Old Lyme Historical Society Walking Tour

On the same street as Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme Historical Society wrote a self-guided walking tour available on their website. This tour provided brief histories and custom watercolor illustrations of buildings. While an audio tour would have been easier to follow, the tour was straightforward and gave plenty of information without requiring too much reading. Sidewalks for most of the route allowed visitors to safely traverse the fairly quiet center of town.

I began at Charles Ludington House, built for banker Charles Henry Ludington, Sr. in 1893 by architect Henry Rutgers Marshall. Further research on Marshall showed that he was more than a local architect, as he designed the Naulakha, the Vermont house of author Rudyard Kipling, which is now a rental property. Before the current house, the site held Parsons’ Tavern, a meeting place for the Sons of Liberty leading up to the American Revolutionary War, which later became a school run by Phoebe Griffin Lord Noyes. As for the Ludington family, one of its more famous members was American suffragist Katharine Ludington who was the last president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, along with co-founding the League of Women Voters. Nearby was Stephen Peck House, likely a stop on the Underground Railroad based on the hidden staircase leading to two attic rooms. The house is now listed as part of Connecticut Freedom Trail.

Woodward “Woodie” Haven Griswold had a Lexington model prefabricated mail order kit house from the Sears Roebuck catalogue built on the property beside his own home. I had first heard about this type of house on the episode “The House that Came in the Mail” from the podcast 99% Invisible, and I was impressed by how well this house blended in with the other houses on the street. I could not determine how Woodie was related to Miss Florence of Lyme Art Colony fame. Next door, Woodie and his wife, Clara Champlain Griswold, opened their own combination grocery story and toy museum. The design of the store matched the design of the Masonic Lodge Hall next door. Which in turn looked a lot like the Baptist Society meeting house, which later became an Episcopalian church, and then a Catholic Church, before its transformation into a private home.

Moving right down the street, bright red 26 Lyme Street started life as a house; became a carriage, cabinet, and coffin shop; turned into a grocery story, and then was sold to antiques dealer Richard French in 1971; antiques are sold there to this day. Meanwhile, Joseph Peck House currently at 32 Lyme Street was built in 1699 on the property now belonging to Florence Griswold Museum. An oxen sleigh brought it here in 1816. Its most famous resident was Morrison Remick “Mott” Waite, a Chief Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Brief additional research showed that he dismantled many of the regulations created to protect African Americans during Reconstruction after the American Civil War. At the same time, he declared that a corporation had the same rights as a person, specifically a white male person at the time. When he died suddenly in 1888, his estate could not support his wife, forcing his colleagues to fundraise on her behalf. For a man that not many people have heard about, he caused a lot of long-lasting problems.

Memorial town hall was built in 1921 after World War I, then called the Great War, in honor of those who served. A two-sided sign in front of the building gave a brief overview of the early history of the town. Next door was Justin Smith House, built in 1726 and studied by members of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the New Deal of the Great Depression. Two doors over, former Bugbee's Store is now a private home but still has the unique entrance of a New England general store with a recessed door and large front windows.

Amos Bacon was a sea captain with a tasty surname who built the house at 76 Lyme Street in 1850. More famous were later occupants, Charles Henry John Ebert and Mary Louise Roberts Ebert, a husband-and-wife team of American Impressionist painters and part of Lyme Art Colony. Next door is an orange Georgian style home called Deming / Avery House. Senator Thomas Joseph Dodd (CT-D) and his son, Senator Chris Dodd (CT-D), lived in the house. Father Dodd was censured for widespread corruption and alcoholism in 1967, the first senator censured after McCarthyism in 1954. Many years later, Son Dodd was involved problems surrounding the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the 2008 housing crisis, along with a laundry list of other scandals of various sizes. My takeaway from all this is that if you want to be a good politician, do not move to Old Lyme. On a slightly lighter note, John Sill House at 84 Lyme Street was owned by smuggler John Sill who made his money by avoiding the Customs Service.

