Abby Epplett, Historian

In mid-August 2025, I took a three-day trip to the Windsor, CT area to explore many museums and parks. My first stop on the trip with the Connecticut Trolley Museum (CTM) in East Windsor. The owner of the museum, the Connecticut Electric Railway Association, Inc., was founded in 1940, making it the oldest trolley preservation organization in the country. While checking off a bucket list item, I saw trolleys and fire trucks, took a ride on a restored trolley, and visited the unique gift shop.

In August 2024, I went on a five-day trip to Cape Cod, MA where I visited many museums and cultural organizations, along with quick history stops and trails. My fourth stop was Cotuit Historical Society , which has the full name of Historical Society of Santuit & Cotuit (HSSC). These are two village of Barnstable, MA. The society opened in 1955, and its museum currently consists of three buildings: newly built Cotuit Museum, Dottridge Homestead, and Rothwell Ice House.

Believe it or not, I had one more weekend left in August 2024 to go on a history adventure. I took a trip to Middleboro, MA to visit Middleborough Historical Museum . This was not your average small town history museum, as the complex combines an indoor exhibit about a celebrity couple plus mechanical musical instruments with a small collection of restored buildings and related artifacts. Once again, the weather was perfect for a summertime adventure.

In September 2024, I visited places and attended programs in Essex National Heritage Area as part of its annual event Trails & Sails . As my first day drew to a close, I made many quick history stops around the town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, so many that this requires a two-part post. The first half of this adventure appeared on Wednesday and included the harbor and train station, library, historic houses, memorials, church, and post office. This post will describe the original and the newest fire stations, another church, an American Revolutionary War era powder house, and other historic buildings.

In August 2024, I went on a five-day trip to Cape Cod, MA where I visited many museums and cultural organizations, along with quick history stops and trails. My first stop was Heritage Museums & Gardens (HMG) in Sandwich, MA. The first part of this six-part miniseries focused on the gardens. This second part will focus on J.K. Lilly III Automobile Gallery located near the entrance to the museum.

The town of Northbridge, Massachusetts has been celebrating its 250 th birthday. Incorporated on July 14, 1772, the last major celebration was held during the bicentennial in 1972. Small town birthdays are not what they use to be, but the cute parade down Main Street contained several highlights from New England history. Here are a few of my favorites.

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.

A few weeks ago in April 2023, I visited the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, MA. While I have often visited Franklin Park in the past to run in cross country races, I had never gone inside the historic zoo, which first opened in 1912 and is among the oldest urban zoos in the United States. Now part of Zoo New England , a collaboration with Stone Zoo in Stoneham, MA that was formerly called Commonwealth Zoological Corporation , this seventy-nine acre property sits at the northeast point of the largest park in the Greater Boston area. The entire park is part of the Emerald Necklace designed by American landscape architect  Frederick Law Olmsted . Formerly called as West Roxbury Park for a local neighborhood now known as Jamaica Plain , the park is currently named after American politician and inventor Benjamin Franklin , who was born in Boston. The zoo itself was designed by former Olmsted employee Arthur A. Shurtleff , greatly changing Olmsted’s idea of a natural wildernes...

Rounding out my long weekend of New England History, on Sunday, October 16, I volunteered at the 42 nd annual Farm Days, held at Waters Farm in Sutton, Massachusetts . The festival is based around the farm house and property of the Waters family, some of whom still volunteer at the event. Their ancestor, Stephen Waters, built the original red house in 1757, and subsequent generations added onto the building. A favorite fact of the family is that the rare Sutton Beauty variety of apple was developed on the farm. The Waters family lived in the house for six generations, until Dorothea Waters Moran donated the home and its contents to the Town of Sutton. Since then, Waters Farm Preservation Inc has done a remarkable job preserving the property and hosting fun community events. The homestead has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1985, and those records may be digitized in the future. A...

Humans become bewildered when given too much ambiguous information in an illogical order. Unfortunately, this is how the text of The Lord of the Rings operates. Between its myriad of perspectives, thousands of years of in-universe history, multiple languages and cultures, and an entire planet of locations, the material seems muddled even to experienced readers. The overwhelming effect of Tolkien’s Legendarium is part of the experience; the reader does not have to know the entire story to feel immersed in the fantasy world but studying both the constructs of Middle-earth and the real-world history upon which it was based enables the reader to understand the complex motivations of the characters. While I am all for embarking on in-depth research, most readers do not have the time or energy for such study. Additionally, trying to remember all this material takes up a lot of headspace. In user experience research, the amount of stress while using available headspace is known as “c...

Yesterday — November 14, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EST — I watched the ninety-minute webinar Parallel Tracks: Steinheimer, Silicon Valley, and Steel Rails about the life of photographer Richard “Dick” Steinheimer . The talk was presented by Ken Rehor , an electrical engineer from Palo Alto, CA, and Elrond Lawrence , Acquisitions & Marketing Coordinator at Center for Railroad Photography & Art (CRP&A) , which hosted the webinar. Rehor had met Steinheimer while working with semiconductors at Bell Labs, while Lawrence met him photographing trains in Stockton, CA. The talk covered the life and photography of Steinheimer in great detail with accompanying photographs. The CRP&A currently has 30,000 Steinheimer slides, 4,200 prints, and 2,700 black and white negatives donated by his wife and fellow railfan, Shirley Berman-Steinheimer . Steinheimer began taking photographs of trains in 1946 when he was seventeen years old. He went to City College of San Francisco , where J...

From November 2 through November 4, I attended the 2022 Annual NEMA ( New England Museum Association ) Conference as a General Scholarship Recipient , which I received thanks to “ Connecticut Humanities and the Connecticut Office of the Arts ; MassHumanities ; Mass Cultural Council ; Vermont Humanities ; and NEMA Annual Appeal donors. After two years of attending virtually, the 104 th edition of the conference was back in-person at the Sheraton Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts Keynote Session: Becoming Good Ancestors: A Sense of Oneness Before the keynote, NEMA Executive Director Dan Yaeger began with opening remarks about the last time the conference had gone on hiatus, which was during World War II when some museum workers were drafted. He introduced the new Value Statements and Mission Statement, which highlight the need for equitable treatment of all people, dismantling oppressive structures within the museum world, addressing the global climate cri...