Abington Congregational Church (1751)

The oldest ecclesiastical building in the State of Connecticut that has been continuously used for its original religious purpose is the Abington Congregational Church in the Town of Pomfret. Overcrowding at the Pomfret meetinghouse, as well as the great distance residents from the Abington section of town had to travel to attend services there, led to the creation of a separate ecclesiastical society in Abington 1749. The new congregation erected its own meetinghouse in 1751, a building that is one of the few surviving examples in New England of eighteenth-century peg and beam construction. The building was completely remodeled in the Greek Revival style between 1834 and 1840 by the architect-builder Edwin Fitch of Mansfield. Among various interior and exterior alterations, Fitch created a new facade featuring four Doric pilasters and replaced the church‘s 1802 bell tower with the current three-stage steeple.

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Main House, Rectory School (1795)

Now comprising part of the “Main House” on the campus of the Rectory School in Pomfret is a house erected circa 1795 for Thomas Grosvenor (1744-1825), a lawyer who served in the Revolutionary War. Wounded in his right hand at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Grosvenor ended the was as a Lieutenant Colonel. The house was remodeled and greatly enlarged in about 1885 by Thomas Skelton Harrison, a Philadelphia industrialist. In 1925, Rev. Frank H. Bigelow and his wife, founders of the Rectory School in 1920, acquired the Harrison estate to become the school’s campus. In the ensuing years they erected a complex of wood-framed colonial revival buildings on the estate, which has been the school’s campus ever since.

Postcard of The Rectory School (Main House)

Christ Church, Pomfret (1882)

Christ Church in Pomfret, consecrated in 1882, was designed in a rural Victorian Gothic style by architect Howard Hoppin. It was constructed through a memorial gift of the Vinton family in honor of the Rev. Dr. Alexander H. Vinton and his wife, Eleanor Stockbridge Thompson Vinton. Their friend, Rev. Phillips Brooks of Boston, who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” preached at the laying of the church’s cornerstone. The building is architecturally distinctive, with an interesting use of rubble stone and brick and an exaggerated roof line. It replaced an earlier church building, built the 1820s, that once stood to the north of the church’s current location. The church has six Tiffany stained glass windows.

First Congregational Church of Pomfret (2016)

The Congregational Church in Pomfret Center was organized in 1715 and its first meeting house was erected on White’s Plains, located on Pomfret Hill, just north of Needle’s Eye Road. The next meeting house was built on the town common in Pomfret Center in 1762. Interestingly, the church was painted orange. (In the coming years, the neighboring towns of Windham, Killingly, Thompson, and Brooklyn would emulate Pomfret’s example!). The church’s third meeting house was erected in 1832 on land acquired from a Dr. Waldo. The land was purchased with proceeds generated by the women of the church, who had knitted a hundred pairs of stockings to sell. In erecting the new church, builder Lemuel Holmes salvaged much of the building materials from the previous structure.

On December 7, 2013, a fire (likely caused by an accident during the repair of the building’s front steps) destroyed the historic church. It was soon rebuilt, following the original design as closely as possible, while creating a building that is a little larger than the original and set further back on the property at 13 Church Road. Construction took three years, with the new steeple being raised into place on August 30, 2016.

Pomfret Town House (1841)

In the early nineteenth century, town meetings in Pomfret were held in churches and other borrowed buildings. In the 1830s there was a movement to build a permanent town hall, but the citizens disputed where to locate the building. Eventually a council was formed to select the location. To ensure neutrality, the council of three was composed of individuals who were not members of the Pomfret community, being chosen from the neighboring towns of Hampton, Thompson, and Killingly. The spot chosen was roughly midway between the town’s two larger villages of Abington and Pomfret Center. Erected in 1841 (at what is now 17 Town House Road), the new building would serve as Town House for many years and is now owned by the Pomfret Historical Society.

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Courtlands (1892)

In about 1892, Mary Frances Clark Hoppin (1842–1934) built a mansion in Pomfret called Courtlands. She was the widow of Dr. Courtland Hoppin (1834–1876) of Providence, Rhode Island, and was the daughter of Joseph Washington Clark, a wealthy Boston investor, who had a summer home in Pomfret. She had earlier lived in a house she had built in Pomfret after her husband died. She later gave that home to the Pomfret School, where it is now Robinson House, the school’s admissions office. After her death, Courtlands became St. Robert’s Hall, a Jesuit monastery and seminary, dedicated in December 1935. Since 1974, the mansion and 114-acre estate have been home to the New England Laborers’ Training Academy, with an address of 37 Deerfield Road in Pomfret.

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Most Holy Trinity Church, Pomfret (1887)

The Catholic parish in Pomfret began as a mission of Sacred Heart Church in West Thompson. Services were held in Pomfret Hall before Most Holy Trinity Church was erected in 1885-1887. The church originally stood on Woodstock Road. In 1973 it was moved to its current location at 568 Pomfret Street, at the intersection of Deerfield Road. A house already standing at the new property, built c. 1800 and remodeled in the Colonial Revival style c. 1890, became the church’s rectory.