5 Connecticut Mill Towns Worth Visiting

FORMER WILLIMANTIC LINEN COMPANY/AMERICAN THREAD COMPANY BUILDING

Many small (and not so small) Connecticut towns once revolved around their mills. I'm referring not to the humble grist mills of the early English settlers, but to the stone and brick behemoths of the Industrial Revolution. Though the industries that brought them to life have mostly moved away now, these imposing buildings still dominate a landscape that ranges from urban to rural. They have been called Connecticut’s cathedrals.

There are many worthy mill towns to choose from, and it was difficult to pick just five. Rest assured that on any aimless drive through the Nutmeg State, especially its eastern half, you're very likely to encounter a mill building, whether crumbling or newly restored, standing beside the rushing river that once powered its machines. It's also probable that you'll see, whether you recognize them or not, the houses that were the bosses' stately mansions and the rows of cottages where workers lived. I picked these five towns because each has a distinct atmosphere and shows off its historic mills in a different way. And, they are all located close enough to one another that it would be easy to combine them into a self-guided, mill-themed tour, to be done in one jam-packed day or stretched out over a week.

Willimantic (The Museum)

Willimantic, which feels like a funky little college town, is probably best known for its frog bridge. As you cross it, you notice that the famous frogs are posed atop spools of thread - that's because this place, nicknamed Thread City, was once home to multiple cotton mills, including the American Thread Company, at one time the state's largest employer. The Windham Textile and History Museum - also called the Mill Museum - offers a glimpse into the world of a 19^th century mill village. Inside former American Thread Company buildings, original machinery and re-created living quarters recall the lives of mill managers as well as immigrant workers, who came here from all over Europe and beyond. Exhibits explore various aspects of the textile industry in Connecticut and America. While you're there, don't miss Windham Mills State Heritage Park.

Apart from its industrial history, there's usually something going on in Willimantic, from Victorian house tours to street festivals. And there's always something interesting to see. Add the Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum to your itinerary, stroll down the colorful Main Street and stop at some stores and restaurants, or peruse willimanticdowntown.org for more ideas.

Putnam (The Trail)

Putnam is an old-fashioned small town that's increasingly becoming known as an antiques and arts destination with an ever-expanding list of new restaurants. It also has two lovely short walking trails, one focused on the mills that once harnessed the power of the Quinebaug River and the other dedicated to that river and its impressive falls. The River Mills Heritage Trail winds for just over a mile past six historic mill buildings, where workers transformed yarn into cotton cloth. Some of these buildings have been, or are being, restored and re-purposed. The River Trail, two miles long, provides a different vantage point for viewing the town, the Quinebaug, and the waterfalls. The two connecting trails are clearly marked, but this (PDF) map, also available at many downtown merchants, shows the details.

Downtown Putnam is small and very walkable, with plenty of free parking. You can't miss the large antiques stores that dominate the area, but there are some sweet smaller shops and art galleries here too. There's also the Bradley Playhouse, and a cute little farmers' market on Saturdays. Though it's still somewhat of a bare-bones site, discoverputnam.com will give you an idea of your options. And from Putnam, the relatively bustling center of Connecticut's Quiet Corner, it's just a short (and stunning) drive to the even quieter towns like Woodstock and Pomfret.

Plainfield (The Historic Districts)

Plainfield might sound agricultural and look unassuming, but this town once clanged with the sounds of heavy machinery from the mill villages that now anchor separate historic districts here. The Lawton Mills, Central Village, and Wauregan Historic Districts all preserve a slice of 19th and 20th century industrial life, complete with imposing mill buildings and their accompanying housing. In Lawton Mills, Railroad Avenue will take you to what feels like a town paused in time. In Central Village, the brick Plainfield Woolen Company Mill (listed separately on the National Register of Historic Places) stands proudly on Main Street. In Wauregan, further north, you'll find the old mill  by following Wauregan Road towards Chestnut Street.

