Hank’s Mill (1882)

The village of Hanks Hill in Mansfield was the home of silk manufacturing company of Hanks Brothers. The original mill, built by Rodney Hanks and his nephew Horace Hanks in 1810 and believed to be the first water powered silk mill in the United States, was purchased by Henry Ford in the 1930s and moved to the Greenfield Village open air museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Another mill building was destroyed by fire in 1882 and replaced by the building at 247 Hanks Hill Road, now much altered to serve as a residence. It is just across the street from the Hanks Reservoir. Nearby, at 233 Hanks Hill Road, is a former boarding house for mill employees, built in the early nineteenth century (or as early as 1789).

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Former Mill Office in South Glastonbury (1720)

Former Mill Office, now a house.

The building at 9 Tryon Street in South Glastonbury may have been built as early as 1720. Around that time Thomas Hollister and Thomas Welles started a saw mill on the east side of nearby Roaring Brook. The mill was linked to the shipbuilding industry in the area at the time. By the mid-eighteenth century this early operation had developed into what was known as the “Great Grist mill at Nayaug.” The house at 9 Tryon Street may have been the bake house associated with that mill that is mentioned in a 1783 deed. According to one source, the Welles-Hollister grist mill and bake oven on Roaring Brook at Nayaug was completely destroyed in the great flood of 1869 and the mill had to be rebuilt on the northwest side of the bridge over Roaring Brook at the foot of High Street. Later, in the early twentieth century, there was a feldspar mill on the east side of the brook and the building at 9 Tryon Street may have served as the mill office of owner Louis W. Howe and then as housing for a spar mill worker’s family. Howe sold the house c. 1928 to Mrs. Aaron Kinne, who had the interior remodeled c. 1940 to designs by restoration architect Norris F. Prentice. It was remodeled a second time in 2002.

Porter Gristmill House (1790)

The historic Porter Gristmill, which started operation in 1740 under the original mill operator Ebenezer Fuller, is located along Jeremy Brook at the west end of the Hebron Center Historic District. The original millworks were later moved to Old Sturbridge Village, where the millstones and other parts are now located in the village‘s 1938 Gristmill building. One of the surviving mill buildings, at 55 West Main Street in Hebron, is the miller’s house (pictured above), which was erected in 1790. The house’s front façade is one story, while the rear is three stories.

Bethel Opera House (1860)

Bethel Opera House

The Opera House in Bethel, located at 186 Greenwood Avenue, was built in 1860 [or perhaps as early as 1848?] by Augustus A. Fisher, a hat manufacturer. It housed a hat factory on the first floor, with a public hall above known as Fisher’s Hall. After a fire damaged the roof in the late nineteenth century, it was replaced with the current broad-eaved roof with Italianate brackets. The building later became Nichols’ Opera House, named after John F. Nichols, who ran it as an entertainment complex, with theater, roller skating rink and billiards. After his death in 1918, Daniel Brandon used the lower floor of the building as a brush factory and showed silent movies upstairs in what was called the Barnum Theatre. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was called Leeja Hall and was used for town meetings and as a high school gym. Since that time, the building has been used by various businesses, with an art gallery and later a photography studio above and a restaurant below.

Gurleyville Grist Mill (1830)

On the Fenton River, near the village of Gurleyville in the town of Mansfield is a historic stone gristmill. Built in the 1830s of local stone, including garnetiferous schist, gneiss, granite, pegmatite and quartzite, it replaced the original mill on the site, built in 1749 by Benjamin Davis, who had also constructed a dam. Samuel Cross, father of Connecticut Governor Wilbur Cross, was the miller for many years in the nineteenth century. The mill was run by the Douda family from 1912 until it ceased operation in 1941. An attached sawmill, in operation since 1723, was destroyed by heavy snow in the early 1950s. The surviving gristmill has complete and perfectly preserved equipment from when it was last used. The Joshua’s Tract Conservation and Historic Trust (AKA Joshua’s Trust) purchased the property in 1979 and the Gurleyville Grist Mill is open to the public on a seasonal basis.

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J. H. Sessions Clock Company Office (1918)

Yesterday I featured the factory of the J. H. Sessions Clock Company, which is located at 61 East Main Street in the Forestville section of Bristol. Part of the factory complex is the company’s former main office building, a Jacobethan Revival-style structure erected c. 1918. It was designed by Bristol architect Harold A. Hayden, who also drew the plans for the Soldiers’ Memorial Monument of Bristol after serving in World War One.

J. H. Sessions Clock Company (1900)

In 1870, John Humphrey Sessions (1828-1899) of Bristol merged his wood turning business with a trunk hinge factory that had been established by his late brother, Albert J. Sessions. The company expanded in the following decades under the leadership of J. H. Sessions, who brought his son, John Henry Sessions, on as a partner. After the elder Sessions’ death in 1899, the family would continue to run the business well into the twentieth century. In addition to the hardware business, the family built a huge foundry on Farmington Avenue in 1895 and acquired a large clock factory on East Main Street in Forestville after taking over the E. N. Welch Manufacturing Company in 1902. Elisha N. Welch (1809-1887) had started manufacturing clocks in the 1850s. The company he founded began to decline after his death in 1887. Although it rebuilt its East Main Street factory complex a year after it was devastated by two fires in 1899, the firm had had to borrow money and continued to suffer financially. William E. Sessions, a son of John Humphrey Sessions, and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, son of John Henry Sessions, soon bought enough Welch stock to take control of the company in 1902. They changed its name to the Sessions Clock Company on January 9, 1903. The company would flourish for many years, but went into decline after World War II. The company was sold in the 1950s and eventually liquidated. By the early 1970s the various factory buildings were sold off. The complex is now known as the Forestville Industrial Center and is now used by small industrial and commercial firms.

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