Zooming Through Loom City, Part II: Other Than the Mills

From Dave Brigham:

I recently visited Rockville, a section of Vernon, Connecticut, that was once a separate city. The village is a gold mine for backsiders, filled with old mills (some abandoned, some converted to apartments, others somewhere in between) and beautiful old buildings of all sorts. Recently, I wrote about the mills (see April 24, 2021, "Zooming Through Loom City, Part I: The Mills"); in this post, I will cover municipal and commercial buildings, a school, a social club and other things.

(Lovely sign along East Main Street, across from Courthouse Plaza.)

The Courthouse Plaza shopping center, which is pretty dead in these pandemic days, is so named because of Rockville Superior Court located on Park Street. Across from the courthouse, I spied this building with a sign in the window letting folks know that a bail bond company will be opening soon.

I like this building, but haven't found out anything else about it. I'm guessing it, like many in the downtown area, dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, during the heyday of the mills in the area.

Next door to the future bail bond operation is something called KLC of Connecticut. You can see the courthouse reflected in the windows.

This outfit is a Christian organization, according to its Facebook page. I'm not clear on what "KLC" stands for; the group's page indicates that it is "The Kingdom of Jesus Christ Connecticut, USA Chapter," where "Jesus Christ" is "The Name Above Every Name." As regular blog readers know, I have a thing for churches, be they housed in massive buildings topped by 100-foot spires or located on the second floor of an unremarkable office building above an insurance agency.

A little further up the hill along Park Street, at the corner of School Street, is the beautiful former high school.

Built in 1892, the Richardsonian Romanesque high school was designed by Francis R. Richmond of Springfield, Massachusetts, according to this incredibly helpful web site about the Rockville Historic District. I believe it stopped functioning as the high school in 1925. I'm not sure if it was used for other purposes before becoming home to the central administration office for Vernon Public Schools.

Just around the corner, on Park Place overlooking Central Park and West Main Street, are three breathtaking buildings. I regret to report that I didn't take enough photos of these places, as I was in a bit of a rush. Here's what I've got. Below is Citizens Block, which dates to 1879.

"Citizen’s Block is a three-story, fifteen-thousand square foot structure. Designated as commercial storefront, its first floor is home to the volunteer-based Rockville Downtown Association," according to Volume 3 of the 2017 Vernon Events magazine. "Although the upper floors are residential, it has been vacant since 1998, when it was purchased by the town."

The town has renovated the building in recent years, although, judging by the photo below, there is plenty more work to be done.

The Rockville Downtown Association is a designated Main Street Community of the Connecticut Main Street Center. The organization's primary goals are economic development, neighborhood improvement and housing, and general physical aesthetics and amenities, per its web site.

Next to Citizen's Block is the former Methodist Episcopal Church, which dates to 1867. There was a bank on the ground floor, which I find pretty funny. This was done in order to "make optimum use of this valuable city property," per the previously cited Living Places web site. I didn't get a shot of the front of this hybrid building, but I poked my head down an alley and took the shot below.

I love coming across old bank vault alarm boxes. Such a cool relic of the past. I didn't realize at the time that this building once had a double use, but I wondered why an old bank had what appeared to be a church window. Now I know. Across the alley from this brick behemoth is the Memorial Building, below.

Built n 1889, the Memorial was constructed as a town hall and Civil War memorial on the site of the First Congregational Church of Rockville, per Living Places. Like the old high school, this building was designed by Francis Richmond. The New England Civil War Museum is housed in this building.

(Look closely and you'll see, in reverse, the letters "GAR" in the windows. Those stand for Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Union Army, Union Navy, Marines and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service who served in the American Civil War, per Wikipedia.)

The western end of Central Park is framed by two buildings, only one of which I captured with my camera....

This is the former Rockville National Bank, which was erected in 1889. It now serves as the annex for the adjacent Union Church, which you can see just a little of in the photo above.

Central Park and the buildings around it are raised above West Main Street. From that vantage point, I could see Fox Hill Tower, below.

The tower is a memorial to Vernon's war dead. It was erected in 1939. If I'd had more time, I would've driven up there and checked it out.

Along Union Street, which is what West Main Street turns into just past Union Church, I spied two more cool old buildings.

This is the Fitch Block, which dates to 1889, the same date as many of the buildings in this area of Rockville. Many older, wood-framed buildings here were destroyed in a fire in 1888. I'm guessing this building was named after Samuel Fitch, who ran a mill in town.

