Salem School (1894)

Naugatuck’s Salem School has been in the news recently. Just this past week, the Naugatuck Board of Education, facing a budget shortfall, voted to close the historic school, resulting in the circulation of a petition to save it. Salem School has been open since 1894. Previously, the Union Center School, built in 1852 and located on Naugatuck Green, had served the community. By the 1890s, the Borough of Naugatuck required a new and larger school building. The result was Salem School, the gift of John Howard Whittemore, a wealthy industrialist who wanted to enrich his hometown. He hired the nation’s leading architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, to design the school, as well as many other prominent buildings in the center of Naugatuck. The old school on the Green was taken down and Salem School was built across Meadow Street in 1893 and opened the following year. The school served all grades until a separate High School building, also designed by McKim, Mead and White, was built in 1905. The Middle School grades were moved out in the 1950s. Salem School, named for “Salem Bridge,” an early name for Naugatuck, has continued since then as an elementary school, but is now slated to close. The future use of the building has not yet been determined.

Hill-Stead (1901)

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Constructed between 1898 and 1901, the Pope Riddle House, centerpiece of the Hill-Stead estate in Farmington, was constructed as a retirement home for the industrialist and art collector Alfred Atmore Pope and his wife, Ada Lunette Brooks. It was designed by their daughter, Theodate Pope Riddle, working with Edgerton Swartout, an architect with the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Gaining a valuable apprenticeship in architecture through this experience, she would go on to design many buildings over the next 30 years, including the 1920 reconstruction of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in New York and the Avon Old Farms School, which she founded.

Once described by Henry James as, “a great new house on a hilltop,” the Colonial Revival-style building combines various influences, from the traditional New England farm house to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Various additions were made in the following years by Theodate Pope Riddle (who married diplomat John Wallace Riddle in 1916). She later inherited the house and left the estate to become a museum after her own death in 1946.

The museum showcases Alfred Pope’s art collection. Begun in the 1880s, it includes works on paper, Japanese woodblock prints, and Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt and James M. Whistler. It was featured in the 1907 book, Noteworthy Paintings in American Collections, edited by John LaFarge and August Jaccaci.