Nestled at the headwater of the Thames River, where the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers converge, its rolling landscape surrounded on all sides by water, Norwich was alluring to the tribal nations 10,000 years ago and to the Europeans who colonized the area in the 1650s. It’s alluring now — a small city brimming with art, architecture and history.
When Connecticut artist John Trumbull began exploring late 18th-century Connecticut for dramatic landscapes, he zoomed in on the Great Falls in Norwich — now known as Indian Leap — for its scenic drama and the famous incident in native heritage involving Chief Uncas and the 1643 Battle of the Great Plain between the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes. It’s a majestic site, surrounded by mill housing and mills that have been converted to waterfront apartments.
Norwich is a walking city with a handful of distinctive trails. The website of the Norwich Community Development Corporation (askncdc.com/) provides links to downloadable illustrated walking tours about Historic Broadway & Union Streets, Historic Washington & Broad, Historic Norwichtown and the Old Norwichtown Burial Ground, a veritable outdoor museum of folk art. There you’ll find the graves of Samuel Huntington, the first president of the united colonies under the Articles of Confederation (1778); Benedict Arnold’s mother (he was raised in Norwich); a monument to LaFayette’s French soldiers, who died here during the American Revolution; Boston Trowtrow, the only one of Connecticut’s Black Governors whose grave is marked; and some of the most beloved folk sculpture in New England. It is an enchanting environment accessed by a narrow alley at the south edge of Norwichtown Green.
Norwichtown was the original town center. Norwich is well-preserved because the industrial age center of town was built up a distance from the original center of town at the port and railroad terminus on the Thames River. As a result Norwich has one of the largest concentrations of 18th- and early 19th-century houses in New England.
One of them is the Leffingwell House Museum (leffingwellhousemuseum.org), 348 Washington St., in Norwichtown. The earliest part of the house dates to the 17th century. It was expanded to its present size by Christopher Leffingwell, an early industrialist and ardent patriot in the American Revolution who helped finance Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Fort Ticonderoga. Leffingwell was a pioneer in the manufacture of paper. He also owned a woolen mill and Connecticut’s first chocolate mill.
Owned and operated by the Society of the Founders of Norwich, the museum presents a remarkable collection of locally made and owned art, decorative arts and articles of domestic use. Norwich was the first important center of silversmithing and clockmaking in Connecticut — a story well-represented. Some of the earliest Connecticut needlework, the key to Benedict Arnold’s house, local industrial products, a surgeon’s chest used by Dr. Phillip Turner in the American Revolution and the desk where Frances Calkins wrote the town history in the 1850s — these are among the treasures you’ll find there. The Faith Trumbull Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution owns and operates the Perkins-Rockwell House museum. Between the two of them is an abundance of local cultural material as deep and rich as any town in Connecticut.
The crown jewel among Norwich’s cultural treasures is the Slater Memorial Museum (slatermuseum.org), Crescent Street, on the campus of Norwich Free Academy. In 1888, William Albert Slater engaged Worcester architect Stephen Earle to create a masterpiece of Romanesque Revival design, founding what became the first municipal art museum in Connecticut. The Slaters were renowned Rhode Island industrialists. The museum got off to a great start by hiring Henry Watson Kent as its founding curator and engaging Edward Robinson from the Museum of Fine Art, Boston to build a collection of cast plaster replicas of the classical sculpture — the finest such collection still intact and on display anywhere in the U.S. Kent, who went on to become one of the founders of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was a curatorial prodigy who built a remarkable collection of Norwichiana, Asian art, African art and more.
Rich Art History
Norwich has a vibrant art history, more in the crafts than painting and sculpture. One local painter stands out, John Denison Crocker (1822-1907), who spent most of his life in Norwich. He worked in the style of the Hudson River School, producing numerous scenes of his native southeastern Connecticut and of Norwich. The Slater devotes an entire gallery to this artist’s work and story.
Part of Slater’s appeal is that it remained frozen an in amber through most of the 20th century while other art museums rooted in the 19th century went modern. No museum in the country better conveys what Victorians had in mind when they created America’s first art museums. In the 1960s, when art museums everywhere dumped regional artists in favor of “cutting-edge” art from New York, the Slater gave sanctuary to the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. Exhibiting the work of Connecticut artists and craftsmen, in addition to serving the needs of the Norwich Free Academy, is the museum’s primary work.
In the Taftville section of town stands the Taftville Cotton Co.’s Ponemah Mill, a gargantuan French Second Empire building that, when completed in 1875, was one of the largest buildings in New England. The name “Ponemah” was taken from Longfellow’s poem, “The Song of Hiawatha,” meaning “our hope.” At its peak, the Ponemah Mill employed 1,600 workers and produced more than 20 million yards of cloth a year. The company was the first importer and user of Egyptian cotton in the United States, and one of the first mills in the country to manufacture fine fabrics. Breathtaking in scale, ornament and setting on the Shetucket River, Ponemah Mill is Connecticut’s most iconic cathedral of the Industrial Age.
