The Families of West Street
The Reunions
Every summer, they came back
The West St. farm families gathered every summer to celebrate their Colonial One Room Schoolhouse.
In 1934 the families organized as the West Street School Association — and their summer reunions drew crowds, music, and the Governor of Connecticut.
West St. School Association Reunion · August 22, 1936
Governor Wilbur Cross addresses the reunion · 1936
Connecticut Governor Wilbur Cross addressed the 1936 reunion about patriotism and the importance of the work they were doing preserving history.
The August 1938 reunion, under the oak tree
Guitars and a banjo in hand, the families gathered again beside the school in August 1938.
Attendance in 1938 — from the minutes book
The Association recorded who came: page after page of signatures, the same family names that filled the school's benches.
From the Association's minutes book
The Association's meeting minutes survive, kept in Secretary Mary A. Kennedy's careful hand — with a newspaper clipping pasted in: “Tolles Named President of School Group.”
Farm Life
A school surrounded by farms
Horse teams, tractors, dairy herds, haying — West Street was farm country, and its farms sent their children to the one-room school.
The farms of West Street — and the children they sent to school
West Street before I-84, with the Borovsky land on the right
Keep Exploring
Descendants
We are looking for West Street School photos, objects, papers, articles, and stories.
If your family name is on this roll — or your family lived on West Street — we want to hear from you.