The Gothic Cottage at 75 Lyme Street looked like a miniature version of Historic New England’s Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, CT because of its gingerbread trip. Old Lyme Historical Society, who created this nifty tour, was renovating its building, which was built in 1910. Nearby was Old Lyme Fire Department, a little red brick building. The town fire department was formed in 1923, and the current three-truck station was built in 1961 out of red brick. Next door was Center School, built with local granite by the WPA and still part of the Old Lyme school system as a preschool.

Down a side street on appropriately named Library Lane was Old Lyme Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library. Constructed in 1898, this mouthful of a name was given in honor of educator and artist Phoebe Griffin Noyes, whose school was originally down the street by First Congregational Church. The original building mixes the Colonial Revival style made popular after the American Civil War with neoclassical elements, including skinny Greek columns and Palladian windows. In 1925, the library received a new wing named after recently deceased Evelyn McCurdy Salisbury, a wealthy socialite from a prominent merchant family who made their wealth in part from the sale of enslaved people. This is why we cannot have nice things. The third addition came in 1994, and the entire building was renovated inside around 2019.

The charming J.A. Rowland General Store built in 1867 was briefly owned by antiques dealer Richard T. French in 1975, who apparently decided that his two buildings on the opposite side of the street were enough and proply sold it to become a clothing store called Country Duffer. In 1988, husband-and-wife team Jeffrey W. Cooley and Betsey Cooley turned the property into the Cooley Gallery and sold high quality American art. Just down the street, a beautiful Greek Revival house built in 1842, which served as dorms for a boarding school, the summer home of Woodrow Wilson and his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who painted at Lyme Art Colony, and the site of a "pickle murder", mentioned briefly on the walking tour but never described in detail, and I could not find any more information online. This post has been whiplash between couples being lovely and other people being terrible.

Captain Samuel Mather, a wealthy merchant who traded in the West Indies, had the house built in 1790. Since 1880, the First Congregational Church has used the property as its parsonage. The final house on Lyme Street was John McCurdy House, purchased by merchant John McCurdy, the patriarch of the prominent family and great-grandfather of Evelyn McCurdy Salisbury for whom the library was named. General Lafayette, a French noble who aided the United States during the American Revolutionary War, stayed at this house during the war in 1778 and after the war in 1824. The connecting street was appropriately named McCurdy Road and featured the Marvin-Griffin House built by the Marvin family around 1820 and owned by the Lord-Griffin family from 1828 to the 1990s, when it became the rectory of Christ the King Roman Catholic Church of Old Lyme.

Not far from Florence Griswold Museum, the Lyme Art Association building is a completely different style of architecture. The association itself began in 1901, but the building was constructed in 1921 under the direction of Charles A. Platt. Platt’s works are well-known to museum lovers and academics on the East Coast, with his other buildings including the Freer Gallery of Art, a museum of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the campuses of Connecticut College in New London, CT and Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, MA. The gallery was switching between shows on the day that I visited, so I did not go inside but could still admire the architecture.

Old Lyme Inn stood across the street from Lyme Art Association. The Champlain family constructed the farmhouse around 1856 and became the Barbizon Oak Inn about a hundred years later during the 1950s after Connecticut Turnpike was built. The latest iteration of the building came in 2012 after restorations by another husband-and-wife team, Ken and Chris Kitchings, who continue to run the restaurant, inn, and jazz club. The farthest point on the walking tour was Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center, originally a Georgian style home built by Judge William Noyes. I got a little nervous when seeing a political title attached to his name, and sure enough, the judge was the same slave owner listed on the witness stone plaques found on the grounds of Florence Griswold Museum. Since 2020, the property has instead been used by the The Connecticut Audubon Society to advocate for conservation and education. No worries about the Roger Tory namesake: this was Roger Tory Peterson, acclaimed painter and author who created Peterson Field Guides and lived in Old Lyme, CT at the end of his life. This was about as happy an ending that I could expect for this post.