Ellington Center Historic District is an
historic district in the
town
A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world.
Origin and use
The word "town" shares an ori ...
of
Ellington, Connecticut
Ellington is a town in Tolland County, Connecticut, United States. Ellington was incorporated in May 1786, from East Windsor. As of the 2020 census, the town population was 16,426.
History
Originally the area in what is now Ellington was named ...
that was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...
in 1990.
The historic district encompasses most of Ellington Center, including the
town green
A village green is a common open area within a village or other settlement. Historically, a village green was common grassland with a pond for watering cattle and other stock, often at the edge of a rural settlement, used for gathering cattle ...
and buildings that face the green or the streets that lead to it.
[ and ] It includes the
Hall Memorial Library. Architecture represented includes the
Colonial Revival style
The Colonial Revival architectural style seeks to revive elements of American colonial architecture.
The beginnings of the Colonial Revival style are often attributed to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which reawakened Americans to the archi ...
and work by
Nelson Chaffee.
[ The Ellington green is largely open space with tall shade trees. A ]granite
Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...
monument on the green identifies the site of the first meetinghouse in Ellington Center, built in 1739.
The National Register listing included 103 contributing buildings, three contributing sites
In the law regulating historic districts in the United States, a contributing property or contributing resource is any building, object, or structure which adds to the historical integrity or architectural qualities that make the historic distric ...
, and two contributing objects
In the law regulating historic districts in the United States, a contributing property or contributing resource is any building, object, or structure which adds to the historical integrity or architectural qualities that make the historic distri ...
. It also included 26 non-contributing buildings, six non-contributing structures, and three non-contributing objects. The district does not include commercial property east of the green, the town hall and its annex, Center School, and several houses within its general boundaries. Center School, a public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichk ...
elementary school, occupies a brick building constructed in 1949 to replace a structure that was constructed in 1852 as a one-room schoolhouse
One-room schools, or schoolhouses, were commonplace throughout rural portions of various countries, including Prussia, Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain. In most rural and s ...
and later expanded.Postcard of Center School
, Treasures of Connecticut Library website, accessed December 24, 2010
Hall Memorial Library, a
Neo-Classical Revival building built of
brick and
limestone
Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...
, is one of the largest buildings in the historic district. The historic district also includes two churches.
See also
*
References
{{National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut
Ellington, Connecticut
Colonial Revival architecture in Connecticut
Federal architecture in Connecticut
Greek Revival architecture in Connecticut
Historic districts in Tolland County, Connecticut
National Register of Historic Places in Tolland County, Connecticut
New England town greens
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut