1790 School House, Probate Court, Blacksmith Shop, & Hendrick Cottage

“House, Court, Shop, Cottage”
Simsbury Historical Society, Simsbury
November 2024

Connecticut museum visit #534. If you’re wanting to read about all of the Simsbury Historical Society buildings and exhibits, you’ve landed on the second of four pages about them, but the ordering doesn’t matter. The Simsbury Historical Society owns over a dozen buildings all located at their complex right in the heart of downtown Simsbury. I was told that only Mystic Seaport has more buildings to tour, which is pretty bonkers. I’ve split up my visit across four CTMQ pages simply because there’s a lot going on here.

Maybe I didn’t really need to split my visit to the Simsbury Historical Society across four separate pages. Now that I look at this grouping of four, I realize I only was able to go inside one. So this page should be pretty short and sweet.

Sweet!

Actually, you and I should both be glad I’ve split up my visit across four separate CTMQ pages. (If you skim all four pages, you’ll agree.) Let’s get going.

1790 School House

I’ve seen so many one-room schoolhouses-cum-museums around the state I wasn’t even upset that my tour guide just completely skipped over this one. I mean, what would I get from it that I didn’t already know?

This school was originally located on Tariffville Road in what is now Bloomfield, near the present Old Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church. At the time, this was an area of Simsbury known as Scotland; the school served Scotland North District pupils in Simsbury until 1843 when the area was annexed to the Town of Bloomfield. (This church is really pretty and is right along the Bloomfield Greenway multiuse trail.)

Mary Skinner is the earliest known teacher for this school. She was paid $48 in 1866, probably for teaching a single term of school. In 1873, John P. McKinney was paid 25 cents per week for making the fire in the school. About 15 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 attended this school at the time. Average attendance for a three-month term was only about 30 days.

The building was modified in 1826 and served as a school house until 1933 when it was converted into a single family home. It was acquired by the Simsbury Historical Society and moved to its present location in 1970.

They have an old schoolhouse bell here too, from 1850, which you can see to the left in the picture above. Yeah, that’s all I’ve got, and almost none of it was mine (it was from the Society).

Probate Court

Another building I didn’t go inside! The biggest reason for this is that this building is no longer part of the Society’s collection and has been the Simsbury Land Trust’s headquarters since 2009. Now, I love the Trust and I have hiked all their trails, so I could probably get inside and poke around, but I think we all agree that is wholly unnecessary.

This slate-roofed brick building was constructed in 1876 with support from Jeffrey O. Phelps II (1820-1899), a former probate judge. Its primary function was to serve as a vault to safely store probate and town records. The building cost $1,600.00 to build and $33.00 to furnish. Originally located at 7 Wilcox Street, it is a typical and charming Victorian pattern book design.

The Probate building was acquired by the Simsbury Historical Society in 1970 and moved to its present location in 1998.

There are stone walls behind the little building with an interesting story to tell: The foundation is all that remains of the five barns that once stood on this site. Built in 1881 for a Phelps guy of Phelps Tavern fame, the main cattle barn was 50 by 60 feet. It and the other four barns also contained farm tools, carts, wagons, hay, grain and corn. A hay fire broke out in the main barn on the evening of Saturday September 12, 1896. Fortunately the entire stock was in a nearby pasture; some of the farm tools were removed from the burning buildings but nearly everything was lost. Phelps rebuilt new barns several times on the old foundation.

Blacksmith Shop

When I first visited this museum complex in March of 2024, this building was unpainted and empty. When I revisited several months later, it had been painted an eye-popping red and had some stuff inside. I was told by my guide that they were waiting on a particular piece of equipment to make it a functioning smithy.

We tried to get inside, but her keychain hadn’t yet been updated with a key to this newest building. I peered in the window and saw the beginnings of what will be an exhibit on, well, an old timey blacksmith’s shop.

I’m sure it will be awesome.

Hendrick Cottage

Moving on…

Since I did that thing that I almost always do – that is, I never tell my tour guides about this website or why I’m interested in their town’s history museums – my guide kept asking if I wanted to see inside the different buildings here.

In my head I was like, “duh. Of course I do,” but outwardly I kept feigning this ridiculous nonchalance; “sure, why not? I’m here, I have time, and it’s a nice day.” My guide was up for it all, she was just probably a little confused since I’m not from Simsbury and didn’t really have any questions.

How could she have known that I’ve been to over 500 Connecticut museums?

Well, Mr. Know-It-All was about to see some things in Hendrick Cottage that were entirely new to me. And I had questions!

The exact age of this gambrel-roofed house has not been determined, but it undoubtedly dates from the 1790s or earlier. It was occupied until 1958, originally located at what is now 25 West Street and was acquired by the Simsbury Historical Society and moved to its present location in 1965.

