Possible dates for the construction of the house at 17 Church Street in Hebron include 1797, 1805, 1811 and 1815. The house is listed on the website of the Hebron Historic Properties Commission with the latter date and John Graves as the builder. The website also indicates that the owner of the house dated it to 1805 and attributed the building to Amos Strong, who owned a brick kiln. Strong sold the house in 1818 and it passed through many different owners during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The house at 140 Burrows Hill Road in Hebron was built c. 1735–1744 by a Mr. Porter. It was purchased by the Smith family in 1794 and remained in that family until 2009. Nathan Smith, the second Smith to live in the home, remarried at age 65. In 1853, he added the Greek Revival north ell, where his father lived after retiring from farming. It is one of three additions that have been made to the house’s north side. There is also a kitchen addition at the rear of the house.
The Smith farm grew to hundreds of acres and included Prophet’s Rock, the town’s oldest historic landmark. The legend of Prophet’s Rock is related by Gov. John S. Peters in his “Historical Notes,” written in 1843 and quoted by F.C. Bissell in Hebron, Connecticut Bicentennial (1908). A group of men from Windsor had set out to explore and find places to settle in the area.
While the men were making preparations for their families in the summer of 1706 they brought their provisions with them and remained for weeks at their new home. Their wives being anxious for the welfare of their husbands and unwilling to be left too long alone, four or five started one shining morning for the promised land, twenty long miles through the wilderness, regulating their course by marked trees and crossing the streams on logs felled for that purpose. Night overtook them in the lower part of Gilead, they wandered from the line and brought up on the hill south of Nathan Smith’s house. Fearing the wolves would regale themselves upon their delicious bodies they concluded to roost upon the top of the high rock on the summit of said hill. Here they proclaimed their lamentations to the winds. This novel serenade attracted the attention of their husbands, who wandered towards the sound until they fortunately but unexpectedly found their wives on the rock, which they had chosen for their night’s repose. The gratification of the interview can be better imagined than expressed.
The location of this rock has been handed down to the present time and it is now known as “Prophet’s Rock.”
The oldest part of the house at 21 Marjorie Circle in Hebron was erected about 1760 (the date displayed on the house) and was a two-room hotel kept by Mary Fuller, wife of Ebenezer Fuller. The house was enlarged in 1770 by Roger Fuller (whose name is displayed on the house). The front entrance design dates to the early nineteenth century.
The Gull School, also known as the Gott School or District Six, is a one-room schoolhouse that once served the southeast section of the Town of Hebron. It was originally located at the northwest intersection of Grayville Road and Old Colchester Road. Built in 1790, it burned down and was rebuilt in 1816, continuing to serve as a school until it closed in 1919. It reopened in 1929 and then continued as a school until 1935. It was sold by the town a decade later and the new owner put it up on blocks. A decade later it was moved to a field where it stood for many years. In 1971 Henrietta Green, who taught at the school from 1930 to 1931, moved the building to the property of the Green family in the Amston section of town, on Church Street, near the intersection with Niles Road. For the next thirty years she welcomed school groups to visit the building, which she had refurnished to appear as it had been during her time teaching at the school. The Green family deeded the school to the town, which then moved it in 2001 to its current address at 8 Marjorie Circle. Three years later the interior of the school was restored for the Hebron Historical Society as an Eagle Scout project by Will Aubin and in 2005 the exterior was restored as an Eagle Scout project by Alex Breiding, both with help from Hebron Troop 28 Boy Scouts.
By the early nineteenth century, Hopevale, or Hope Valley, located in the Town of Hebron, was an active area for farming as well as manufacturing along the local streams. There were also camp meetings, held on the shores of Barber’s Pond, one of which in 1823 lasted for a full week of preaching. The earliest Methodist Churches in Hebron were one built c. 1805 on Burrows Hill and taken down in 1845 and the 1838 church on Hebron Green that later became the Town Hall. Another Methodist church was established in Hopeville, as related in the Souvenir History of the New England Southern Conference in Three Volumes (1897):
In the year 1849 the church property, situated in what was then called Hope Valley (now Hopevale), was deeded by David Chapman to the trustees in trust for the use of the Wesleyan Methodist Society, and the deed was recorded in the Hebron Town Records.
For some years thereafter that denomination sustained services until unable to do so longer on account of members dying or removing. For some years previous to the year 1881 preaching was sustained by the Methodist Episcopal denomination, but only at the rate of twelve Sabbaths per year, preachers coming from Colchester or Marlborough.
At the Willimantic Camp Meeting in the year 1881 a religious interest was started among the people of Hopevale. Soon afterwards Brother Kathan, laboring among the people, was rewarded by seeing a number converted. One of the results of this revival was an earnest desire to form a Methodist Episcopal Church in this place. Consequently, Sunday, October 10, 1881, Mr. Mitchell formally received into the church Mr. and Mrs. David Johnson and Mrs. Sarah Thompson, the only survivors of the Wesleyan Methodis Society, then living in Hopevale. He also received a number of others by letter and from probation, and baptized and received seven others on probation.
The church property was deeded to a board of trustees for the use of the Methodist episcopal Church February 3, 1882. and the deed recorded in the Hebron Land Records. In the spring of 1882 the church was repaired, painted, papered and a new bell, carpet, lamps, chairs and organ purchased. The church was rededicated September 3, 1882, by Presiding Elder H. D. Robinson.
Since the organization of the church, services have been held regularly, with the exception of three years, when it was closed for want of funds.
[. . .] The church membership has been small, never numbering more eleven by removals and deaths.
[. . .] The quaint Communion Service which was used in the old church is still in good condition, and is used at the present time in Communion Services. It is said that the first Camp Meeting held in Connecticut was held in a grove about one mile from this place.
As related in an historical address by Cyrus H. Pendleton, on the occasion of Hebron’s Bicentennial in 1908:
Of the subsequent history of this church I have been able to obtain scarcely anything definite. There would now seem to be in connection with it no regular church organization, and the trustees are now all residents of Colchester, and services are held in the church just sufficient to use up the income of a small fund bequeathed by Samuel Skinner, a former resident of Hebron, and a member of the Methodist Church on the green.
The church building was also used in the late nineteenth century by the Seventh Day Adventists. Adjacent to the church is a house (built c. 1790-1810), at 29 Reidy Hill Road, that once housed the Adventist school. The church, located at 21 Reidy Hill Road, is now known as the Hope Valley Church.
