When Marsha and I bought our house on the corner of Brimfield Road and
Folly Brook Boulevard in Wethersfield we had neither the time nor the
inclination to pay attention to the history of either our new abode or
the area in which it resides. There was after all no “Battle of
Brimfield Road”, or any other textbook-worthy event in the past life of
our new neighborhood.
(Please click the image for a larger
picture)
Now, as members of Wethersfield Historical
Society, we have come to believe that the history of our house and its
surrounding neighborhood is, in its own way, as much a part of the story
of our town as the 1781 meeting between General
George Washington and General Comte de Rochambeau, or the great
flood of 1936.
No house is typical of all others. No
neighborhood is representative. In Wethersfield, as in all others
towns, each home and every locality is its own unique tale, filled with
its own singular collection of characters, and its own distinct set of
happenings. The interweaving of all these individual narratives is the
story of a town. The history of our home at 284 Brimfield Road is a
part of the history of Wethersfield.
Doctor Samuel Johnson
(essayist, poet, biographer, lexicographer and a critic of English
Literature) said, “We must consider
how very little history there is; I mean real authentick history. That
certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend on
as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is
conjecture.”
In that spirit here is what I have found and
what I have conjectured about the history of my homestead and its
immediately surrounding area.