Willington Historical Society

 

MAP OF 1869

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This Willington map, published by Baker and Tilden in 1869, was included in a Windham and Tolland County Atlas and shows the town divided into nine school districts.  The maps were hand-painted and indicated the locations of all the houses and the names of their owners as well as other buildings then in existence.

The school districts were numbered and named as follows:                      

I. Center School District 

VI. Roaring Brook District

II. Daleville

VII. Village Hill District

III. Willington Hollow or East Willington

VIII. Glass Factory District

IV. Moose Meadow or Rider District 

IX. South Willington District

V. Potter School District

 

District I – Center

In the Center School district the largest concentration of buildings was around the Willington green, most of which are still standing.  Unlike the other districts there was little industry in this section.  The early settlers chose the geographical center of town to erect their meeting house which served as both a church on Sundays and a place to carry on the town’s business whenever the need arose.  Thus it was the political center and social center of town affairs as well.

District II – Daleville District

This region was initially called the Topliff district after the first settler, Clement Topliff.  His son, Cyrus, built a saw, grist and cider mill and a brandy still north of where the school was located.  In 1825 a fulling machine and carder was established at the same site as the saw and grist mill.

In 1840, Thomas Dale founded the Willington Silk Mill here and from then on the area was called Daleville.  Many women earned money by raising and selling silk worms, a process that required painstaking care.  When a blight struck the mulberry trees, on which the worms fed, the silk industry came to a halt.

In 1870, James Regan took over the Daleville mill and manufactured Petersbaum overcoating there as well as other woolen materials.  Three years later James Hoyle, a native of England, bought the business which continued for over twenty years when it was sold to Dennison Walker in 1900.
John Divorsky bought the property in 1907 and produced buttons there for a short time.  It continued under the management of several different owners but finally closed in 1942 because of shortages of materials during World War II.

The old mill suffered an ignominious end when it was used as a chicken coop and was later destroyed by fire.  There are a few remaining houses, all that is left of a once thriving village.

District III – East Willington or Willington Hollow

Once called “the city” this was one of the most industrialized sections of town.  Near a grist and saw mill on the water privilege was a long one-story shop, owned by John Heath, in which horn combs were manufactured. 

A buzz saw, invented by Daniel Hartshorn of Mansfield, Connecticut in 1776, was first used for cutting the teeth of these combs.  Seven or eight workers were employed to boil the hoofs and horns in oil and press them into the required shape for combs.

Across the Fenton River from the saw and grist mill was the farm of Hosea Vinton, and his blacksmith shop, where he made a large part of the farming tools used in that section.

By far the most important industry in this area was the tanning and shoe business operated by Amos Preston and his sons.  The shoe business consisted largely of producing cowhide brogans (untanned leather shoes) for the southern slaves, which proved profitable until the Civil War.

C. S. Amidon established a machine shop about 1918 which produced portable sawmills, claimed by some to be the best in the country.  Amidon also had a lumber business which experienced its best years between 1910 and 1920.  The principal consumers were the railroads who bought switch timber and car timber, and the box companies who purchased square-edged pine used in making boxes.  Other buyers were   chair manufacturers and the building trades.

A general store was established here as early as 1825 by Orrin Holt and John Heath to accommodate this flourishing section of town.

District IV - Moose Meadow or Rider District

One of the largest centers of commercial activity in northeastern Connecticut during the middle of the 19th century was a placed owned by Origin Dimock in the Rider district.  There was a large building where palm leaf hats were braided by hand and pressed by machine.  A team from the store traversed the country and the peddler with “Yankee Notions” was a familiar sight.  Furniture and matches were made here and a wood yard employing water power supplied stove wood to families living in the Glass Factory and East Willington areas.

The intense industrialization of one section of this district led to its designation as Tinkerville (or Forestville).  One of the state’s first woolen mills was established in this section in the early part of the century.  The mill was destroyed by fire in 1847 and a silk business was established on the old mill site.  The numerous streams in the district were also used to power a saw mill that produced plow beams and a spool thread factory that employed twenty men and women.

In addition, there was a small mine where iron ore was obtained and made into pig iron and finally, a general store, which in addition to the goods produced by the local industries, purchased supplies for resale from Hartford and Norwich.  These supplies were brought in by ox teams which performed a freight service both ways, similar to that carried on by our contemporary trucking lines.  Liquor was one of the most profitable items handled by the store.

The demise of the Forest Mill in Tinkerville in 1887 marked the end of industrial activity in the Rider district. 

