The Wheeler Library, 101 Main Street in North Stonington, is a private institution that serves as a public library for the Town of North Stonington. Funded with money donated by the Wheeler family, the Library was built in 1900 of Westerly granite. It was originally a school as well as a library, until the secondary school on the first floor moved out in the 1950s.
One of the historic buildings located at Mill Hill Historic Park in Norwalk is the Downtown District Schoolhouse, a one-room school erected in 1826. The schoolhouse originally stood near what was then an intersection of Willow Street and East Avenue. East Norwalk was known as the “Down Town” district until the late nineteenth century. The building was used as a school until 1876 and was later used as a residence. The building was moved several times over the years, settling at Mill Hill when Interstate 95 was built through East Norwalk.
Phoenixville is a village in the town of Eastford. At the junction of Routes 44 and 198 (4 Hartford Turnpike) is a former residence that would become the Union Society of Phoenixville House. It was built in 1806 as the home of Smith Snow (1784-1842), a mill-owner. In 1858, Snow’s heirs conveyed the house to Lydia Clark, the wife of his nephew, Albert B. Clark (1825-1903), a shoemaker. Around the turn of the century, the house was already being used as a nondenominational Sunday School, which officially incorporated in 1907 as the Union Society of Phoenixville and purchased the building. It also served as a meeting place for the local community and by the 1940s was commonly known as the Community House. The building was moved a short distance west of its original location circa 1930 to accommodate highway improvements. The building was in use until 2000, but already before that time fewer events were being held and maintenance issues had made preserving the building difficult (by the 1960s the upper floor had become unsafe). The Union Society sold the building to the Town of Eastford in 2002 and it has since been the object of preservation efforts (the roof was replaced in 2009).
The community of Gales Ferry in Ledyard was served for generations by a one-room schoolhouse. The surviving school building, erected in 1868, is the third to have stood on the same site (4 Hurlbutt Road) since 1750. It was used as a school until a new two-room building (now the Gales Ferry Community Center) was opened in January 1929. The former Gales Ferry School House was later restored by the Ledyard Historical Society.
About 1850 the town of East Windsor organized its schools into twelve districts. The 7th District School in the village of Melrose was built around that time and remained in use as a school until 1938. The Melrose Library was also located here from its founding in the 1930s until it closed in 1950. After that the building, located at 195 Melrose Road, was used by local community groups as a meeting place. In more recent years it was restored by the Melrose School Restoration Committee. The building’s Neoclassical front portico is a later addition that fits in well with the school’s Greek Revival architecture.
The house at 23 Baileyville Road in Middlefield has a sign that reads “First Schoolhouse ~1800~.” Town assessor records give the house a date of 1830.
The current City Hall of Norwalk (125 East Avenue) was built in 1938 as Norwalk High School. Its original entrance, since altered, faced East Avenue. It and other buildings in Norwalk contain one of the largest collections of WPA Depression era murals in the country (45). Twenty-three of the City Hall murals were restored in the 1980s. Others were brought to the building bringing the total on display there to thirty-one (now thirty after the recent removal of a controversial painting). The High School moved to a new building in 1971 and the 1938 building became City Hall in place of the 1912 City Hall in South Norwalk (which became home to the Norwalk Museum until 2011).
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