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.
One of the properties of the Totoket Historical Society in North Branford is the Gordon S. Miller Farm Museum. Housed in a traditional New England barn constructed in 2002, the museum collection contains farm machinery and farm implements used in Northford and North Branford going back over two centuries, as well as artifacts discovered in local archeological digs sponsored by the society. The museum is named for Gordon S. Miller, a long time resident of Northford and a former President of the Totoket Historical Society.
Andrew C. Colegrove, who operated an electrical appliance business in Mystic, was killed in a plane crash in California on August 24, 1951. The Colegrove Building at Mystic Seaport was built in 1952 as a memorial in his memory. Since 1962, the half of the building that faces the Mystic River has housed a printing exhibit, called the Mystic Press Printing Office. The original Mystic Press newspaper, started in 1873, had an office at West Main and Pearl Streets. The other half of the Colegrove Building contains a Ship Carver exhibit.
A dramatic example of Modern architecture on the campus of Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford is the private school’s Paul Mellon Arts Center, also called the PMAC. Designed by I. M. Pei, it was completed in 1972. The western section of the building contains a 770-seat theater, while the eastern portion has fine arts studios, music classrooms, music practice rooms and a 100-seat recital hall. Connecting the two sections underground is the Chase-Bear Experimental Theater, known as the “Black Box.” In 2015, the School received a $10 million gift to renovate building, primarily the main stage theater, which was renamed the William T. Little ’49 and Frances A. Little Theater in honor of the donors.
The first public library in the town of Roxbury was established in October 1896. It was housed in the back rooms of the old Town Hall until Charles Watson Hodge, upon his death in 1936, bequeathed $15,000 to erect a building for a library and museum. Completed in 1937 by Clayton B. Squire, the stone building was named after Charles Hodge’s father, Albert Lafayette Hodge. A north wing addition was completed in 1967 through a donation by Everett Hurlburt. A new building, the Minor Memorial Library, was erected in the early 1990s to become the town’s public library, with the Hodge Memorial, at 4 North Street, continuing as a museum open to the public by appointment only.
Happy New Year!! For New Year’s Day, here’s a relatively new “historic” building that’s become a modern Hartford landmark. The Connecticut Science Center, designed by César Pelli, was erected as part of the city’s Adriaen’s Landing development. The Science Center is nine stories, 154,000 square feet and is the first science center to generate most of its power from an on-site fuel cell. The Center opened its doors in 2009.
Frederick Gunn, founder of the Gunnery School in Washington, was also the founder, in 1852, of the Washington Library Association, of which he became president in 1855. In the 1880s the Library Association evolved into the Washington Reading Room & Circulating Library Association, which opened a reading room in 1891. E.H. Van Ingen pledged land and money toward erecting a permanent library building in 1902 and the completed building was dedicated in 1908. It was designed by noted architect Ehrick K.Rossiter, who had become a summer resident of Washington. The interior has ceiling murals by Washington resident H. Siddons Mowbray and bronze busts by English sculptor A. Bertram Pegram. The local DAR branch had opened a historical room in a nearby house in 1899. This collection was turned over to the library in 1907. Originally located in the library’s basement, the museum later collection moved to the adjacent house, bequeathed to the library by June S. Willis in 1965. A new 7,500 square foot addition, five times the size of the original library, was completed in 1994. The plans were drawn by King & Tuthill.
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