District V – Potter School District

The Potter School district was the only section of Willington that did not provide employment in manufacturing.  There was a saw mill in the southeast corner of the district which utilized water power on the Fenton River but that apparently was the only one in this section.  The families who settled here owned large farms which were not divided up until recently thus limiting the development in this part of town.

District VI – Roaring Brook District

The old Boston Turnpike passed the Roaring Brook schoolhouse, and from there took a nearly direct route northeast toward Boston.  Four-horse stages were used on this route, two passing every day.  At a tavern near the Methodist meeting house, intoxicating liquors were sold; and during the Revolution counterfeit money was said to have been made here.

This may have been the place where Edward Kendall, a British traveler, stopped in the summer of 1807 where he was waited upon by “Minerva.”  Commenting on where he described as “rustic orthography,” he cited a bill he received from an innkeeper charging him for “Medson for your hors.”  From this and a poorly spelled advertisement he saw in a local newspaper, he concluded that education in Willington must be “general and humble.”  The tavern Kendall visited no longer exists and the Moose Meadow meeting house was torn down in the early 1900’s.

In the northern part of this district Burnham Lillibridge had a saw and grist mill.  He invited the side scraper which was used in repairing roads.  John Merrick, in his newspaper columns, refers to it as a “crude affair compared with those in use on the streets of Minneapolis (where Merrick lived at the time he wrote), but the principle of the scraper is the same that was first used on the roads in Willington.”

District VII - Village Hill District

Rich farm land in this section of town attracted the early settlers who bought large acreages on which they depended for their livelihood.  The earliest settlers were Johnsons, Beals, Mains, Jennings, Fisks and Moultons.

The principal industry, aside from farming, was what was then known as the Eldridge Mills.  Three Eldridge brothers, Capt Elijah, Hezekiah and Eri, utilized the water power of this rapidly flowing stream for the operation of a grist mill and one of the town’s six saw mills in 1800.  They later added a shop which produced wood-toothed hay rakes which were well-known for their workmanship.

In the southern part of the district, residents manufactured scythes, hoes and pitchforks.  Many of the farm implements were constructed from bog iron found in the local swamps.  Later in the century, the Parker brothers ran a thread mill and a spool shop on the site of the old Eldridge mill.

The first Baptist church in Willington was established by Rev. David Lillibridge in 1778 and existed for 50 years.

District VIII - Glass Factory District

An important industry in the days before the Civil War was the Willington Glass Company which gave the name to this district.  The company was first organized in 1815 by Frederick Rose of Coventry, Roderick Rose, Stephen Brigham Jr., Elisha Brigham, Spafford Brigham, John Turner and Ebenezer Root, all from Mansfield, and Abiel Johnson, Jr., the only Willington resident at the time.  John Turner later moved to Willington.

At its height the company employed a dozen glassblowers who produced whiskey flasks, demijohns, cathedral pickle jars, telephone insulators, ink wells, rolling pins and medicine bottles.

The only other industry in this district was a saw and shingle shop and a grist mill owned by Captain Robert Sharp.   When business at the mill was slow, Captain Sharp built coffins in the shop connected to his house.  Albert Sharp, son of Robert, continued the saw mill business which was later given up in order to concentrate on the grain business.

The first button shop in town was opened by William Masinda which he operated as a combined grist and button mill in 1903.  When the building burned a smaller building was erected and the button business continued until 1938.

In the 1930’s another button shop was erected by William Parizek, close to the site of the original glass factory, which still stands including all the belt-driven machinery.

District IX - Thread Factory or South Willington District

South Willington was, without dispute, the major industrial sector of Willington for over one hundred years because of the Gardiner Hall Jr. Co. which manufactured thread here.  When Gardiner Hall Jr. founded the company in 1860, he employed six workers and did his own bleaching.  Before his death in 1915, the company employed more than 150 workers and produced 26 million spools of thread annually.

To accommodate the increasing number of employees who came from neighboring towns, a boarding house was constructed so that workers could stay overnight and get their meals there as well.  About four years later, in 1876, tenement houses were constructed and rented to employees and their families.

As the company grew and expanded the Hall’s recognized the needs of the growing community and built a general store which also housed a post office.  A few years later the Clara Hall Elliott Baptist Church was erected and in 1924 a new, modern school was constructed in memory of Holman Hall, with a gymnasium and auditorium

Even after the district schools were consolidated – many of the villages still retained their identity such as:  Center, Daleville, East Willington, Moose Meadow, Glass Factory and South Willington.

 November 2006