History
Preserving Granby history in its cemeteries
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I have always enjoyed walking through cemeteries and seeing the tombstones as well as the names and dates on each one. This is a short biography of the person buried below.
Granby Drummer (https://granbydrummer.com/category/history/)
I have always enjoyed walking through cemeteries and seeing the tombstones as well as the names and dates on each one. This is a short biography of the person buried below.
Near the south end of the West Granby National Register Historic District stands a house and barn that have witnessed more than over two centuries of Granby history. Built around 1800 by Sadoce Wilcox, an aspiring blacksmith, the Wilcox House has a story to tell about his family and five more generations of Wilcoxes who inhabited the place until 2019.
For nearly 25 years, from 1944 to 1968, hundreds of teenage girls from Florida cities like Sarasota, Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and Miami—came to Camp Manitook in Granby to stay for two months and worked the shade-grown tobacco fields in the Farmington Valley.
At approximately 10:45 in the morning on Friday, October 9, 1936, William Shattuck looked over to the northwest hills of West Granby and saw the airship from Germany flying below the clouds, about 500 feet from the ground
Since the Fiscal Year 2022-23 adopted budget did not include an amount designated for preservation of historical documents, Town Manager Erica Robertson requested the Granby Board of Selectmen to authorize a budget amendment of $5,500 for this purpose.
Many homes in Granby are over a century old, with rich and complex histories reflecting the transformation of Granby from a solely agricultural community to a thriving suburb.
From 1929 to 1935, the Manitook Hotel, and guest cottages on the west shore of the lake, was a thriving, bustling place. Tourists from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and many other states visited to canoe, swim, play tennis, fish, hunt, and enjoy a vacation in Granby.
For the past two years the Salmon Brook Historical Society has been restoring the Captain Sadoce Wilcox House and Lyman Wilcox Barn in West Granby.
September is the time of year when the small-town fairs begin around Connecticut. For the early 20th century resident, the Granby Fair was the biggest thrill of the year.
In its first 75 years, the Salmon Brook Historical Society has had three amazing curators. I have written about Eva Dewey saving Granby history when she stored most of the files, genealogical files, and artifacts in her house while the SBHS was first renovating its campus. I also have written about how Carol Laun helped transform the society as we know it today and became our town historian and educator. Both Eva and Carol followed in the footsteps of our first curator, Ethel Linnell.