot leaks Eleanor's diaries; First Witch article published; Safe Harbor rebrand begins
|-
| c. 2007 || Eloise dies; Margot inherits; gives diaries to House Subconium
|-
| 202X || The Darewright Jar resurfaces on the ETC campus
|-
| Fall 2024 || Margot places the Anklet on [[Haley Wegner]]
|}

== Related articles ==
* [[Visit Verdant]]
* [[Eleanor Ashburne]]
* [[The Hemlock Veil]]
* [[Delacroix Family]]
* [[House Subconium]]
* [[Order of the Hemlock]]
* [[Eastern Tsuga College]]
* [[Elysian Road]]
* [[Verdant Scholars Memorial Grove]]

[[Category:Verdant]]

History of Verdant - Revision history