Harry O. Erickson Pavilion Hall (1897)

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Pavilion Hall in New Preston (in the town of Washington) was built in 1897 (some sources claim 1929) as a community hall for concerts, plays and celebrations. At one time, the building contained a post office and a fire engine was kept inside behind the double doors in front. Today the building is home to the Boys and Girls Club of New Preston and is named for Harry O.Erickson, a beloved community volunteer.

C. H. Dexter & Sons (1876)

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Located along the canal on South Main Street in Windsor Locks, is the former factory complex of C. H. Dexter & Sons, paper manufacturers. A brief history of the company appeared in The American Stationer of July 25, 1914 (Vol. LXXVI, No. 4) as follows:

The Dexter paper mill is one of the oldest landmarks of Windsor Locks, the business dating back nearly eighty years. From a grist mill, built by ancestors of the present owners over one hundred years ago, there developed the manufacture of paper that has grown to large proportions. The old mill was operated by Seth Dexter, 1st, and later by his son of the same name. When the latter died, his son, Charles H. Dexter, took possession of the mill, and in 1835 Mr. Dexter began making paper out of manila rope in the basement of the old grist mill. In 1840 a mill for the exclusive purpose of manufacturing paper was erected on the opposite side of the canal. The nucleus of the present plant was built in 1876, after the original mill had been destroyed by fire.

Charles H. Dexter died in 1869 and was succeeded by Edwin D. Dexter and Herbert R. Coffin. In 1886 Mr. Dexter died and the business passed into the hands of Mr. Coffin, who continued it under the old name. He increased the size of the plant and began the making of high-grade specialties and tissues. On the death of Mr. Coffin in 1901, his sons, Arthur D. and Herbert R., continued the business, maintaining the plant under the old name, C. H. Dexter & Sons.

The Dexter Corporation (as the company was known after 1966) was dismantled in 2000. The company’s nonwovens production facilities in Windsor Locks were sold to the Finish company, Ahlstrom Paper Group. (more…)

Noyes Memorial Building (1901)

Noyes Memorial Building, home of the Litchfield Historical Museum

Happy New Year!!! We begin the year with the Litchfield Historical Museum. The Noyes Memorial Building was constructed in 1901 (and expanded in 1906-1907) to house the town library and the Litchfield Historical Society, the latter of which had been founded in 1856. The building was built by John A. Vanderpoel in memory of his grandmother, Julia Tallmadge Noyes, a local resident and amateur historian who had led the Historical Society for many years. A granddaughter of Benjamin Tallmadge, she had married New York City attorney William Curtis Noyes in 1857. The couple owned the Benjamin Tallmadge House in Litchfield, which was inherited by their daughter, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. Also an active member of the Historical Society, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel oversaw the completion of the Noyes Memorial Building after the death of her son, John A. Vanderpoel. She wrote two books about Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy, which her mother had attended. The library moved out to a new building in the 1960s and the Historical Society then occupied the entirety of the Noyes Memorial, which was expanded in 1989-1990. (more…)

First Church of Christ, Congregational, Middletown (1872)

First Church of Christ, Congregational, Middletown

There have been five meeting-houses of Middletown’s First Church of Christ Congregational. The church was organized in 1668 and the first meeting house had been built even earlier, in the 1650s, with a gallery added in the 1660s. The second was built in 1679. Both of these simple log structures, defended by palisades, stood on Main Street, but the third meeting house was built in 1715 on High Street. As Azel Washburn Hazen explains in A Brief History of the First Church of Christ in Middletown, Connecticut for Two Centuries and a Half, 1668-1918 (1920),

This was a strange location, far from the centre of the population, and still farther from the settlement of the Upper Houses. But the site was chosen by lot, as the people could not otherwise agree where It should stand. Though the place was one where no person desired the house to be reared, yet such was their reverence for the lot, as indicating the will of God, they held sacredly and amicably to its decision. The edifice was sixty feet long and forty feet wide, two stories in height, with spacious galleries. No picture of it has come down to us, yet tradition reports it to have been an ungainly structure. After twenty-five years it was outgrown, and an addition eighteen feet in width was stretched along the westerly side of it.

Hazen writes of the fourth building,

In 1799 occurred a memorable event in the life of the Church viz. the completion of its fourth house of worship, on Main Street. It caused sincere rejoicing in the hearts of the people to take leave of the unsightly, badly situated structure near the head of Church Street, and to enter the spacious, and for its time, elegant, edifice at the very heart of the city.

By 1870, this building was out of repair. The nearby South South Congregational Church had built a new meeting house in 1867 and the First Church decided to erect a new edifice as well. The current brownstone-fronted church, built in 1871-1872 on Court Street, was designed by C.C. Nicholas of Albany. The church‘s spire, damaged in the hurricane of 1938, was removed and has never been replaced.