Stafford Hollow, also known as Stafford, Stafford Village, or Furnace Hollow, is a

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...

in the town of

Stafford Stafford () is a market town and the county town of Staffordshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It lies about north of Wolverhampton, south of Stoke-on-Trent and northwest of Birmingham. The town had a population of 70,145 in th ...

, in

Tolland County, Connecticut Tolland County is a county in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Connecticut. As of the 2020 census, its population was 149,788. It is incorporated into 13 towns and was originally formed on 13 October 1785 from portions of eastern Ha ...

, located at the junction of Route 19 and Route 319. Stafford Hollow was the town center of Stafford during the 18th and 19th centuries, before the growth of the village of Stafford Springs. A area of the village has been designated a

historic district A historic district or heritage district is a section of a city which contains older buildings considered valuable for historical or architectural reasons. In some countries or jurisdictions, historic districts receive legal protection from cer ...

, the Stafford Hollow Historic District, which includes

Colonial Revival 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 archit ...

Greek Revival The Greek Revival was an architectural movement which began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States and Canada, but a ...

, and Late

Victorian architecture Victorian architecture is a series of architectural revival styles in the mid-to-late 19th century. ''Victorian'' refers to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), called the Victorian era, during which period the styles known as Victorian w ...

.Connecticut National Register of Historic Places
Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Historic Preservation and Museum Division Twentieth-century houses on the roads radiating away from the village center are not included in the historic district. As early as 1779, Stafford Hollow was the site of a

blast furnace A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical furnace used for smelting to produce industrial metals, generally pig iron, but also others such as lead or copper. ''Blast'' refers to the combustion air being "forced" or supplied above atmospheri ...

, known as Phelps blast furnace, that processed bog iron ores. The Phelps furnace is reputed to have produced

cannon A cannon is a large- caliber gun classified as a type of artillery, which usually launches a projectile using explosive chemical propellant. Gunpowder ("black powder") was the primary propellant before the invention of smokeless powder ...

and cannonballs, kettles, and pots for use by the

Continental Army The Continental Army was the army of the United Colonies (the Thirteen Colonies) in the Revolutionary-era United States. It was formed by the Second Continental Congress after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, and was establis ...

. It operated until 1840, when the local ore supply had been used up.Charles Rufus Harte (1944)
Connecticut's Iron and Copper, Part I
from the 60th Annual Report of the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers, 1944 Stafford Hollow Historic District 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 1987. The historic district includes five of the Town of Stafford's most significant buildings. The district includes the Pinney School building, a Queen Anne style structure from 1895. and It includes the Valley Cotton Mill site, now ruins, which was destroyed in 1900.

References

{{authority control Stafford, Connecticut Colonial Revival architecture in Connecticut Villages in Connecticut Villages in Tolland County, Connecticut Historic districts in Tolland County, Connecticut National Register of Historic Places in Tolland County, Connecticut Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut

See also

References