Below is a t-shirt and hat shop in a long, low brick building along Union Street. There's no name on the store, but I think it's called Gallery 46, after its address.

Along West Main, across from Central Park, is a line of stores, including La Brioche French Bakery.

I love the old clock from a Friendly's Restaurant in nearby Manchester, in the window of the bakery. Below is an old sign for a defunct restaurant called the Rockville Eatery, located on the side of Craig's Kitchen.

Also along West Main is a sign commemorating this section of Vernon as the place where 1960s hitmaker Gene Pitney -- the Rockville Rocket -- grew up.

From Wikipedia: "Pitney charted 16 top 40 hits in the United States, four in the top ten. In the United Kingdom, he had 22 top 40 hits, and 11 singles in the top ten. Among his most famous hits are 'Town Without Pity', '(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance', 'Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa', 'I'm Gonna Be Strong', and 'It Hurts To Be In Love'. He also wrote the early 1960s hits 'Rubber Ball' recorded by Bobby Vee, 'Hello Mary Lou' by Rick Nelson, and 'He's a Rebel' by the Crystals. In 2002, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

A short distance south along West Main Street, at the corner of Vernon Avenue, is the TKB Club, below.

TKB stands for Tadeusz Kosciuszko Benefit, and is a social club founded in 1923. Kosciuszko was "a Polish-Lithuanian military engineer, statesman, and military leader who became a national hero in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the United States," according to Wikipedia. "He fought in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's struggles against Russia and Prussia, and on the US side in the American Revolutionary War. As Supreme Commander of the Polish National Armed Forces, he led the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising.

I'm gonna wrap up with a building that I initially assumed was a former mill or warehouse.

"TURN-HALLE 1897" it says at the top of the building. When I shot these photos, I assumed that was the name of the company that made or stored woolen products here. I was wrong.

This solid-looking building, you see, was an athletic facility/social club for Rockville's German immigrants. The club, one of many formed in the United States based on the German gymnastics movement called Turnverein, was established in Vernon in 1857. Known as Turners, the members "promoted German culture, physical culture, liberal politics, and supported the Union war effort during the American Civil War," according to Wikipedia. "Turners...were the leading sponsors of gymnastics as an American sport and the field of academic study."

This building was later used by the Polish American Citizens Club, and has been altered quite a bit, according to the Historic Buildings of Connecticut.

So that's it. I went to Rockville not once but twice to take all these photos, against the advice of R.E.M.

Zooming Through Loom City, Part I: The Mills

From That Same Old Guy:

I've traipsed through plenty of old mill towns in service of this blog -- Watertown to Clinton to Maynard to Hudson (all in Massachusetts) -- but I'd never seen anyplace like Rockville, Connecticut. A Tolland County village that was incorporated in 1889 and subsumed by the town of Vernon in 1965, Rockville is bisected by the Hockanum River, which drops more than 250 feet over 1.5 miles. That water power allowed for the development of several mills, going back before the Revolutionary War, per Wikipedia.

Before embarking on a recent day trip to visit my mother in Connecticut, I did a quick Google Maps search to find a good place not too far off the highway where I could explore. Rockville immediately jumped out at me, because of the R.E.M. song. As I zoomed in closer on the map, I could see that there was a nice little downtown; what caught my eye first was Loom City Lofts. That sounded promising. Once I saw Paper Mill Pond and Springville Mill Apartments, I headed to Wikipedia to learn more about this mill town, and realized I had found the right place.

I started my tour at the loft apartment building, which is stunning in its color and style.

Loom City Lofts is situated at the southern end of Shenipsit Lake, where the headwaters of the Hockanum River are located.

This building is unlike any other old mill complex I've seen. Known historically as the Minterburn Mill, this structure was built in 1906, and is an early example of reinforced concrete in an industrial buildling. Every other mill in Rockville and the other towns and cities that I've visited is wood or brick or a combination.

There used to be more buildings at the site, the oldest of which dated to 1834. A three-building complex known as the Rockville Warp Building was demolished in 2016. "The site's industrial history dates to at least the 18th century, when an iron works and a gin distillery were documented at the site," according to Wikipedia. "In the late 18th century George Hall established a fulling mill....The Rockville Warp Building dates to this time; the proprietors also built a stone dam, which was later replaced by the present concrete dam. The mill produced cotton warps used for yarn and satinet production in a number of Rockville's mills. In 1906, the plant was purchased by the Minterburn Mills....That company produced woolen and worsted fabrics until it closed in 1952. The plant was then bought by Roosevelt Mills, which produced knitwear at least into the 1970s."