These historic districts are not tourist attractions, but neighborhoods where regular people sill live and work. Although there are signs indicating their locations, you have to do some research on your own to know which streets to look for and which buildings to note. If you're into that kind of thing, the National Register of Historic Places registration and nomination forms for Lawton Mills, Central Village, and Wauregan will tell you everything you need to know. You won't regret taking the time; with a little imagination, Plainfield - the most off-the-beaten-path of the five towns listed here - might provide the best idea of what it was truly like when New England buzzed with looms and spindles.

Coventry (The Ruins)

Coventry, better known as the birthplace of Nathan Hale and host of Connecticut’s largest farmers’ market, has preserved what remains of its old mills in a unique and understated fashion. Find Mill Brook Park and the Mill Brook Park Trail, located right behind Main Street. Here, a little trail (if it can even be called that) meanders through peaceful woods and wetlands. Markers inform visitors about the eerie ruins of the former shoddy mill and the stone arches that were once part of a center of industry along the brook. The site of the dam, along with a few remaining buildings and brick chimneys, might help you imagine the shoddy mill, silk mills, and many other mills and factories that were once here. Or, you might find it almost impossible to picture this spot as anything but rural and serene.

While in Coventry, you can tour the Nathan Hale Homestead and experience the Coventry Farmers' Market, or follow a historic walking tour. Browse the antique stores on Main Street, or stop at the Visitors' Center at 1195 Main Street for more ideas.

Manchester (The Restoration)

Some of Connecticut’s old mills (including a few in Manchester) are gloriously dilapidated. (The old American Writing Paper Company building is one.) But many others have been preserved for their historic value and/or converted to condos, offices, or modern factories. Perhaps the best place to see both types of preservation is in Manchester. This town, home of the nation’s oldest woolen mill (they made the wool for the suit George Washington wore to his inauguration) has transformed vast complexes that once produced silk and paper into rental apartments and historic sites. The Manchester Historical Society has information about the Cheney Brothers National Historic Landmark District, in which you can find the Cheney Brothers silk mill buildings, now apartments with names like Lofts at the Mills, Ribbon Mill Apartments, Clocktower Mill Apartments, Velvet Mill, and Dye House. The district also encompasses several Cheney family mansions and hundreds of houses, plus facilities like schools and churches, that were constructed for use by the employees of the Cheney mills and their families. The Historical Society conducts walking tours, or you can explore the 175 acre district on your own. A few minutes away, the Hilliard Mills complex (that's the manufacturer of President Washington's suit) now houses businesses, and the old Adams Mill is home to a restaurant and banquet hall. To get a different sort of look at Manchester's mills (including the one in my American Writing Paper Company link), some are visible from the hiking trails along the Hockanum River.

Manchester - sometimes called Silk City - has a nice main street for wandering. The Manchester Historical Society lists other local museums and places of interest. And don't leave without going to the amazing Wickham Park (yes, I once wrote a blog post about Wickham Park. It's mostly pictures.) 


If you've read this far and still want more historic mill villages to visit in eastern Connecticut, check out Stafford Springs (in the town of Stafford), North Grosvenordale (in Thompson), Rockville (in Vernon), and Taftvile (in Norwich.)

And if you have your own favorite, please leave it in the comments!

Shopping, Quietly

My feelings about shopping are rather complicated. (Slight background, along with the history of Waterford's Crystal Mall, here.) I sometimes love it, though only in certain circumstances. Unless I have to do it, and then I hate it.

I've been told I'm good at it, which is nice, I guess, but if the stores don't have what you need it doesn't matter how good you are.

Also it would be nice if I could be good at something that paid me money, rather than the reverse.

In any case I am always looking for places to shop where I can usually find what I need, but even if I can't, the experience is at least pleasant rather than stressful and depressing.

And in the Quiet Corner, a few of those places are Silver Circle and Martha's Herbary.

