Volume 17 Issue 1  Spring 2010

The Town’s First Three Histories

A headline in the Hartford Courant in 1913 told this remarkable story: “STATE LIBRARY HAS ROLL OF MINUTE MEN, List of Simsbury Volunteers of 1776 Found in Dump Heap.”  The article explained that about thirteen years before Lucius W. Bigelow, who has a place in Simsbury history as its last tin peddler and a veteran of the Civil War, heard that a refuse pile in the backyard of a house in the Weatogue section of Simsbury was going to be burned.  He asked for it to be turned over to him and spent time over two years picking through it.

Volume 16 Issue 3   Fall 2009

Supplementing Vital Records and Census Information

If you’re looking for information about an ancestor to add to the sketchy facts that vital records provide, you might be successful in town reports. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, town reports published by the Town of Simsbury listed the name of every resident the town paid for goods or services, except teachers.

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Volume 16 Issue 2     Summer 2009

Witness to the Civil War and the Transcontinental Railroad

One day in 1928 Lettie Dodge Montgomery welcomed to her grand summer home in Simsbury a writer and his wife.  The man, Jacob R. Perkins, was close to publishing a biography of Mrs. Montgomery’s father, Major General Grenville M. Dodge, the Civil War soldier and Abraham Lincoln’s choice to build the eastern portion of the first transcontinental railroad 1.

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Volume 15  Issue 4,   Winter 2008-2009

The Architect Who Designed the Simsbury Free Library

A seventh generation descendant of Shadrach Hapgood who arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1656 at the age of fourteen, Melvin Hathaway Hapgood and his architectural firm designed several significant Simsbury buildings. Hapgood was born February 11, 1859, in a log cabin in the pioneer settlement of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his parents had bought a forty-acre claim shortly after their marriage.

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