The apartments opened in 2016.

My next stop was a backsider's dream, the heart of the Rockville Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. "The Rockville Historic District consists of approximately 550 acres and includes 975 buildings, a structural density of 1.8 buildings per acre." according to this Living Places web page. "The...[d]istrict is a physical reflection of the development during the nineteenth century of a small industrial city. Dominated by its textile mill buildings and with the fall of the Hockanum River as its matrix, the City of Rockville...embodied the urban and industrial development patterns associated with the use of water power in manufacturing."

The buildings in the historic district are a mix of mills, mill-owner mansions, worker tenements, and commercial and institutional buildings, nearly all of them built between 1830 and 1934.

Above is the circa-1890 Belding Brothers Silk Mill. Established in Rockville in 1866, the Belding Brothers' company eventually expanded manufacturing operations to Massachusetts, Michigan, California and Canada.

As I was snapping that photo, a guy in a Keith Gauvin Roofing van, who was stopped at a red light, called out to me: "Beautiful buildings, right?" I yelled back that they sure were, and I was trying to shoot as many of them as I could. "I drive by here all the time for work. There's another down that way that got turned into apartments," he said, referring to Loom City Lofts. I told him I'd just come from there. "This town must have been amazing when all the mills were running," he said. I quickly imagined bars, restaurants, banks, social clubs and churches jam-packed with mill workers and their families.

The light turned green and we wished each other a good day. It's always nice to run into someone who appreciates the backside of America as much as I do.

Above, you see the Belding Brothers building at right, connected via pedestrian bridge to the former Rose Silk Mill, which the Belding operation acquired in 1871, according to this web page. There once were other buildings to the right of the Belding complex, between Brooklyn and Grove streets. The smokestack to the left is part of the former Dart Stone Mill.

(Close-up of the pedestrian bridge.)

While the former Minterburn Mill building -- aka Loom City Lofts -- stands apart from the standard red-brick mills in Rockville and in most other old factory towns, the Dart Stone Mill is yet another kind of old industrial beast. Made of light-colored stone and stucco, the Dart buildings date to 1868, according to this Preservation Connecticut web page.

"This mill, erected by Albert Dart in 1868, has the most dramatic setting of any mill in Rockville -- perched on the high rock shelf at the second millseat down from Snipsic Lake," according to the Preservation Connecticut site. "Dart first used the mill for spinning silk, then added shoddy production (shoddy is low-grade cloth made from the by-products of wool pressing). Cyrus White bought the mill in 1870, continuing shoddy production and adding manufacture of cotton warps. In the late l870s White ran six sets of cards for his woolen operation and 4,800 cotton spindles, as well as renting space to the textile firms of J.J. Regan and J.A. Smith and Son. Belding Brothers and Co. bought the mill in 1909."

The Hockanum River runs directly underneath the Dart Stone Mill, which you can sort of see in the photo below.

Below, a view of the Dart Stone Mill from below the falls.

The Dart Stone Mill, the Rose Silk Mill and others are all crowded together, as you can see below.

To the left in the photo above is the old Rose Silk Mill. Below is the main entrance.

The Rose Silk Mill dates to 1867; it was acquired, as mentioned above, by the Belding Brothers in 1871. Below are some more photos of the Rose Silk Mill.

Just north of the Rose Silk Mill is the Hockanum Company mill, which was built in 1865 by the Carlysle Thread Company. Over the decades, the buildings were home to Samuel Fitch and Sons, maker of liners for rubber boots and raincoats; the Hockanum Company; a storage firm; a band practice operation; and more. At some point, it was known as the Daniel's Mill. Below are some shots of this old mill.

Next in the line is a mill complex that, as far as I can tell, is empty.

These buildings were most recently home to Presstek, Inc., which manufactures offset plates and presses. In 2018, that company was acquired by Mark Andy, Inc., a company founded in 1946 in Missouri. I'm guessing a consolidation followed that deal, resulting in the shutdown of this facility.

(Rear of the former Presstek plant.)

In 2016, Presstek acquired analog and digital offset printing plate manufacturer Ano-coil, which had been located at this site since 1958, upon its founding.

