Search

The materials in this collection relate to town governance, residents, local churches, schools, and businesses in Lyme, Connecticut, from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Topics covered include how the Town supported itself and its responsibilities to the citizens: taxes, justice, welfare, road and bridge infrastructure, education and schools, legal and property affairs.

Elizabeth Huey Putnam and her mother Dora Warner collected extensive news clippings about Lyme and Hadlyme from regional newspapers (Deep River New Era, New London Day, Pictorial Gazette) spanning the 20th century. They had a special interest in artists, authors, musicians, and other notable figures who lived in Lyme, local association and organization events, churches, ferries, fishing, historic houses, mills, steamships, stores, World War I and II, and a large collection of obituaries.

The Sylvia Daniels Harding (1911-1997) papers include her personal and many Harding, Ely, and Daniels family papers. Included are her own and her mother's diaries; photographs and vintage postcards of local sites and community life in late 19th and early 20th century Lyme — domestic life, farming, dairying, shad fishing, fur trapping, and the raw fur business, one-room schools, church, Grange, Sylvia's community work, organization memberships, and folk art "needle painting".

The collection covers a prominent farm, civic, and political family of Lyme. The documents in this collection provide information about family history, town politics, government, community service; farm life and tools; the roles of children and women, Lyme Impressionist artists, women's service in World War I and II, and the life of Jennie Stark, an early twentieth century teachers and local folk-artist (rug hooking).

Elizebeth Bull Plimpton (1921-1994), Lyme town historian and a descendant of first settlers, collected an encyclopedic range of historical material about Lyme and Old Lyme, CT, strongest for the 19th to mid-20th century — artists, authors, businesses, churches, community organizations, fishing, ferries, geography, historic properties and houses, military and maritime subjects, schools and much more. There are original documents, transcriptions, research notes, manuscripts, journals and ledgers, photographs, and print materials.