June 17, 2022
Connecticut River Valley Doorways

We are busy putting the finishing touches on our “Hidden in Plain Sight” tour of beautiful and historic South Windsor, scheduled for August 28th, and the Windsor Historical Society is holding their Windsor House Tour tomorrow, June 18.  This Musing takes a look at the iconic Connecticut River Valley Doorway, which patrons will be able to see on each of theses tours.  The poster image of "Doorways on Old Main Street"  used in this Musing is still available for purchase from the South Windsor Historical Society.

Connecticut River Valley Doorway (1720-1770)
In the mid-eighteenth century, up and down the Connecticut River Valley, there was a distinctive type of doorway that joiners were making for their clients, the style of which eventually became know as the Connecticut River Valley Doorway. These doorways can be grouped into four basic types, scroll pedimented doorways, triangular pedimented doorways, segmental pedimented doorways and flat-top doorways. Intricately-carved pilasters and pilaster caps, and detailed rosettes are characteristic of the artistically expressive, architectural carving found on the doorways.

These oversized and detailed doorways were a way for wealthy colonists to project their social status, and were based on English designs found on stately homes back in England.

Joiners, or millworkers as they are know today, may have based their design on images they would have seen in a widely-circulated architecture book by William Salmon, Palladio Londinensis: or The London Art of Building (1734). The local Connecticut artisans, who were building Connecticut River Valley Doorways before the American Revolution, made their own alterations and modifications and ended up creating a unique and recognizable style all their own.

Because of demolition, fire, and the general rot, and deterioration of wood, there are only  a few hundred of these doorways remaining today. Even fewer are still associated with their original buildings. Most of these are found in towns that are located in close proximity to the Connecticut River, on both the east and west side of the river such as Windsor and South Windsor.

Some of those doorways, not attached to their original structures, are now housed in major museums. In 1912, the Metropolitian Museum of Art bought an ornate doorway, circa. 1750, from the Daniel Fowler house in Westfield, Mass., and shortly after, in 1916, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bought the front door of the Lieut. Elihu White house, built around 1762, in Hatfield, Massachusett.

Amelia Miller's illustrated checklist of 220 river valley doorways, "Connecticut River Valley Doorways, An Eighteenth-Century Flowering," provides detailed information on the history and unique characteristics of the Connecticut River Valley Doorways, as well as information on the joiners who crafted them.  Her checklist identifies doorways that are pictured in photographs and artwork that are no longer in existence, or cannot be located, right along with those that survive, both on and off of their original structures.

Sources used in this Musing:
(all website sources were assessed accessed June 16, 2022)

Gordon, Jane, Passage to History, Hartford Courant, November 4, 1995.

Miller, Amelia, Connecticut River Valley doorways: An eighteenth-century flowering, Boston University for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1983.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, website.

The Met, New York, website.