And, I don't write about food very much, because a) I'm not much of a foodie and b) if I did the comments would fill up with stuff like "Oh I've seen you, chubby, and let me tell you, the last thing you need is more food!" But if you're already up in the QC (that is not an actual expression, to my knowledge) Bill's Bed and Breakfast - which is not a bed and breakfast - sells the best muffins in, well, a seriously long distance.

FWP Tour 9 (Part 3 of 3)

(Part 1; Part 2)

I left Killingly and drove into Putnam and another whirl of Federal Writers' Project-induced confusion. There was supposed to be an old cemetery, and a Green with an 1818 Congregational church ("its three front entrances topped with semi-circular fan-lights...it is a pleasing composition...") and a tavern built in 1786 where local farmers had planned the financing and building of a sloop which was sent to Providence in sections and "engaged in the West Indian trade for many years." But these things weren't there. There was a cemetery - as I knew from living around here, there were several. But Putnam had no real green, and certainly not one with a church and landmark tavern. Buildings are moved, yes. Places change, things fall apart. But this was Connecticut. If there's anything we don't mess with, I thought, it's Congregational churches, taverns, old cemeteries, and town Greens.

Thoroughly puzzled, I gave up and proceeded to downtown Putnam, "named for Israel Putnam, Revolutionary hero," a "manufacturing center composed of narrow, winding streets and low buildings, on four small hills." When I first saw Putnam years ago, I thought it looked like one of those towns perched perilously on the rugged hills around where Pennsylvania meets West Virginia meets Ohio. (Which some would have intended as a slur, but I did not: shortly after that, I moved there.) The town was once an industrial and shipping center, situated, like Plainfield, on intersecting railway lines between major cities. "Although it has suffered during the depression," my Guide said, "Putnam is still a thriving little community."

And in its own way, it still is. It has suffered again since the depression, but it seems that Putnam always bounces back. Not to what it was in its shipping, silk-thread-making heyday, but to something else. Trains no longer stop here, but tourists do. Putnam today is antiques bazaars that overwhelm you with their sheer tonnage of disparate stuff, and sweet outdoor cafes, and calming river trails. But none of its industrial past has been erased. As I looked for the Roads, Lore, and People version of Putnam I didn't take pictures of the mill buildings, now mostly offices, or the Quinebaug's rushing Cargill Falls ("one of the most beautiful in Eastern Connecticut.") I thought I'd taken lots of those already, and that this blog was already too full of them. Later I realized I'd never written much about Putnam, and my imagined lots of pictures were really just a little.

Instead I only noticed new things, like these flowers blooming in a wall of brick, which belonged neither to the Putnam of my recent memory nor the Putnam of the old days. Which was just as well, because the book's Putnam seemed to have vanished. "Quinebaug Pines State Park," for example, "formerly called Priests' Island," a "thirty-six-acre islet, reached from the mainland by a suspension footbridge." Gone. And I had no idea where it might once have been. "The Masonic Club, occupying a building which was a station of the 'Underground Railroad' before the Civil War"? Also gone, also without a trace.

In the stop on the tour that I knew best, I was the most lost.

I continued on my route, following "the Quinebaug River through valley lowlands" and the water shimmered blue and cold by the side of the road. "The highway" - that's how the Guide refers to Route 12 - "passes through Mechanicsville (Town of Thompson) on an uneven hillside." This had been a "busy village" in 1938, though "important only for its textile mills." Now, in a strange reversal, I was seeing things that the authors of the book had not, like the empty Mechanicsville School building. I was on their Tour, yet I felt I'd somehow left it, as if the time that intervened between their era and mine had shifted the geography slightly but irrevocably beneath my feet.

And apropos of nothing, but just because I'd always thought it looked so utterly out of place, I stopped at the yellow horse statue. Which I was almost sure had not been here in 1938, or earlier, and which signified nothing except "here is a the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant," and "This is America, land of the free and home of random tacky things by the side of the road."

