Seymour Antiques Co.

Where I grew up, antique stores were full of furniture that was made in France and cost more than your car. When I moved away and later began traveling throughout the United States, I was amused to learn that in most places, antique stores are full of the sort of stuff my mom would reluctantly give away by the box-full, while gazing at it fondly and saying, "It's too bad no one would want that."

While the first kind of store has always been off-limits to me (and honestly, is not even particularly enjoyable to browse), the second has provided hours of entertainment and, a few times, an obscure item special enough to take home. But those massive meccas of all things old have their downsides, too. They're exhausting, for one. ("Oh look, there's a whole 'nother section we haven't been to yet!") They're overwhelming, for another. ("You like depression glass? Excellent, here's nine rooms full of it.") Plus, there's something about them that comes a tad too close to a house on an episode of Hoarders. On my third hour of wandering through one of these places, I will sometimes suddenly envision how my living room would look if I bought every marked down object that made me say, "Oh, cute!"

And this is why Seymour Antiques Co. has to be one of my favorite antique stores in Connecticut. It's located, as its name suggests, in the small Naugatuck Valley town of Seymour, which has a lovely throwback of a downtown. In the store, which is loosely laid out by room and category, everything is either beautiful, interesting, or both. And rather than making me shake my head in amazement that someone, somewhere, will buy anything if you stick a price tag on it, it makes me think everything was carefully curated just for me. (Yeah, I wrote "curated." I'm not ceding that word to the hipsters so they can describe their vacations or their cocktails or whatnot.) Prices are not exactly bargain basement cheap; you could probably find any given item for less elsewhere if you were determined enough. But they're not so absurdly high that they will cause you to burst into laughter and inquire whether anyone has any Grey Poupon, either.

Now that I've said all that, you know what's funny? I've never actually bought anything at Seymour Antiques Co. I just keep going back and thinking that I will. Which I suppose is decent proof that it's a really nice place to shop: instead of disappointment and annoyance, I leave feeling optimistic. Maybe that's only proof that I am strange, but I'll choose to believe the other thing.

100 Bank Street, Seymour

I have admired this building from afar for years. I would have written a post about it long ago, except that every time I saw it I was, well, afar. Passing on some parallel but impossible road, I could only watch as it sped out of view and vow that I would get over there, eventually.

Then one day last week, completely by happenstance, I ended up driving right in front of it.

And so: presenting the former Seymour High School, constructed between 1884 and 1886. I might have liked High School better if mine had had a bell tower...

Finally Seymour

There's something about Seymour. Ever since I went there for this story, I've been meaning to go back. It reminds me of a little mini-Putnam. And I once liked Putnam so much, I moved there.


Seymour is very much about Antiques.


And strange little touches.

There are things in Seymour, like this pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks from the downtown area to a sort of little parking lot, that I'm sure are very useful, but I can't figure out exactly why.

Overall a casual, old-fashioned, put-all-your-wares-out-on-the-sidewalk feeling prevails.


And there is, apparently, a Pumpkin Festival.


Chairs, the kind that aren't for sale, also get to be out on the sidewalk.

And colors that are a bit more Mississippi than Connecticut come together.

From above it looks like a 1950s postcard (with more contemporary cars.)

And though it feels pleasantly forgotten, it is connected to the wider world, via the Waterbury Branch of the New Haven Line.

Road Trip

I went to the Valley a while ago, for one of my Patch summer travel thingies. (Or is it thingys? They both look so wrong. What? No, I will not speak like an adult and use a real word instead.) Anyway, this was one of my favorite stories to do. I knew there would be a lot of wacky stuff on this little road trip, because I researched it. But it was much better than I'd expected, and much better than that old image of the Valley I'd been carrying around. And now that I've disposed of that, I have room for the old license plates and other sundry antiques I want to go back to Seymour and buy from this amazing store. If you want to read about my short tour of the Lower Naugatuck Valley, it's here..

I Went To the Valley. And It Wasn't Scary.

When I was young "The Valley" used to be a place you wouldn't go to, you'd just drive through it on the way to somewhere else. It was (we thought) an industrial wasteland that was icky in implicit and unspecified ways, and in which your cell phone signal would mysteriously disappear. But I went there, not just through it on Route 8, but I stopped. In Waterbury, Beacon Falls, Oxford, Seymour, and Derby. And I drove through Middlebury, Ansonia, and I don't even know what other little towns. Not on the highway but on the back roads. And it was interesting. And beautiful. I don't know if the area has improved over the past 10-20 years, or if we were wrong all along. (We lived in Fairfield County; we were probably wrong.)I saw thing like the footbridge above.

And these silos, and farmland, and winding roads and ice cream stands and all those thing you think exist only in the Quiet Corner or Litchfield County.

And bins full of metal letters. You can't say anything bad about a place where there are bins of metal letters.

And history, a lot of it, casually standing around, just part of the landscape.

History within history, even, like the blackboard in this picture I took through a broken window of the one room schoolhouse above. I wish I had gotten off Route 8 and peered through some broken windows years ago.