A: Elizabeth Pond, wife of Hartford Trust Company President Charles Pond, who left the property to the city in 1895. (Source: "Structures and Styles: Guided Tours of Hartford Architecture," by Gregory E. Andrews and David F. Ransom.) Site visitor Paul LeMay adds this: "Most people think that the Pond house in the park is named such because it sits next to a pond, when in fact it also is named after Elizabeth or the Pond family, who donated the land and trust for the park."

Q: What Hartfordite served as Gen. Washington's commissary general of purchases during the Revolutionary War?

A: Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth, then the city's wealthiest merchant. At his home on Main Street, he entertained Washington, Count de Rochambeau, and the Marquis de LaFayette. His son, Daniel, donated the property in 1841 for the construction of the Wadsworth Atheneum, America's oldest public art museum. The house is gone. (Source: "Hartford: Yesterday and Today," by Robert H. Arnold.)

Q: Aetna Life & Casualty has been headquarted on Farmington Avenue since 1931. Where was the previous home office?

A: At the corner of Main Street and Atheneum Square North, a spot now occupied by the Travelers Plaza. The building, a very ornate affair, was built in 1869 as the headquarters for the Charter Oak Insurance Co. The Aetna Life Insurance Co. acquired it in 1895, added four floors, and remained there until moving to Farmington Avenue. The building was destroyed in 1957. (Source: "Images of America: Hartford, Vol. 1," by Wilson H. Faude.) Q: Antonina P. Uccello was mayor from 1967 to 1971. How is she both a "first" and a "last" in Hartford politics?

A: She was the city's first female mayor and its last Republican one.

Q: What's the significance of that statue at the convergence of Asylum and Farmington avenues, near the headquarters of The Hartford? It shows a girl held up in the palm of a giant hand.

A: The statue, by Frances Wadsworth, honors Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Mason Fitch Cogswell and Laurent Clerc, founders of the Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, which later became the American School for the Deaf. The school stood on Asylum Avenue from 1817 until the early 1920s, when it gave way to the insurance headquarters. The school is now in West Hartford, but the neighborhood carries reminders of it in the statue and in its name: Asylum Hill.

Q: Who were "the bishops"?

A: The post-war corporate leaders of Hartford who took a great interest in the city's progress, engineering such efforts as the construction of the Civic Center.