Ellsworth Visitor’s Center, Ensign-Bickford Exhibition, & Wigwam

An Explosive Start…
Simsbury Historical Society, Simsbury
November 2024

Connecticut museum visit #533. If you’re wanting to read about all of the Simsbury Historical Society buildings and exhibits, you’ve landed on the first 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.

Every visit to the Simsbury complex begins in the Ellsworth Visitor’s Center. Well, every visit with the intent of receiving a tour does at least. And sometimes, you’ll visit with the intent of taking a tour but none are available.

Which is fine. Mostly because this place is only 15 minutes from my house, but also because these are usually largely volunteer driven organizations. And as such, sometimes volunteers can’t make it. Tour are available here (in 2024) every Saturday, all year save for holidays, at two different times in the afternoon.

That’s an extraordinary amount of availability for a town historical society.

And you know what, even if you show up at a non tour time, you’ll still get to see plenty here. It’s a nice and compact complex.

Starting with…

The Ellsworth Visitor’s Center

This building was built in 1966. Like 200+ years later than almost everything else here. It is not a conventionally attractive building at all, but it sort of stays out of the way of all the brightly colored colonial era structures orbiting around it.

The Ellsworth Visitors Center was constructed through the generous support of the Ensign-Bickford Foundation which funded a lot of programs that allowed this whole complex to flourish. Today the building houses the Historical Society Research Library and Archive, Museum Store, and serves as a year-round program space for the Historical Society and greater Simsbury community.

So far, I haven’t mentioned anything CTMQ-worthy here. But alas! There are large exhibit cases here that hold rotating displays of objects from the Society’s collection. When I first visited – the time I didn’t get a tour – I learned about a bunch of Revolutionary War artifacts via a whole case of powder horns.

The second time I visited, months later, the cases were full of Native American tools like arrowheads and such.

And more importantly, that second time I visited I arrived smackdab at 1 PM and asked for a tour. A woman named Sharon asked who was joining me and after a comedic look at absolutely no one behind me, I broke the news that it was “just you and me, sister.”

I paid my eight bucks, skimmed over the extensive Simsbury paraphernalia for sale, and we exited into the bright sunshine. I’m going to take some liberties here and write up my visit in a different order than my tour, but a) you’d never know if I didn’t tell you and b) now that you do know, it doesn’t matter at all.

With that in mind, let’s get going…

Simsbury Indigenous People Exhibit & Wigwam

There’s an enclosed model near the parking lot of a settlement near a river from long before white people came to Simsbury. The earliest indigenou inhabitants of present-day Simsbury began populating the area soon after the glaciers receded at the end of the last ice age – about 12,500 years ago. The display shows an encampment from about 5000 years ago and I promise you that it’s quite nice. Unfortunately, the sun glare on the day I visited made it unseeable through a camera lens and when I returned a few months later, I figured I’d already had a nice picture of the thing.

I did not. But I did have some pictures of the wigwam. This a replicated dwelling that was common among the Algonkian speaking inhabitants of southern New England beginning about 3,000 years ago until colonization began, more or less. These structure would have been all over Massacoe and Weatogue back in the day.

A guy named Barry Keegan and some volunteers built this wigwam using traditional materials and methods, and it is sturdy and impressive. The inner frame are made of cedar, maple provides rigidity, and basswood fastens it together. Then an outer cedar frame covers the whole thing, which is stuffed with reeds and grasses between the layers for insulation. Amazingly, well-crafted wigwams would last 10 years or more.

Ensign-Bickford Exhibition

This is the back (or front, I suppose, depending on your perspective) of the Visitor’s Center. It houses exactly what it says it houses: An exhibition of the history of the Ensign-Bickford Company – perhaps the most important company to ever exist in Simsbury. (And Avon, where the employees were housed back in the day. It’s that complex of buildings where the Avon Police Department and the Farmington Valley Arts Center are located now.

Okay, technically I guess the buildings in Avon were Climax Fuse Company buildings who used Bickford fuse technology to make safety fuses but then later merged with Ensign-Bickford, and… oh who cares. (Though knowing you, you probably do care about Climax Road in Avon… y’know, for history’s sake.)

Anyway, yes, the Ensign-Bickford Company is responsible for the early manufacture and widespread use of the safety fuse in America. Developed in 1831 by Cornishman William Bickford, the Miner’s Safety Fuse was introduced to Farmington Valley mining operations in 1836. Simsbury production began in 1837.

Before the safety fuses, mining concerns and military munitions people used, get this, goose quills filled with gunpowder.

Buildings and people blew up all the time. In fact, factory here blew up once but was rebuilt by Joseph Toy who joined the company in 1839 and set up his own manufactory, Toy, Bickford & Company along the Hop Brook in 1851. After Toy’s death in 1887, the company added the name of his son-in-law and successor, Ralph Hart Ensign.

This was a hugely important product and safety fuses saved countless lives. To be clear, the fuses were actually invented in England, this company merely bought the patent to make them in America. The fuses made the company a fortune and it still thrives today, making all sorts of military and aerospace equipment, many of them involving explosives still.

Ensign-Bickford’s Simsbury plant is right down the street from the Historical Society. The Farmington Canal Heritage Trail takes riders and walkers right past the complex, which is, as you’d imagine pretty tightly secured what with all the military and NASA contracts they have. Security was a concern back in the day too, and the Society has the old guard booths to prove it.

These octagonal guard booths were used at the Ensign-Bickford manufactory site in Simsbury. Booths such as these were installed at each driveway entrance to the grounds. During World War II, additional security was employed – armed guards were posted and parts of the grounds were surrounded by fences. The guards also worked to ensure a safer work environment. Matches were not allowed in the plant area; to be caught with them was grounds for dismissal. Ensign-Bickford employees could deposit their cigarettes and matches with the guards at the beginning of their shifts – or drop them in a box in the wall – and retrieve them at the end of their work-day.

The Society acquired two of the booths in the early 1970s to enhance its Ensign-Bickford exhibition and archive collection.

The exhibit here is really cool. They have replicas of the fuse spinning/making machines from the mid-19th century and explanations of how it all worked. There’s a video that wasn’t working, and a recreation of Bickford’s office. Amazingly, they have all the original ledgers from back in the day; handwritten massive tomes recording every penny in and out of the young company.

The artifact collection includes manufacturing equipment such as coilers, powder cans, and spinning machines, and administrative artifacts such as the company safe, desk, and wall clock. The company has also donated a lot of money over the years to the Historical Society, so they certainly deserve their own building here – a building which they funded entirely. I don’t say that cynically at all. I swear!

Continue on to the next set of Simsbury Historical Society Buildings.