Hitchcock-Phillips House

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Hitchcock-Phillips House, Cheshire
May 2019

Connecticut museum visit #417.

I enjoy the well known Alfred Hitchcock movies and as I sit down to write up my visit to this Georgian Classical Hitchcock–Phillips House in Cheshire, I can’t help but think about trying to pigeonhole some references onto this page. I’m a bit Notorious for doing such nonsense.

The 1785 house is quite large and incredibly well-appointed. Right out of the gate, it’s one of the most comprehensive town historical society historic house museums in the state. It has been the home of the Cheshire Historical Society since 1972, so they’ve had a long time to get things right I suppose. I had my son Damian in tow, so there was no way I was going to absorb everything here – of course I love museums, but I’m not some sort of Psycho about them.

This joint was built by one Mr. Rufus Hitchcock, a merchant and town clerk. I’d say he was a rather successful merchant and town clerk. But as with many people just 250 years ago, life wasn’t a bowl of cherries as he lost one child at 9 months and his wife during the birth of his third child. Ugh. The house wasn’t as big back when Rufus built it – the west wing was added around 1820 when Rufus’s son William brought his wife home to live there. After he died, the house passed through family, including a daughter who married Andrew W. Phillips, an instructor at Cheshire Academy. A couple more transactions and the Academy used it as a dormitory until the 1970’s when they sold the house to the town for a buck which then leased it to the Historical Society.

And then I visited it in 2019.

And as I said, it’s quite nice. The ground floor includes a parlor with all sorts of period portraits and furniture. There’s a dining room which contains an 1810 portrait of Cheshire, painted by a guy named Sylvester Hall. The Society calls this “the most historically important item in the house,” which is a little surprising, since the same room contains a 1775 grandfather clock and a travelling desk used by President Millard Fillmore.

There’s a chest with a copycat painting of the church on the green painting that the Society is somewhat baffled by. No one would have had easy access to the painting to copy it… unless it was a Cheshire Academy kid who found it in the attic or something? As far as I know, no one was put under Suspicion, and the mystery remains.

There’s another room here called the “Exhibit Room” which is where they’ve put a bunch of… stuff. Paintings, more furniture, Civil War artifacts. That sort of stuff. There are also some locally made watches here as well. You may be familiar with Cheshire’s Watch Factory Shoppes.

They were originally the Cheshire Watch Factory. Amazing, that. Then they were Cheshire Academy buildings and the main one was called Seabury Hall in honor of Samuel Seabury. Connecticut and/or Episcopalian history superfans know that Seabury was the first Bishop elected in the new world!

At the Glebe House in Woodbury! (Note: They did not tell me he went on have a Cheshire Academy named in his honor which was the Cheshire Watch Factory which became the Watch Factory Shoppes with an ‘e’ to make it fancy.)

Then there’s the parlor and the kitchen which contain all the usual 19th century implements and such. The museum labels pretty much everything and while that can be a distraction and/or overkill, CHS seems to keep the verbiage under control.

There are certainly docent-led tours available here as you’d expect, but it seems like the default visit allows you to just wander and read about the stuff on your own. That certainly works for me, and definitely works for Damian. Let’s take The 39 Steps and check out upstairs.

When I visit these types of museums, I try my best to approach writing about them in a vacuum. That is, the large majority of Hitchcock-Phillips visitors are Cheshire residents who have not been to a hundred other similar town history historical house museums before. And for that person, I’ll reiterate: this is an excellent example of this type of museum. There are many “worse,” and not too many “better.”

What this place does well is all the usual stuff. What I mean by that is that there’s nothing extraordinary or amazing or unique here, but there’s a lot of the usual, displayed professionally, artistically, and thoughtfully. There are descriptions and backstories to most items, but it’s not overly verbose, excitedly tied to some random family or event no one remembers, or puffed up with some pretend importance. This is just a solid historic house museum.

To my knowledge, Hitchcock (the director) never used dolls as a horror theme but for any of you budding horror/thriller directors out there, I’d recommend a visit to this museum.

You just aren’t going to get better than this:

There are dolls all over this place. First floor, second floor, third floor. In the bedrooms, in the toy room, in the parlor, in the dressing rooms. They’re everywhere. If you don’t like dolls, this might not be the museum for you.

The second floor contains bedrooms with displays of quilts, other textiles, firearms, toys, tools, and household items may be found in rooms on the second floor. Okay the tool room here was uniquely placed, I’ll give them that.

They call it the Cheshire Industry room and it focuses on tools and implements and things made in Cheshire’s industrial past. One display features buttons. Lots of buttons. Buttons and things made down the street at the Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company. There are lots of buttons here, but it’s nothing compared to the walls upon walls of buttons at the Waterbury Button Museum – there, the buttons on buttons on buttons is enough to give a person Vertigo.

Anyway, Ball & Socket had a large complex in town which is being turned into a really cool art space. I’ve visited the first step of that transformation and look forward to the future there.

As Damian and I poked around the Industry/Tool room, I came across the strangest thing in the house. As I write this, I can’t remember if it’s real or not – or some sort of fake-out for a Halloween event or something. Because to display it, just doesn’t make sense.

The claim is that the display of tools and farm implements is dangerous and cluttered. The thing is, the display is fine, and the picture on the thing I’m talking about looks the same:

I don’t get it. If it’s real, hoo boy, do I have some museums to show the Cheshire PD.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Victorian Bedroom. There, the Society shows off some old quilts and textiles. I was particularly struck by a “daisy popcorn bed spread.” The fact that a woman made this by hand is amazing to me. I’m not one for Victorian or olde timey or lace or quilts or any of that stuff – but this is beautiful.

You may have caught that this museum is 3 floors. Yes, the very rare historic house with an open third floor!

There, they have a display of what a Cheshire Academy kid’s dorm room would have looked like in the 1960’s. Hey, that’s something unique and pretty cool. And it didn’t really look too different from my dorm room at UConn in the early 1990’s.

Let’s see… what else. Oh, there are a bunch of toys including this thing:

I don’t know how that’s fun. There’s a ball, a rick-rack slide, and a Rope. Still better than dolls.

That’s about it. You don’t have to be from Cheshire to enjoy the place. You don’t have to be old or young or named Rebecca or Spellbound by history or anything like that. You do, however, need to have just rolled your eyes at my attempt to squeeze in two more Hitchcock movie titles here at the end.

Because that effort was for The Birds.

Hitchcock-Phillips House
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