The first Methodist sermon preached in what is now the town of North Canaan was given in 1786 at the Lawrence Tavern (the Isaac Lawrence House on Elm Street). A Methodist church was erected in 1816 and remained in use until the current Canaan United Methodist Church was erected in 1868-1873. It is located at 2 Church Street, at the west end of Main Street where it divides into Church and West Main Streets. The original church building was sold to a farmer. The large stained glass window at the front of the church was installed in 1905. The church merged with the Falls Village Methodist Church in 1966. That church’s first structure, built in 1793, was the first building for Methodist worship erected in the New England states.
At 102 Front Street in Noank is a small building with board-and-batten siding that is believed to have been the community’s original railroad station. It was built in 1858, with the completion of the last major section of the Shore Line Rail Road, connecting Boston and New York City. Since the discontinuation of railroad service, the building has been used as a store, with an extension erected on the Front Street side.
The former home of the Danbury Library, located at 256 Main Street, was built in 1876-1878 and served as the city’s library until the current building was erected at 170 Main Street in 1970. Beginning in 1771, there had been several successive library organizations in Danbury, the last of which disbanded in the 1850s. As related in James Montgomery Bailey’s History of Danbury, Conn. (1896), the creation of a permanent library was
substantially the gift of one family, that of the late E. Moss White, [a successful farmer and merchant] of Danbury. The late William Augustus White, of Brooklyn, son of E. Moss White, by his last will and testament bequeathed the sum of $10,000, to be paid five years after his decease, for the establishment of a public library in his native borough of Danbury. The Legislature of Connecticut, at its session in 1869, passed an act incorporating the Danbury Library, which act was approved by the Governor, June 5th, 1869. On June 1st, 1870, Alexander M. White, of Brooklyn, brother of William Augustus White, and sole executor of his will, placed at the disposal of the trustees of the library the house on Main Street, in which he was born and in which his parents died, to be used for library purposes until a suitable building could be erected upon the premises.
The E. Moss White White Homestead, erected in 1790, housed the library until 1876. At that point, Alexander M. White (who was a partner in Danbury’s leading hatters’ fur processing firm) donated the house and land to the library. With his brother, George Granville White, he provided the funds necessary to move the house to a rear lot and erect a brand new library building in its place. Designed by architect Lorenzo Wheeler, the Danbury Library opened in 1878. It became a free library in 1893. Initially, the downstairs rooms were rented for offices with the library on the second story. Later, the lower level was converted into the Children’s Room. In the 1930s, artist Charles Federer of Bethel, painted murals depicting fairy tales in the Children’s Room as a W.P.A. project. Today the former library building is the Danbury Music Center. In 1994, the Marian Anderson Recital Hall was dedicated on the second floor. (more…)
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Wethersfield was organized on March 21, 1943 and the congregation initially used a vacant store at 689 Wolcott Hill Road for worship. Outgrowing the store after a few months, the congregation acquired the Griswold House at 371 Wolcott Hill Road. The congregation worshiped in a chapel on the first floor its first pastors also lived in the house. After using the house for fifteen years, a new church building was erected on the property and the congregation began worshiping in its new home on New Years Day, 1958. A parish Education Building was constructed in 1968 and a new Fellowship Hall, connecting the Church and the Education Building, was completed in 1996.
Universal Food Stores was an early grocery chain that had branches throughout southeastern Connecticut. Most of the stores had individual owners who joined a cooperative agreement to sell goods wholesaled by Yantic Grain and Products Co. of Norwich under the Universal banner. A surviving Universal Food Store in Noank closed in 2011. Another Universal Food Store, located at 15 Palmer Street in Pawcatuck, had closed many years before. It was housed in a 1935 building that still has its peaked gables, a feature used on many of the stores. The building is now the Whistle Stop Pizza Restaurant.
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