Bethel Public Library (1842)

Seth Seelye House, now Bethel Public Library

In 1831, P. T Barnum, started publishing a newspaper called The Herald of Freedom which stirred up a number of controversies. His uncle Alanson Taylor even sued him for libel, although the suit never went to trial. Another libel suit in 1832 did land Barnum in jail for two months. The prosecution was brought on behalf of Seth Seelye (1795-1869), a merchant and church deacon in Barnum’s hometown of Bethel whom Barnum accused of usury. In 1842 Seeyle built a grand Greek Revival-style house at 189 Greenwood Avenue in Bethel. In 1914 the house was donated to become the new home of the Bethel Public Library, which had been organized in 1909.

Unionville Museum (1917)

The building at 15 School Street in the Unionville section of Farmington was erected in 1917 as the town’s West End Library. Designed by Edward Tilton of New York, it was one of the many Carnegie libraries built throughout the country from the later nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Not used as a library since the 1960s, it has been home to the Unionville Museum since 1984.

Atwater Memorial Library (1942)

Yesterday I posted about the Gordon S. Miller Farm Museum in North Branford. The museum is located adjacent to the Historical Society’s Reynolds-Beers House and the Atwater Memorial Library. The oldest section of the Library was built in 1942-1943 on the site of the town’s old Training Ground. The library was built with funds left to the town by a grandson of the Rev. Charles Atwater, the third minister of the North Branford Congregational Church. An addition to the library was constructed in 1967.

Bakerville Library (1873)

According to the website of the Bakerville Library in New Hartford, the building that houses the library was built in 1834. The building was previously used as the Bakerville School. The volume in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series on New Hartford (by Margaret L. Lavoe, 2002) explains that the Bakerville Academy opened in 1873 (replacing an earlier Bakerville schoolhouse on the site) and that research was underway to determine the origin of the building. According to another book published by Arcadia, Connecticut Schoolhouses Through Time (2017), by Melinda K. Elliott, the school was started in 1824 and for a time the upstairs was used by the school and the downstairs was used for meetings and social events. Eventually, both floors would be used as classroom space. Next door was the Bakerville Methodist Church. The church’s horse sheds were attached to the rear of the school building, but they were eventually removed because children would climb out of the second-floor schoolroom onto the shed’s roof. The church burned down in 1954 (a new church was erected in 1960). The school closed when the Bakerville Consolidated School was built in 1941-1942. The Bakerville Library, started in 1949, moved into the former school building in 1951.

Prospect Public Library – Meeting Place (1905)

I have just completed a building index (by address) for the buildings on this site that are in the Town of Prospect. The most recent entry for Prospect is today’s building, the former Prospect Public Library, which is constructed of fieldstone and was erected in 1905. Earlier private circulating libraries (the Cheshire Mountain Library and the Oxford Circulating Library) had existed in the community even before the incorporation of Prospect as a town in 1827. The Library Association was organized in 1886 and its books were first located at the home of its first librarian, Sarah Tallmadge, and then in the vestry of the Congregational Church. Efforts for the construction of a free public library led to the erection of the 1905 building, designed by F. E. Walters of Waterbury. The principle donors for the library were the Tuttle family of Naugatuck, descendants of Eben Clark Tuttle (1806-1873) who had begun manufacturing hoes in Prospect before moving to Naugatuck in 1851. The family also funded landscaping of the grounds around the building on Prospect Green. A new library building was erected in 1991 on the former site of the Petrauskas farm at 17 Center Street. The former library, located at 30 Center Street, was renamed the Meeting Place and is used for community purposes.

Abington Social Library (1886)

In 1793, the Congregational parish of Abington in Pomfret formed a social library for their community. Rev. Walter Lyon, minister of the Abington Congregational Church, was the first librarian. The books were kept in his home and later in a house at Abington four corners. The books were mainly theological and philosophical volumes and many subscribers lamented the lack of more popular works of literature. In response, a young men’s organization, the Junior Library of Abington, was founded in 1804. It merged with the social library in 1815 to form the United Library of Abington. Women of the community founded their own organization, the Ladies Library of Abington, in 1813. It was the first women’s library in the United States. The United and Ladies libraries merged in 1879 to form the present Abington Social Library, which is the oldest continuously operating social library in the country. The library is located at 536 Hampton Road, in a building erected in 1886.

Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library (1898)

The Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library in Old Lyme was established in 1897 as a free public library. It was built on the site of the old Lord family homestead, dating back to 1666, where Phoebe Griffin Lord was born in 1797 and grew up with her sisters and widowed mother. After spending her teenage years with her uncle in New York, she returned to Old Lyme and began a long career as an artist and educator, which she continued after her 1827 marriage to Daniel Noyes, a merchant. In 1831 they purchased the Parsons Tavern , which had been an important meeting place during the Revolutionary War. The tavern’s former ballroom became a classroom. Phoebe Griffin Noyes (1797-1875) contributed a large part to the community’s development as a center of art and culture. To honor her memory, her family decided to erect a library in her honor, which was funded by the gift of her son-in-law, Charles H. Luddington, and opened in 1898. The Evelyn McCurdy-Salisbury wing was added in 1925, and the library was more than doubled in size with an expansion in 1995.

On the site of the old tavern, Ludington built a summer estate in 1893. It was long the home of his daughter, Phoebe’s granddaughter, Katharine Ludington (1869-1953), a notable activist and suffragist.

As Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, said in his address at the opening of the Library

It is fine to see this spontaneous recognition of the obligation which men owe their fellow-men, to contribute their best, whatever that may be, for the promotion of the good of those among whom they have dwelt.

That is what Mr. Ludington has done. He has provided a commodious, spacious, and attractive building to be the literary centre of Lyme. It furnishes a suitable place for the books already brought together by the members of the Library Association. The ample shelves are suggestive of future accessions. The reading room silently invites the neighbors to enjoy their leisure hours in the quiet companionship of the best of contemporary writers and illustrators. Not only the residents of Lyme, but those of the region around, are welcome. Here too is a place for occasional lectures and readings and for exhibitions of historical mementos, or works of art. The building is placed on a beautiful site, and it is associated with the life of a woman whose rare gifts and noble character are to be perpetuated as a memory and an example.