It is used for temporary exhibits as best I can tell and I happened up a good one – The Roland Wolf Collection: Historic Photos of Tariffville. The Society will be doing a series of Tariffville themed events and exhibits to commemorate Tariffville’s 200 years of history, approaching in 2025. (If you’re unaware, Tariffville is a village in the northeastern corner of Simsbury.)

Roland Wolf was a popular barber in Tariffville for more than 50 years. The walls of his Valley Barber Shop were decorated with many old photos of Tariffville. The photos caught the attention of customers and spurred conversations about Tariffville’s manufacturing history and range of architectural styles. After Roland retired in 2021, he donated his collection of framed photos to the Simsbury Historical Society.

Photos in the collection depict Tariffville’s people, places, and events from the past. Images of the Tariffville train wreck of 1878, Bartlett’s Tower, the former Tariff Manufacturing Company, commonly known as the Mill, as well as village houses, business, and places of worship are represented.

So yes, this guy’s photo collection predated his life. Two sets in particular were most interesting to me. There were several photos of “the” Tariffville Train disaster of 1878. “Sure,” you say, “a train crashed into the Farmington River back in the day. Happened all the time.” I guess, you heartless ghoul, but this tragedy was special.

Apparently, this train crash precipitated “the first emergency phone call in the United States.” Now, of course that is a ridiculous claim and there’s no way that can be qualified or quantified (what is the threshold that makes an emergency an emergency, for example), but it is not only claimed by the Simsbury Historical Society, but by other sources as well.

A doctor named D.P. Pelletier down in Hartford learned of the train crash, probably by telegram from the railroad’s main office. He knew that a nearby druggist on Capitol Avenue had installed Alexander Graham Bell’s speaking telephone. He rushed over and used the store’s telephone to call other doctors for emergency aid. They organized a special relief train that carried physicians and other first responders. The train that rushed to the scene of the Tariffville disaster was called The Samaritan Special.

The doctors ministered to the injured passengers while the Tariffville residents brought the survivors into their homes. Reporters and photographers hurried to the scene of the wreck. In the end, 13 passengers died and 70 were injured. It is said that many more might have died if not for the new phone in Hartford. Which would make this first’s occurrence in Hartford, not Simsbury! For an event that I think happened in what was Bloomfield at the time! What gives?! (For more on this whole thing, it has its own CTMQ page.)

As cool as that is, I was drawn to the old photos of the non-Heublein Tower towers on the Talcott Mountain ridge. Heublein has its own dubious “US First” claim attached to it: Lookout tower for public use.

While we’re at it, Simsbury also claims the first steel mill in the US and of course the first safety fuses, which is probably the dumbest of all of them since they were invented and manufactured in England for years before a guy brought the patent to Simsbury.

Anyway, back to the towers. Before television and the internet, going up to lookout towers was a thing. A big thing, apparently, as Talcott Mountain was positively covered with these things. Bartlett Tower was in Tariffville at the extreme northern end of the mountain – a part of the village that was later annexed by Bloomfield, I believe – in fact, I believe the site of the train crash was as well.

You can hike to the remains of Bartlett Tower, which was Laurel Hill Tower at another time. It’s along the Metacomet Trail, but can be accessed from a variety of side trails.

People would buy tickets and take trains from Hartford (or wherever) and ride carriages up to the top of the ridge. From an advertisement:

It is on top of Talcott Mountain where the wild passage of the Farmington River into the Connecticut Valley below, forms a striking feature of the view. The Tower Station on [the railroad line] is only one-third of a mile distant from Tower. Nowhere else in the state can the public find access to views which will compare favorably in extent and beauty. The valley of the Connecticut, between Mt. Holyoke and the hills below Middletown, covering 1200 square miles, lies spread out like a vast sea before one, dotted over with cities, towns, and villages, Springfield, Rockville, and Hartford, with their principal buildings are in plain sight, and can be brought very near by the aid of the powerful telescope at the Tower.

It goes on and on with more run-ons. They claimed tourists could see Old Newgate Prison, The Capitol, Cedar Hill Cemetery(!), Trinity College, Suffield Literary Institute, McLean Seminary, Old St. Andrews’ Church in “Scotland” (mentioned above) and perhaps most exciting: Windsor Locks Water Tower. Wow!

Here’s my picture, taken in a downpour, of what remains of the tower

They had “swings, croquet, and quoits” which was another lawn game. They offered row boats on the Farmington and ballfields down below.

In other words, it was awesome.

There were a bunch of other old photos and the whole thing gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. An elderly retired barber from an old section of Simsbury with a lot of history took and collected a bunch of old photographs of his little village and the wider town’s historical society saw fit to honor him and his collection with an exhibit.

And I’m glad I got to see it. And if you want to see more of the Society’s museum complex, click here!