St. Thomas the Apostle Church, Oxford (1973)

Pictured above is the rear elevation of St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, located at 733 Oxford Road in Oxford. The parish, established in 1966, began as a mission of St. Augustine Parish in Seymour. It later passed to the care of St. Rose, Newtown and then to St. Michael, Beacon Falls in 1924 before returning again to St. Augustine in 1948. In 1909, Judge Thomas Coman of New York donated money to build a chapel. Dedicated on July 2, 1912 to St. Mary, the chapel was renamed for St. Thomas the Apostle on October 9, 1916. In 1971 the site for the current church was chosen and the Coman chapel was sold the following year. The new church was dedicated on January 28, 1973.

Charles Mallory Sail Loft (1830)

Charles Mallory (1796-1882) was born in Waterford and learned sail making in New London as an apprentice to his brother-in-law, Nathan Beebe. In 1816 Mallory came to Mystic, where he soon set up his own sail loft. In 1836 he retired from sail making to focus on his fishing, whaling and shipping interests. His descendants would continue as an important shipping and shipbuilding family. Mallory had a sail making loft on the third floor of a building on Holmes Street in Mystic that he constructed circa 1830. All three floors were used for a variety of purposes over the years. In 1951 the building was brought upriver by barge to its current location at Mystic Seaport. The top floor has a sail loft exhibit, the middle floor has a ship rigging loft exhibit and the bottom floor has a ship chandlery exhibit. (more…)

Dr. Lewis Barnes House (1800)

In 1907-1908, Oxford Congregational Church acquired the house at 6 Academy Road, at the southeast corner of Oxford Road and Academy Road in Oxford, to serve as its parsonage. The front section of the house dates to c. 1800, but the rear section, which has a saltbox roof, is possibly much older. Before becoming a parsonage, the house was the residence of Dr. Lewis Barnes (1824-1907), who was a physician in Oxford from 1856 until his death. (more…)

Hodge Memorial Library & Museum (1937)

The first public library in the town of Roxbury was established in October 1896. It was housed in the back rooms of the old Town Hall until Charles Watson Hodge, upon his death in 1936, bequeathed $15,000 to erect a building for a library and museum. Completed in 1937 by Clayton B. Squire, the stone building was named after Charles Hodge’s father, Albert Lafayette Hodge. A north wing addition was completed in 1967 through a donation by Everett Hurlburt. A new building, the Minor Memorial Library, was erected in the early 1990s to become the town’s public library, with the Hodge Memorial, at 4 North Street, continuing as a museum open to the public by appointment only.