Beacon Falls

St. Michael Church, Beacon Falls (1942)

St. Michael Catholic Church in Beacon Falls began in 1885 as a mission of St. Augustine Church in Seymour and became a parish in 1924. The first St. Michael’s Church in Beacon Falls, erected at the corner of Church and Main Streets, was dedicated on March 11, 1900. The property was sold to the state of Connecticut for highway construction and the cornerstone of the current church was blessed on October 12, 1941. The church’s first Mass was celebrated on on June 26, 1942. The interior remained unfinished for many years due to wartime austerity, but the completed church was eventually dedicated on June 24, 1956.

Tracy S. Lewis House (1916)

Update: As noted in a comment below, this house was demolished in 2022.

The house at 35 Wolfe Avenue in Beacon Falls was built in 1916 for Tracy S. Lewis, president of the Beacon Falls Rubber Shoe Company. The company had been founded in 1898 by Tracy S. Lewis and his father, George Albert Lewis. The Lewis House and its grounds are part of a neighborhood created on the highland above the rubber factory for the company’s workers. Called the Hill, the neighborhood was designed by the renowned landscape architects, Olmsted Brothers. Parts of the house may date to c. 1855, when the property was owned by the American Hard Rubber Company. The house later lost its original wood shingle siding. The town acquired the property in 2008 for future municipal use and in 2010, after a report was released on the feasibility of restoring the house, there were debates over whether the house should be razed or renovated. The house’s future remains undetermined.

Rimmon School House (1779)

Near the intersection of Rimmon Hill Road and 10 Pines Bridge Road in Beacon Falls is a one-room school house traditionally believed to have been built in 1779, when Beacon Falls was part of Derby. It is more likely that the Rimmon School House was one of six built in 1830, when Beacon Falls was part of the town of Oxford. The school was in use until 1953, when Laurel Ledge Elementary School opened. For 24 years the former school was owned by Raymond Lafferty, who had been in the last class at the Rimmon School before moving to Laurel Ledge in forth grade. His father had purchased it not long after the school closed and used it for storage. Raymond Lafferty had an antiques shop in the building, which he sold in 2010. The new owners wanted to sell the building to the town, but the town could not afford it.

Beacon Falls Congregational Church (1871)

The Beacon Falls Congregational Church was originally a Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1846. The first church building was built next to what is now Pines Bridge Cemetery. A small meeting house, it burned in a fire. After 1850, the church moved to another small building on Main Street, near Lebanon Brook. That structure later became an American Legion Hall and is now Beacon Falls Pizza. The current church on Wolfe Avenue, built on land donated by the Home Wollen Mill, was completed in 1871 and dedicated on January 11, 1872. The church became Congregational in 1919. A member of The United Church of Christ from 1957 to 2005, the Beacon Falls Congregational Church is now an independent Congregational Church.

Beacon Mill Village (1853)

Beacon Mill Village in Beacon Falls is an example of a nineteenth century mill village adapted to new use as an apartment complex (in this it is similar to the mill village established by the Cheney Brothers in Manchester). The eight surviving buildings of the Beacon Mill Village complex were built between 1853 and 1916. The Town of Beacon Falls, incorporated in 1871, grew up alongside the factories. The Village was originally home to the American Hard Rubber Company in the 1850s. By the time of the Civil War, the complex housed the factories of the Home Woolen Company, which produced shawls for Union soldiers. This company went out of business in 1880, but the Beacon Falls Rubber Shoe Company, founded in 1898 by George Lewis, later moved into the complex. His son, Tracy Lewis, later served as the company‘s president until his death in 1921. The company, which grew to have offices in Boston, San Francisco and New York, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1915, while production remained in Beacon Falls. That same year, the company hired the Olmstead Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, to design a mill town for plant workers. The mill buildings were restored and transformed into an apartment complex in 1986.