At this point my guidebook also took a turn for the random, and I turned onto a crossroad hoping that the next stop it mentioned was still around. I knew, sadly, that there was almost no chance of actually coming across the "Russian Bear, which retains an odd brick smokehouse and is now operated by a group of expatriate Russians." But I had to at least look. Finding nothing but houses, I moved on to the center of Thompson.

"Thompson is a quiet rural settlement of well-kept country estates and gleaming white or butter-yellow houses along shaded streets." The Green, which was currently blanketed with snow, "was a militia training ground on which eastern Connecticut troops were mustered in 1775 at the Lexington alarm." Physically, at least, It didn't appear that very much had changed in Thompson since then. The houses were somehow massive, and gleaming even, without being ostentatious. And the buildings (including the inn that was once the Vernon Stiles tavern, where "Thomas Dorr, illegally elected Governor of Rhode Island, instigator of Dorr's rebellion (1841) in which his followers attempted to seize an arsenal...was in hiding when pursued by Federal agents, and evaded capture by use of the complicated series of stairways") were pristine. This was pure New England, distilled, bottled, and carefully doled out from a dropper. This was how Litchfield County imagined itself in its own mind. It looked like there was a local ordinance against messing up the snow.

The genius thing about Thompson was that there seemed to be no public parking. I'd never encountered a town Green with no parking spaces around it, but it seemed I'd found one. You could only stop and appreciate Thompson if you lived in Thompson, and were able walk to the center of the town from your beautiful butter-yellow house. No wonder it was pristine.

The road where the Russian Bear once was led from Thompson back to Putnam. I turned down it one more time, just to be sure. It was mid-afternoon but the sky was streaked like impending nightfall. I had nothing to look for anymore, so I just looked: at snow, at the winter trees, at this place I'd lived so close to and never explored.


And then I saw a church. It had no sign; it had no parking. It had no meaning to me, yet I stopped. It was something I knew. "Its three front entrances topped with semi-circular fan-lights...it is a pleasing composition..." This church couldn't be that church, that missing 1818 church from the missing green. Could it? Why had the guidebook writers placed it there, when it was really here? Perhaps "there" was here? Or perhaps they were two different buildings after all.

That was a sort of a perfect ending. But this was not the end. Technically I had about five miles to go until the Massachusetts border, and three more mill villages, all within the town of Thompson.

I'd been to Grosvenordale, which I hadn't realized was a place separate from North Grosvenordale, and taken a picture of its crumbling mill, which I hadn't known was a mill then. Grovenordale, my book told me, was an agricultural settlement until 1863, when "Dr. William Grosvenordale, industrialist" brought in new machinery from England and enlarged the existing small mill. Apparently, at the time the Guide was written, the Grosvenordale Company Mill was still manufacturing textiles.

And I'd been to North Grosvernordale too. I wrote about it on this blog, in fact, and I doubted that if I went back now, I'd come up with anything better to say about it. The Guide had very little to say about it compared to its southerly counterpart, which was strange because it is, at least today, a much more substantial village. Its mill still stands - that's it in the in the link above - and has been turned into offices, or apartments, I can't remember. It has restaurants and a park, and a church with "an unusual stone grotto and Shrine of St. Joseph...a copy of the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France" which I'd also seen but not understood.

And then there was Wilsonville, just before the Massachsetts line. At this point I had no desire to seek out Wilsonville, which three-quarters of a century ago had been a "small mill village composed mainly of old gray company houses." The Federal Writers' Project writers couldn't seem to muster any particular enthusiasm for Wilsonville, and I couldn't either. Maybe, I thought, humoring myself, they'd secretly decided not to go there too.

The 8:15 Express to CREEPY!

This free-standing train car in Putnam is a museum. It's dedicated to - no, not that! It's dedicated to Putnam native Gertrude Chandler Warner, author of the Boxcar Children series, which was about some orphans who run away (can orphans run away?) and live in a train car. I guess I should say is about, because I just looked it up and the series seems to have lived on; there are graphic novels now. When I lived a few minutes away from this, and drove past it a few times a day, it always creeped me right out. And it still does!