Simsbury Free Library Quarterly

Memories of the Ketchins of Tariffville #3

Volume 18 Issues 3 & 4, Fall & Winter 2011

Part 3: Ensign, Bickford & Company Buildings and More

The second installment of this series, based on the memoirs of William Mansfield Ketchin, told of A. J. Ketchin & Son’s monument business and its diversification into stone bridge construction and stone home building. On the personal side, William Ketchin told of the February 9, 1892, sledding accident that paralyzed his brother, Archie, below the twelfth vertebra. Indirectly, Archie’s misfortune led to young Will’s finding the love of his life.

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Memories of the Ketchins of Tariffville #2

Volume 18 Issues 1 & 2, Spring & Summer 2011

Part 2: The Early Years of A. J. Ketchin & Son

In Part 1, excerpts from William Mansfield Ketchin’s memoirs told the Ketchin family history from their arrival from Paisley, Scotland, in 1821 to their eventual founding of stone masonry and monument businesses in the Tariffville section of Simsbury, Connecticut. The article ended with a confrontation between young Will and his eighth grade teacher at the Tariffville Grammar School. At the end of the winter term Will left the school and worked in his father’s marble shop until the beginning of the next school year, when his family enrolled him in the Simsbury Academy run by Rev. John Bunyan McLean.

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Memories of the Ketchins of Tariffville

Volume 17 Issue 4 Winter 2010

Part I: Builders in Stone and Quarrymen

Three generations of men in the Ketchin family worked on most, if not all, of the brownstone constructed in Simsbury and the surrounding towns from the 1850’s through the 1920’s. They built the Ensign -Bickford buildings in Simsbury and Avon, the Simsbury United Methodist Church, the former High School that is now the Simsbury Town Hall, the former tobacco warehouse that is now the volunteer firefighter building in the Tariffville section of Simsbury…

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The Eno Family from Their Origins in France to the Present

Volume 17 Issue 3 Fall 2010

Part II: Into the 20th Century

In Part I, we shared the unpublished typescript of Abigail Eno Ellsworth’s records compiled between 1940 and 1947. Her records, along with those of Henry Lane Eno, gave us the full story of the earliest recorded lives of the family as they moved from France/Belgium to England and finally to America in 1648.

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