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Windham Textile Mill and History Museum
November 09, 2008 //
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The other week Katie and I travelled to the Windham Textile Mill and History Museum for a class trip for my history class. Our teacher brought us on a guided tour because he is the librarian for the museum. For those who are interested in visiting, here's the address and phone number.
Windham Textile and History Museum
411 Main Street
Willimantic, CT 06226860-456-2178
Taken from the website http://www.millmuseum.org/index.html, here is the information about what the place is.
The Mill Museum is dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history of the textile industry, the working people of the mills and explores their home life in unique ways.
Focusing on the time period of 1870 to 1920, the present two historic buildings which were built in 1877 and situated within the massive mill complex of the former Willimantic Linen Company, located in Willimantic, CT, are a lively place of enjoyment and learning.The town of Windham is made up of four parts: North Windham, Windham Center, South Windham and Willimantic. As with many towns with abundant river water-power, mills were a very large part of the history of the town.The Museum is located in two buildings formerly owned by the Willimantic Thread Company (1854-1898). This company was bought by British owned American Thread Company (1898-1985).
The actual mill building is now being rented out to businesses and such, so the inside is not very accurate to how it once looked. We needed to go to the museum across the street in order to find out info about the mills. Inside the museum, there are fake houses set up. If you go inside you get to see what the common worker's home looked like...how crowded it was, how cramped and tight for space, the way rooms were set up, and what kind of things they needed and used back then. We also get to see what a house of a factory manager, or accountant...someone who was middle class...looked like. Their houses were very, very nice despite the fact that they didn't have any of our modern conveniences.
Next to the museum, there is a building where they store all of the equipment that used to be in the factory. It has all the different types of machines that clean cotton, spin thread, and such. Also, there is an old whistle that used to be on top of the mill that was blown off during a storm. These whistles were installed in mills when lights were invented because electric lights allowed the mill to be open for shifts during night so the whistle was needed to let them know when shifts began and ended. I've included pictures of the trip.
The Frog on the bridge is a story for another day.
the whistle retreived from the river
Once my monthly upload limit is over, I will upload more on my Flickr page so check there in about 3 weeks. http://www.flickr.com/photos/24489179@N05/
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Comments (3)
Comments
Hey Kevin, glad to see you're still posting once in a while. You should restructure this post and put it up on ctweekender.com.
Also, where's the pics you said you've included? Would like to see them.
Posted by: Sean | Nov 9, 2008 6:31:40 PM
I kinda felt lazy while typing. Like there is a lot more I would say in person so I don't wanna spend the time adding to it. Idk, remind me at a later time we'll see.
Posted by: kevin | Nov 9, 2008 7:31:26 PM
Thank you for showing this place to us.
Posted by: Dad | Mar 31, 2009 5:24:07 AM