Prior to Ano-coil, this site was occupied by textile conglomerate M.T. Stevens from 1934-1951. In 1960, a massive fire destroyed much of the original mill complex, which had been built as the American Mills Company. That business was organized in 1847 to manufacture "woolen textiles, such as cassimeres, and occupied a massive six-story stone and wood mill formerly located east of the present plant," per the Connecticut Mills web site. "The American Mills Company continued to operate and expand its Rockville plant into the early-20th century. In 1918, however, the firm and mill complex were sold to the Hockanum Mill Company, a holding company formed in 1906 that operated three other textile mills in Rockville at the time of the acquisition. The Hockanum Mill Company retained the American Mills Company’s name, management, and some 200 employees, among them being the firm’s 95-year old president George Talcott."

I'm unclear on just how many complexes in Rockville the Hockanum Mill Co. operated at its peak, but it was quite a few.

At the western end of Brooklyn Street, hard by the Hockanum River, is the building below.

Now home to Diversified Welding, the warehouse served as a storage facility for Ladd & Hall, a Vernon-based furniture retailer that went out of business last September after 83 years. I haven't found any further historical information about this property.

Across Vernon Avenue from the old furniture warehouse is the former New England Mill, the lone surviving building of which has been converted to an apartment complex known as Linden Place.

New England Mill Co. was founded in 1836, per this web site, making high-grade woolen cloth.

The Linden building is one of three former mills in the short span between Vernon Avenue and Spring Street that have been redeveloped into living quarters.

The Florence Mill Apartments, below, were erected in 1864.

I know that picture isn't great, but I was battling the sun on this day. Anyway, this wonderful place provides housing for elderly and disabled residents. The mill replaced a textile mill that was destroyed by fire, per Wikipedia. "In 1881, it was described as the largest brick building in Rockville, and continued in the production of textiles. It was purchased in 1881 by White & Corbin, who expanded the building several times, making it the largest manufacturing plant in the United States for the manufacture of envelopes," Wikipedia continues. "The building was used for this purpose by White & Corbin and its successors (including the U. S. Envelope Company), until 1975."

Just steps westward along West Main Street is Springville Mill Apartments.

"The Springville Manufacturing Company constructed a modern brick mill in 1886 at 155 West Main Street," says the Living Places web site. "The building was equipped with automatic sprinklers, elevators and electric lights. It features a five-story stair-and-bell tower with a slate-shingled pyramid crowned by a pair of finials."

Nowadays, apartment dwellers can enjoy a fitness center and in-ground pool.

The final stop on this mill tour is absolutely my favorite, for a number of reasons.

Reason No. 1: The former Hockanum Mill is the oldest surviving textile mill in Rockville, per this handy-dandy web site. "The Hockanum Company was first established in 1838 to manufacture satinet. In 1858, the company began production of high grade cassimeres from domestic and imported wool. By 1903, 400 workers were employed. A brick mill was added in 1881, and a reinforced concrete building in the early 20th century." The complex is located near the western terminus of West Main Street.

(I'm not sure if this house was part of the original mill, nor what its future purpose might be.)

Reason No. 2: This mill complex, which contains multiple buildings and which is much bigger than I initially realized, has been home to the New England Motorcycle Museum since 2018. Ken Kaplan of Kaplan Cycles -- which is located on the museum site -- bought the mill complex in 2013 (I think; that's the year he started the renovation project). Kaplan, who has also been in the computer refurbishment business for more than 30 years, is quite a character, which brings me to Reason No. 3:

Go Kaplan America!

Last year, the museum and business owner starred in his own Discovery Channel show, "Kaplan America." I'm not sure whether the show has been renewed. In 2019, in an effort to promote the show, Kaplan, well, just read this article about him getting arrested.

To fully appreciate the amount of work that went into this project, and that goes into just about large-scale redevelopment of such old mill buildings, check out the video below from the museum:

According to the museum web site, there is a plan to open a brew pub on site; I believe the museum is currently open, but operators have been seeking funds to repair roof damage.

Below is a shot of the motorcycle shop.

This place is a real eye-popping mix of standard brick mill building and bold new art.

I assumed the painting below depicted internationally renowned motorcycle stunt man Evel Knievel. But after watching all the Kaplan America stuff, I'm not so sure it's not a likeness of the museum owner himself.

Make sure to check back for part two of my Rockville story, in which I discover lots of cool, non-woolen mill stuff!