Salmon Brook Historical Society’s Sadoce Wilcox House and Lyman Wilcox Barn in West Granby are the recipients of a 2026 Award of Merit from Preservation Connecticut. The society acquired the house, built around 1800, and barn, built around 1857, in 2019 after sixth-generation Steven Wilcox Hastings sold the 45-acre property to the Granby Land Trust. Hastings had hoped that the house and barn would be preserved and the society agreed to take on the project.
Preservation Connecticut (formerly the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation) is a non-profit organization devoted to “preserving, protecting, and promoting historic places which embody the stories of our shared past and enrich our shared future.” Its annual awards of merit recognize “outstanding achievement in protecting and nourishing Connecticut’s significant buildings, landscapes and communities.” The Wilcox house and barn, important pieces of vernacular architecture, have been restored and furnished as a museum of early New England life. This is a unique historical resource that tells the story of the six Wilcox generations that lived here, and more broadly illuminates the social history of Granby and rural New England. These structures are anchors to the West Granby National Register Historic District significant for its representation of 19th-century agricultural life and water-powered industry. The history here is not about the famous and prominent, but rather all about middling farmers, cottage industry laborers and struggling mechanics.
After six years of careful restoration work, the house, from attic to cellar, depicts the lives led in the early 1800s by Sadoce and Roxey Wilcox and their family, as well as their neighbors. Paint scrapings were done to determine original colors, peeling paint was removed, walls and ceilings were replastered and painted with material that can withstand extremes of temperature, rotting framing material was repaired, fireplaces were uncovered and missing stones replaced, all the window sashes were removed and completely reglazed (saving the original glass), and furnishings kept for two centuries by the family were catalogued and placed in rooms according to an 1833 estate inventory. In particular, a 300-year-old loom was moved from the attic to the north parlor and made operable. The barn needed work on its frame and sills, replacement of rotting floorboards and siding, repairs to doors and stabilization of its iconic cupola.
Last summer the society opened one of the most interesting parts of the house: the cellar. In the process of digging out an accessible walk-in entrance, workers discovered a hinge pin suggesting that the original entrance was a walk-in rather than the hatch they replaced. That discovery along with the full fireplace and bake oven suggest that the family of Martin Gozzard, who owned the property before Sadoce Wilcox, may have first lived here in a cellar house. Later Roxey Wilcox and her daughters surely used the cellar as a summer kitchen. The listing in Sadoce’s estate inventory of “five cider barrels” in the cellar, along with “eight cider hogsheads” (each hogshead held 63 gallons of potent beverage) suggests that Captain Sadoce entertained his militia company there on training days.
This award-winning Wilcox House and Barn at 145 Simsbury Road, West Granby will open to the public this summer from 10 a.m. to noon on June 13, July 11 and August 22; and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sept. 12 (Open Farm Day). Admission is free. During openings there will be varying demonstrations of household tasks, such as weaving, basketmaking, spinning and food preparation.