In 2016, Mystic Seaport celebrated the opening of the new Thompson Exhibition Building, a modern museum facility that makes extensive use of wood and features a dramatic roof that evokes an ocean wave. Designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, the building features a 5,000-square-foot exhibition gallery and visitor reception areas.
Designed to fit in with the many historical nineteenth-century buildings at Mystic Seaport, the museum’s MIldred C. Mallory Building was erected in 1963 using stone from a house in the Fort Rachel area of Mystic that had been destroyed in the 1938 hurricane. Serving as Mystic Seaport’s members’ lounge and membership office, the building named for Mildred C. Mallory (1897-1961) as a memorial to honor her efforts for the museum’s membership program. The first floor is covered with granite ashlar and the second floor with clapboards.
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One of the historic buildings at Mystic Seaport represents a nineteenth-century general store called George H. Stone & Co. The objects on exhibit were donated by George H. Stone, a retired merchant from North Stonington who had his own collection of historical items. The building itself was originally erected circa 1850 as a house in Pawcatuck. It was acquired by the museum in 1954.
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It looks like I posted this building too late. It was demolished a few years ago! A new building was completed on the site in 2022.
Later home to a business and much altered, the building at 595 Greenhaven Road in Pawcatuck was once a restaurant called the Greenhaven Inn. I’m not sure when the house was built (if it’s Colonial or Colonial-Revival). The real estate websites give a date of 1901 but that may not be very precise.
Listed in the Mechanic Street Historic District as the Freestone House, the residence at 27 Lester Avenue in Pawcatuck was built in 1900.
Mystic Seaport recreates a drugstore of the period 1870-1885 in a building the museum erected in 1953. A small recreated doctor’s office adjoins the drugstore building. The store is named for the Binghurst family of pharmacists, which began with Joseph Bringhurst (1767-1834), who operated a drugstore in Wilmington, Delaware. The Bringhurst collection was given to Mystic Seaport by Smith, Kline & French Laboratories, which had acquired it after the store closed. The building also contains the Abram P. Karsh collection of pharmaceutical items from the Philadelphia area.
The Boardman School at Mystic Seaport is a one room schoolhouse that was originally built in the town of Preston. It may date to as early as 1765 (or c. 1840) and was named for the Boardman family whose land was adjacent to the schoolhouse. When the section of Preston called Glasgo, where the school was located, became the separate town of Griswold in 1815, Boardman School became District Seven School (it was also known as Potter Hill School). It served as a school until 1949, when it was moved to Mystic Seaport.
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