A simple hand-stitched notebook, its marbled paper cover faded over the centuries, records the religious, educational, and charitable purposes of Lyme’s earliest women’s organization. Mid-way through the construction of a new Meetinghouse at the foot of what is now Lyme Street, ten ladies from the town’s prominent families gathered in 1816 to establish a reading group.
Women in Old Lyme debated the merits of granting women the right to vote. Read more to learn about a Connecticut town's role in suffrage, anti-suffrage, and the ratification of the nineteenth amendment.
by Carolyn Wakeman Featured photo, above: Florence Griswold, "Moonlight." Postcard [...]
When local artists exchanged holiday cards, they often sent original etchings or woodblock prints of the surrounding landscape, or lithographic reproductions of their paintings.
Daphne Ely was a resident of Lyme and active community member, but before settling down in the town where her ancestors had settled, Daphne lived in Hartford and documented her life from 1911-1914 in her scrapbook. She was also an avid collector of newspaper clippings, local advertisements, and invitations to social events, and her scrapbook details four years in the life of a Hartford socialite in the early 20th century.
Carolyn Wakeman Featured Photo: Unidentified artist, A Massachusetts Militia Bandsman, ca. [...]
Carolyn Wakeman Featured Photo: Joseph Perkins house, ca. 1890, showing apple [...]
The Independence Day holiday in 1907 passed without celebration in Old Lyme. Ashes still smoldered from the fire that demolished the Meetinghouse on July 3, and the community united in a sense of shared loss. But when the newly arrived minister proposed replacing the elegant white clapboard structure that had graced the village for almost a century with an “up-to-date” red brick church, controversy flared.
In the cultivated wildness of their flower gardens, local artists showcased their delight in color, pattern, and form. According to The Hartford Courant in 1931, Lucian Abrams, whose paintings are lavishly displayed in the Florence Griswold Museum’s spring exhibition A Cosmopolitan in Connecticut, was one of several Lyme painters known as much “for their wonderful flowers and the studied care of their houses and grounds as for their pictures.”
Although Florence Griswold’s unique role in the history of American art has been well documented, we have known surprisingly little about her life as head of the Griswold Home School, an educational institution which preceded the arrival of her artist boarders and occupied the four women of the Griswold family for fourteen years from 1878 to 1892. But by tracking newly uncovered historical sources, we now know much more about the workings of the school and about Florence Griswold in her position of school administrator.
In 2013 the noted silver designer Siro Toffolon donated to the Florence Griswold Museum an important collection of Revolutionary War papers relating to Capt. Jonathan Gillet of Lyme. During the course of researching and cataloguing this collection, trustee and editor Carolyn Wakeman made a fascinating discovery that is told in this posting to From the Archives.
Tired of cold and snow? Read about two remarkable New England winters.
