New Listings on the National Register

New Listings on the National Register For the Common Good 

The French author Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed in his Democracy in America (1835) that Americans are joiners: “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America. …In the United States associations are established to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion. There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.” Three recent listings on the National Register of Historic Places highlight ways in which residents of rural Connecticut communities formed associations for common goals.

Depopulation and road widening have nearly erased the once-thriving mill village of Phoenixville, located in the town of Eastford. One of the village’s few remaining structures is a small, simple house probably built in about 1806 and acquired in 1907 by the Union Society of Phoenixville, a group incorporated to “maintain and conduct occasional undenominational public religious worship and Sunday School…and any other unsectarian religious or social endeavor conducive to good morals and the best interests of society.”

Sunday Schools grew  rapidly in the United States in the 19th century, a result of changing theological attitudes, promoted by Hartford‘s Horace Bushnell, that emphasized instructing believers in the Christian faith, rather than sudden conversion. Many congregations started their own Sunday Schools, but in the countryside interdenominational schools served entire communities.

The records aren’t clear, but it appears that the Clark family, who owned the little house, allowed local groups to use it as early as 1880. Even before the Union Society was incorporated, the inventory of Albert Clark’s estate, drawn up in 1904, mentioned the “Sunday School House & Lot.” By 1921 the Society reported five teachers and 22 students who met for an hour every Sunday afternoon.

In addition to the Sunday School, the house served as a community center for Phoenixville, hosting suppers, Christmas parties, and other organizations such as the Boy Scouts, the PTA and the 4-H Club. Use of the building declined after the 1950s, as local industry closed and growing automobile use expanded social outlets. In 2002 the Union Society sold the house to the town of Eastford, which is trying to stabilize the building.

Overlooking the Connecticut River in the town of Haddam, Camp Bethel represents another form of association, the camp meeting. Beginning in the late 1700s, large open-air revivals attracted crowds who often sought social as much as religious renewal. By the middle of the 19th century, the camp meetings had become institutionalized, often with permanent campgrounds, regular schedules, and, increasingly, permanent structures.

In 1877 members of the Life and Advent Union, a denomination that expected Christ’s imminent return to earth (they are related to the more numerous Seventh-Day Adventists) held a camp meeting in Haddam, on land that they eventually bought and named Camp Bethel. They set up tents in a circle around a preachers’ stand and, as the camp grew, laid out a series of roads radiating from the original circle or paralleling the bluffs along the river. Over the years, small cottages replaced the tents, and communal facilities, including a chapel, boardinghouses, and a caretaker’s cottage, also were built.

Their cottages’ small size and steep roofs evoke the image of the original tents, while their gingerbread ornament creates a joyous atmosphere. Historian Jan Cunningham points out that the intimate setting, small size, and openness of the campground form “a highly organized, non-hierarchical setting that embodied the democratic sensibilities of the community.”

Today, Camp Bethel is operated by a nondenominational, nonprofit organization. An annual camp meeting week is held every summer, as it has since 1878. The facilities are also used by other groups, and families vacation at the cottages, many of which have been handed down through several generations.

Agriculture played a central role in rural life. In 1867 a group founded the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, more commonly known as the Grange, intending that the new group “would bring the farmers of the country together in a fraternity which would bind them as closely as the Masonic fraternity binds its people for the mutual benefit and interests of the men who till the soil.” The organization spread through the country, establishing state, county and local chapters and championing such improvements to rural life and agriculture as rural free delivery, good roads, and community farming.

The Greenfield Hill Grange #133 was established in 1893 in an agricultural area of the town of Fairfield whose primary crop was flax. The group erected a building in 1897 and enlarged it in 1931, enlarging the stage and adding a kitchen and a wraparound porch. These facilities, along with beaded wainscot and pressed-metal sheathing inside, made it one of the most elaborate Grange buildings in New England.

Over the years, the Greenfield Hill Grange became one of Connecticut’s largest and most active, and its building witnessed Grange fairs, dinners, and theatrical productions. The organization’s fair reached its acme in the 1950s; more than 2,000 attended the 1956 fair, with its competitive exhibits of vegetables, food, flowers, dressmaking and animals. However, as agriculture dwindled the Grange’s populist rural values were less and less in synch with the community’s increasingly suburban population. Membership has declined, and now the organization is negotiating to transfer the property to the Greenfield Hill Village Improvement Society—yet another vestige of 19th-century community associationism.