Avon History Museum

A Giant Beaver, a Climax, and a Pope
Avon History Museum, Avon (Location)
December 2025

Connecticut museum visit #552.

For many years, this page started thusly:

This museum will remain “closed” for the foreseeable future. In the world of historical museums, progress can be quite slow. Glacial even.

To wit, this one room schoolhouse was built in 1823. It was used until 1949. It was almost razed in 1981, but was saved as part of the Avon Historical Society cadre of museums. Then it closed in 2018.

It’s set to reopen in – checks calendar – 2023.

It didn’t open in 2023 or in the summer of 2025 as promised. A few inspections fell short which pushed its grand re-opening to Labor Day weekend of 2025.

And here we are… it’s fully renovated, open, and ready for you to visit. The 200+ year old one-room schoolhouse in Avon, right on busy Route 44, has been transformed from “just another” old schoolhouse to a modern town history museum.

Schoolhouse No. 3, as it was known, was originally built in the center of town over on what is now Country Club Road where the town’s library is located today. Students attended there from 1823 to 1938 and today it stands as Avon’s oldest building.

When it was threatened with demolition in 1981 to make room for that library, the Society and others funded its dismantling, relocation, and restoration to its current location.

And the Society has done an amazing job with converting it into a historical museum. They cover the full history of Avon from the Tunxis tribe through the 20th-century. There’s also a nice new sign in front of the building and the fresh paint job looks great.

Also great? A marker noting the Farmington Canal that passed right next to the building. You know we love our canal references here. (The Farmington Canal was never an economic success, largely because of the oncoming advent of railroads. Today, you can travel the canal’s path on the multipurpose Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.)

The Society held an open house in 2024, allowing visitors to check out the space. I got overly excited and visited at that time, as they were celebrating their 50th anniversary and I thought the long awaited museum was finally here. There was fanfare and quite a crowd, actually. Unfortunately, there was next to nothing inside.

This turned out to be a sort of fundraiser for the museum; a final push for some money to purchase museum quality display cases and probably some electrical work and such. Oh well, I could wait another year.

So that’s exactly what I did.

When I visited the fully finished and furnished museum in 2025, I was greeted by a gentleman who gave me a friendly welcome, explained the layout – remember, this is a one-room school house, so, y’know, it’s all in one room – and proceeded to get back to his book.

Walking the room counter-clockwise more or less takes you through Avon’s history, starting with the Tunxis who lived here longer than colonizers have.

Most town history museums have a Native arrowhead and tool display and Avon is no different. One particularly impressive collection was donated by a guy whose hobby was hunting arrowheads.

His name was Howard Ervin Rodgers and he was apparently very good at his hobby. There is a lot of good information about the tens of thousands of years before Avon was, well, Avon. Even back to the Pleistocene when giant beavers roamed the land.

Now, you didn’t know you were going to get a giant beaver:man shadow art on this page, but here you are:

I don’t really know why they felt the need for that, but I love that they did. The museum helpfully noted that “The Tunxis left the area in the 18th century to join the Brothertown Indian Nation in Wisconsin.” That sounds a little Euro-washed to me.

The Europeans came in and set up farms in the fertile valley. Then the canal came and the museum has a cool diorama of it through Avon showing the exact specifications of how it was built in town. The Farmington Canal operated from 1835-1847 and crossed the Albany Turnpike at this very site.

That second picture above is of a diorama created in 1956 by John Hawkins, depicting the Farmington Aqueduct. People around here are still enamored with the aqueduct, which was mostly destroyed in the 1955 floods.

Today, if you’re also enamored with the thing, you can see remnants of it just south of here at the Canal Aqueduct Trail on the eastern side of the Farmington River, as well as along the Fisher Farm Trails – which take you to the Farmington Canal Trail. (These both straddle the Avon/Farmington border, so it’s more confusing than is necessary.)

The museum, at least in 2025, put a heavy focus on Avon’s contributions to various wars, from the Revolution through more recent times. One company that helped in those war effort through almost all of them in one way or another is Ensign-Bickford.

They are still headquartered in Simsbury and feature heavily at that neighboring town’s historical society museum. Many of their buildings are used today around the Avon Police Department. Heck, the Farmington Valley Arts Center uses a few of them today.

The company started as the Climax Fuse Company which is where today’s much enjoyed Climax Road gets its name.

Speaking of things getting names, Avon’s path to Avon is more interesting than most. Avon was originally part of Tunxis Sepos, and then it was part of Farmington when settlers first came here. When the Europeans kept pushing the Tunxis further and further away up into what is now Avon, it was called Nod, from the Algonquin word “noadt” meaning “far, far off.”

(You may be familiar with today’s Nod Road that runs along the base of Talcott Mountain.)

That “far, far off” aspect is what led to the local churchgoers to start whining about the distance they had to travel to church down in the center of Farmington every week. This was the time of “Northington” section of Farmington.

The whiners won, and Northington broke off from Farmington in 1830 and renamed itself Avon after the place in England.

Aside from the usual stuff and the focus on Avon’s residents at war, there’s a nice bit about Theodate Pope Riddle who was the architect and found of Avon Old Farms, one of our fancy prep schools. If the name rings a bell, and it should if you’re reading this far about a little museum in Avon, her former home is now Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, on of the true gems of the Farmington Valley area.

And that’s about it. As always, town residents will get more from their town’s history museum than others, but we should all be appreciative of the time and efforts of all the volunteers that applied for the grants and put in the work to get this place back to being an attractive and informative nice little museum…

One which features a giant beaver, a Climax, and a Pope.

Avon Historical Society
CTMQ’s Museum Visits