At 87 Mountain Road (corner of Buena Vista Road) in West Hartford is the town’s oldest extant schoolhouse, a brick structure known as the Old West School. Since 1936, the former school has been occupied by the West Hartford Art League, which purchased the building from the town in 1965 on the condition that it be preserved and used exclusively for non-profit cultural and educational purposes.
The building at 30 Church Street in Waterbury was built as a house for John Booth Burrall (1879-1920), an industrialist, in 1916, the year he married Mrs. Margaret Fallon Barber. It was designed in the Georgian Revival style by Aymar Embury II, the noted New York City architect. A wing was added to the rear of the house in 1919. Burrall died suddenly the following year while spending the winter in Palm Beach, Florida. The house later became Notre Dame Academy, a co-ed Catholic school. A modern brick classroom wing was added in 1965. Today the building is the Enlightenment School, an alternative learning program for Waterbury students with behavioral and truancy problems.
The building at 165 Main Street in East Hartford was built around 1870 and was originally the Hockanum School house. By the 1940s, overcrowding (there were four kindergartens housed in portable classrooms) led to the opening of a new Hockanum School in 1949. For many years the former school building was used by the town as the Hockanum Library.
Prominent on the campus of the Taft School, a boarding school in Watertown, is Charles Phelps Taft Hall. It was named for Charles Phelps Taft I (1843-1929), a lawyer and U.S. Representative, who was the bother of Taft School founder Horace Dutton Taft and U.S. President William Howard Taft. Built in 1929-1930, Charles Phelps Taft Hall was designed by the firm of James Gamble Rogers. A boys dormitory, the building also contains the Woolworth Faculty Room, which was formerly the school library. Charles Phelps Taft Hall connects seamlessly with other adjacent campus buildings to form a single unified structure with a shared architectural vocabulary and materials. This structure was begun in the early twentieth century with an Arts and Crafts/Gothic building designed by Bertram G. Goodhue. The complex was then expanded by James Gamble Rogers. A recently built section, which connects to Charles Phelps Taft Hall and complements its Collegiate Gothic style, is the John L. Vogelstein ’52 Dormitory, designed by Robert A.M. Stern.
Fuller Hall (185 North Main Street in Suffield) is a dormitory and admissions building at Suffield Academy. It was built in 1886 when the school was still known as the Connecticut Literary Institute (it was renamed the Suffield School in 1916 and Suffield Academy in 1937). Today it remains “the building at the heart of Suffield Academy.”
The Town Hall at 9 Devotion Road across from the Green in Scotland was built in 1896 as the Scotland Consolidated School on the site of the former Center District School. At that time the building provided space for the town hall and library on the second floor. (more…)
Yesterday I featured the Carriage House at Johnsonville, a now abandoned Victorian-themed village attraction in East Haddam originally created by Raymond Schmitt, founder of of AGC Corporation. One of the buildings that Schmitt brought to Johnsonville is the Hyde Schoolhouse. It was originally built in Canterbury between 1853 and 1863 and was said to have been discovered by Schmitt’s wife Carole in an abandoned state, surrounded by overgrowth.
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