Celebrating Birthdays at the CHS!

This past week I celebrated my 31^st birthday (not a milestone year at all!) – at home, in my pajamas all day, glued to hour after hour of non-academic television shows, and watching the snow fall outside. By the end of the day, my Connecticut yard was blanketed with about 10 inches of snow. I did venture outside to shovel a path for my Border Collie, Poncho, and, along with my husband, played a little soccer with him. This was one of the highlights of birthday #31!

Poncho and his favorite soccer ball on a much warmer day. 

 

We are celebrating many other birthdays at the Connecticut Historical Society this winter!

The Value of Gallery Tours

I have had, in the past few weeks, the opportunity to lead gallery tours of our temporary exhibition, Through a Different Lens. I spent so much time with the photographs on display when we were preparing the exhibition and I was writing the publication that I’ve sort of forgotten what it’s like to see them through new eyes. Every tour I lead gives me the chance to see the material afresh.

Mr. Veeder’s Neighborhood

As if secret panels and an in-home car wash weren’t enough to delight visitors on our monthly Secrets of the Veeder House Tours, we’ve now added new information on the rapidly developing West End neighborhood that Mr. Veeder chose as the site of his home.  Before he began building the stone colonial revival home for an estimated cost of $143,000 in 1925, the land belonged to the Goodwin family farm. The Hartford Courant waxed sentimental about the rapid development in the area in same year that Veeder’s construction began:

“It was not many years ago when out Asylum Avenue, west of Woodland Street, the rolling fields of the Goodwin estate drew much comment. To the north and south fields stretched out, lending the aspect of the country right within the city.”

In 1889, Farmington Avenue had yet to experience the boom in development that would come in the 1910s and 1920s.