Archives & Special Collections for Local History Research

The collection documents the personal and professional lives of several generations of Leavenworths residing in Connecticut.

The Smith family of Canterbury, Connecticut, owned and operated a number of mills in the section of Hanover from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1940s. The original site on Little River, north of Hanover and Woodchuck Hill Roads, became the home to five successive generations of Smiths. The papers include correspondence, both business and personal, business and financial records, ledgers, account books, daybooks, and printed materials collected by the family.

Theodore Sedgwick Gold was born in Madison, New York. T.S. Gold graduated from Yale College in 1838 and then spent four years studying and teaching at academies in Goshen and Waterbury. He moved to Cornwall in 1842 to pursue a career in farming. Mr. Gold was a trustee of the Storrs Agricultural School from 1881 to 1901 and took an active role in promoting the school's growth and development throughout his lifetime.

Manuscripts, legal records, correspondence, and clippings focus on the work of Herbert W. Conn, a professor of Biology at Wesleyan University in the late 1800s. Conn gained fame at the time for his research in dairy microbiology and his public health efforts in dairy hygiene and milk pasteurization, a controversial issue at the turn of the century. Although he was not a member of the faculty at what was then the Connecticut Agricultural College (University of Connecticut), he was the driving force in establishing the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station. The collection includes information on family members Julia Conn and Harold J. Conn.

The collection contains correspondence, school papers, memorabilia, photographs and ephemera associated with two generations of the Collins and Levine families who attended the University of Connecticut between 1922 and 1948. The materials in the collection are useful in providing a perspective of college life and experiences from the student's point of view.

Legal records and a photograph of the Goodwin family from Waterbury, Connecticut. The Goodwin family of carriage and wagon-makers owned the Charles F. and G. H. Goodwin Carriage Shop and Factory in Waterbury in the 1880s.

The Fitts Family Papers consists of chronologically arranged correspondence, legal papers, bills and receipts, tax records, deeds, promissory notes and other papers dating from 1770 through 1909. Also included are election notices, a physicians note and an auction notice.

The Cosier Family Collection provides some insight, through family history, photographs and clippings, into the life of employees of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Many of the images portray a working railroad company in the early 1900s.