Rimmon School House (Closed)

Rimmon Job
Rimmon School House, Beacon Falls
November 2024

Y’know, this was never a museum and I’m 99% sure it will never be a museum, but here it is, what I’m calling Connecticut museum visit #531.

Look, I get it. You think I’m just padding my museum visit stats. Fine.

But do you really think that a guy who has been to 530 museums prior this non-museum needs to “pad his stats?”

I’m here to tell you, objectively, he does not. I’m also here to tell you that Beacon Falls has no museums, so this is the best they’ve got. A rotting former school house that may no longer be standing when you’re reading this.

It’s actually situated along a fairly busy road very near a very busy highway, at the corner of Rimmon Hill Road and Pines Bridge Road just off of Route 8 amidst a bunch of warehouses and machinery concerns.

It has tried to be special in the past, pretending to have been built way back in 1799, perhaps in an effort for a sympathetic restoration effort. That didn’t work when historians noted that it was 31 years younger, having been built in 1830 with a whole bunch of other area schoolhouses. Still, it is amazing this thing was in use as a school all the way until 1953 – and it is the last remaining in town.

At some point after it was decommissioned as a school, it was owned by Raymond Lafferty for 24 years, who had been in the last class at the Rimmon School. His father had purchased it not long after the school closed and used it for storage. Raymond Lafferty had an antiques shop in the building, which he sold in 2010. The new owners wanted to sell the building to the town, but the town could not afford it.

And since then, they whole thing has been rather murky. And the newspaper articles that talk about the town’s hand in the schoolhouse’s demise are no longer available. It’s not so much that the town of Beacon Falls can’t afford the building itself, it’s that they’d have to restore it and move it to a suitable plot of town-owned land. Apparently that doesn’t exist, likely because the town has no other museum with grounds at which to plop it. (Other towns like Harwinton and Bethany have put their old one-room schoolhouses at… schools. So there’s an idea.)

There’s a parcel of state-owned parcel of land along North Main Street, just north of the Beacon Falls Police Department, which officials hoped would become the new site for the schoolhouse in 2018 – the same year that the owners apparently offered to give the schoolhouse to the town and the town still said no.

I believe in 2025 it is still privately owned and still for sale. Someone has put a protective tarp on the roof. Shout out to that person.

But the whole thing is moldy and falling apart and the shutters are nailed shut.

It’s crazy how little there is in the way of historically important houses in Beacon Falls. One historic house, the Tracy S. Lewis (president of the Beacon Falls Rubber Shoe Company) House, was razed in 2022. This dumpy little schoolhouse is pretty much the last hope. Heck, the awesome house on the island at Matthies Park has gone to pot and is falling apart.

C’mon Beacon Falls. Save something!

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