Jonathan Dickerman II House (1792)

In 1792, Jonathan Dickerman II built a farmhouse in Hamden, south of the Sleeping Giant, also known as Mount Carmel. Originally located on the north side of Mount Carmel Avenue, the house was acquired by the state in 1924, serving for a time as a ranger station when the Sleeping Giant State Park was being created. In 1961, when the Avenue was being straightened, the state gave the Dickerman House to the town and, the following year, it was moved across the street to its current location by the Hamden Historical Society. A historic cider mill barn was moved to the property in 1992 and an outhouse in 2002.

Norfolk Academy (1840)

A school was established by the town of Norfolk as early as 1768. Initially, students were taught in the church parsonage, until the the School Society built a small structure, used as a school and church conference room, in 1819. According to an 1899 speech by librarian Henry H. Eddy (quoted in the 1900 History of Norfolk): When John F. Norton was the teacher at the school, it

was so successful that by 1838 there were upwards of seventy pupils under his charge. The next year, the need of still greater accommodations being felt, an Academy Corporation was formed for the purpose of building an academy, and in 1840 such a building was erected on the east side of the Green, for the sum of $2,000. As the career of Mr. Norton had been so successful he was appointed first principal, and continued as such until duties outside of the town took him away.

As Frederic S. Dennis relates, in his 1917 book, The Norfolk Village Green:

The Town Hall, originally the academy, was built in 1840 and from that time on was used as the place for the transactions of town business, including voting. In 1846 a committee was appointed to confer with the proprietors of the academy with a view to the use of this building for town meetings. The lower floor is used for town meetings; the upper floor is the property of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Stoeckel; it was not unusual in early days to have one building owned by two or more parties. In addition to the school room above and the town hall below, there was constructed in the basement a lock-up, which has been built on the first floor by partitioning off a room.

Today, the building serves a different purpose, as the Norfolk Historical Society Museum.

C.L. Griswold Factory (1870)

According to the History of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1884), the Town of Chester

“is finely situated for manufacturing, having two considerable streams of water running through it, which have their rise in the lower part of Haddam and unite, at tide-water, at the head of the cove. […] The first factory on the south stream is the bitt factory of C. L. Griswold, now occupied by the Chester Manufacturing Company, consisting of Edwin G. Smith, John H. Bailey, and Charles E. Wright, who manufacture auger bitts, corkscrews, reamers, etc. The factory is on the site of a forge built about the year 1816, and occupied by Abel Snow in the forging of ship anchors. About 1838, the building was used for the manufacture of carriage springs, later by C. L. Griswold & Co. for the manufacture of bitts, and by the present owners for the same business.”

The C.L. Griswold Factory building, built around 1870 (or perhaps as early as 1850) continued to be used for manufacturing until 1919. In the 1920s, the building became a Masonic Lodge and was more recently used by the National Theatre of the Deaf. In 2001 the building was purchased by the Chester Historical Society and has been renovated to become the Chester Museum at the Mill.

Lee Academy (1821)

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Lee Academy was built as a schoolhouse in 1821, at the corner of the Boston Post Road and Neck Road in Madison. It was named for Captain Frederick Lee, who had led the effort to establish a private college preparatory school in town, and the new building was constructed across the street from his own house. Capt. Lee had also been the one to propose Madison as a name for the new town in 1826. Although built with a proviso that it would never be moved, the school building has been relocated several times: in 1836 to the western end of the town Green; in 1839 (when it began to serve as a district school, continuing to accommodate the preparatory school as well until 1884) to a plot across from the Green’s northeast corner; in 1896 (making way for the construction of Memorial Hall) to a location behind the Hand Academy. In 1923, the Madison Historical Society began to manage the building, which was moved, for the last time, to its present location, facing west toward the Green. Having housed a number of organizations and businesses over the years, Lee Academy is now used as a museum and as offices for the Historical Society.

Jordan Schoolhouse (1740)

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One of the historic structures on Jordan Green in Waterford is the 1740 Jordan Schoolhouse, the oldest surviving public building in Waterford. The earliest mention of a schoolhouse in Jordan actually dates to 1737. The present schoolhouse building was converted into a private home in the mid-nineteenth century for the widow Eliza Gallup and her three children. The building’s granite front steps came originally from the nineteenth-century West Neck Schoolhouse. The Jordan Schoolhouse was moved to Jordan Green in 1972 and is now a museum run by the Waterford Historical Society.

Hicks-Stearns Family Museum (1788)

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This Thanksgiving we focus on a house that is now a family museum. The Hicks-Stearns Family Museum, established in 1980, is a Victorian era home, located on Tolland Green. The earliest parts of the house date to the eighteenth century, sometime before 1788, when then owner Benoni Shepard established a tavern in the home known as Shepard’s Tavern at the Sign of the Yellow Ball. Shepard was also a deacon of the Congregational Church and served as postmaster, with a post office in his home, from 1795 to 1807. The house was occupied by the Hicks family from 1845 into the the 1970s. The family enlarged and embellished the house with many Victorian-era architectural features in the 1870s and 1880s. Charles R. Hicks was a leading merchant in Providence and New York, who retired to Tolland. He married Maria Amelia Stearns Their son, Ratcliffe Hicks, was president of the Canfield Rubber Works of Bridgeport and a member of the state legislature. The Ratcliffe Hicks School of Agriculture at UCONN is also named for him.