Granby Drummer (https://granbydrummer.com/category/history/page/5/)
In the July/August Drummer edition, I wrote about how Granby was full of volunteers, mentioning many organizations such as the Granby Club, Bridge Club, and the Boy and Girl Scout chapters. One organization I overlooked was the Freemasons of Granby, a very early civic organization and the oldest fraternal organization in the world.
r the past couple years, many people have groused about the construction in the center of town, taking detours down streets such as Copper Hill, Griffin Road and Hungary Road, and increasing traffic through neighborhoods.
As we all endure the construction in the center of town and look forward to seeing the improvements to Granby, I can’t help but think about how much our town has changed.
Fifty years ago, on Nov. 17, 1973, when Mary Brynes scored the winning goal with 28 seconds left in the second overtime, Granby’s Field Hockey team beat Guilford 2 to 1 in the first ever Field Hockey State Championship. As author Rob Penfield stated, this win “put Granby on the map.”
When speaking about volunteering in Granby, the perfect example would be the 1950s to 60s when the County YWCA was an active organization in a changing and growing community.
When Sadoce Wilcox, Jr. of West Granby died in 1833, his estate papers were testimony of a family living comfortably, if not prosperously, engaging in a variety of activities.
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