The Southwest District School, on Simsbury Road in Bloomfield, was built of local traprock in 1858. It served as a one-room schoolhouse until 1923. Now owned by the Wintonbury Historical Society, the School’s roof and underlying structures were restored in 2002.
The Roberts Homestead is an 1822 brick house, located across from the Town Green in Bloomfield. It was built by Lemuel Roberts. Later in the nineteenth century, owner Lester A. Roberts, who gave land to add to the Town Green, was described as “a man of unusually wide intelligence and some literary note,” who “is now a resident of Brooklyn, but still makes Bloomfield his summer home.”
For Thanksgiving, we focus on the First Congregational Church in Bloomfield. Originally established as the parish of Wintonbury, the first meetinghouse was erected in 1737 and the first official gathering was in 1738. A second meetinghouse was built in 1801 and served for 56 years before being moved aside for the current church building, built in 1858. Wintonbury had by then became the Town of Bloomfield in 1835. The church’s steeple blew down in 1862 and was replaced with a sturdier one that includes a clock.
Constructed in Bloomfield in 1796, at the intersection of Park and School Streets, the brick Old Farm School served one of the seven school districts in what was then Windsor’s Wintonbury Parish. Before then, an earlier log building on the site from the 1730s had been used as a school house (it was eventually sold in 1815). Although originally built with two floors, the new brick building’s second floor classroom was only completed in 1829-30. The school closed in 1922, but the building continued to be used by the public, serving as a meeting place for the American Legion and Auxiliary Legion from 1931 to 1971. When the state planned to widen School Street, the Wintonbury Historical Society raised money and supervised the moving of the building to a new location across the street in 1976. In 1987 the first floor was restored and opened to the public as a museum, with the second floor following it in 1989.
Francis Gillette was a politician, lecturer and abolitionist. He pursued agriculture in Bloomfield and lived in an unusual 1834 Greek Revival style stone house on Bloomfield Avenue. In 1852, Gillette moved to Hartford, founding the Nook Farm neighborhood with his brother-in-law, John Hooker. Francis Gillette served as a senator and was the father of actor William Gillette. The house, which was used as an overnight stop for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, was moved to a new location on Bloomfield Avenue in 1990, after being vacant for 17 years.
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