The Stephan Main Homestead
The North Stonington Historical Society's Stephen Main Homestead, with its arts and crafts collection, dye house, gardens and mill sluiceway presents a rarely seen picture of life in the rural Industrial Age.
Our Homestead was built in 1781, a year the British burnt New London to the ground. Towards the end of the Revolutionary War, much farmland had been destroyed and crippled veterans were seen in every town. So why build a big house? By this time North Stonington Village was a thriving mill village - thanks to the Shunock River. Luther Avery was a mill owner and built this homestead looking out over his properties.
This 1853 Gale Square piano belonged to the Wheeler family, local merchants who lived in the Homestead before the Civil War, and funded the Dye House. The Wheelers, chiefly Major Dudley Wheeler, operated a system of cottage industry weaving that employed 600 local weavers and left him rich enough to endow the school.
Click here to hear this piano played.
Mill Owner Stephen Main
The Industrial Age is generally thought of as a time when many Americans left their farms and headed for the city to earn wages, becoming small cogs in a big machine. In fact, the Industrial Age started in rural communities with entrepreneurs pooling the talents of weavers and carpenters working at home, small fuling and lumber mill operations that used power from local streams, and wool and wood gathered locally.
The Main Homestead sits in the center of North Stonington's Historic District - once known as "Milltown". The house later belonged to prosperous mill owner Stephen Main and includes an extensive collection of paintings and photographs of rural life, created by Main's daughter Harriet, and her son, Fredrick Stewart Greene, who also lived here.
Painting by Harriet Main Greene
Fredrick Stewart Greene at work. Greene left an extensive record of rural life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his painting and photography, available in our collections.
