MILL MANAGER’S MANSION EXHIBIT ROOMS

Unlike mill workers, mill owners and managers lived in large houses, often ornate Victorian mansions – various styles of mid-to-late 19th-century architecture that became popular during Queen Victoria’s reign (r. 1837-1901).  The Museum’s Mill Manager’s Mansion Exhibit is inspired by (but is not a reproduction of) two Willimantic Victorian mansions: the Eugene Boss house at 100 South Windham Road and the William Eliot Barrows house, which was on Fairview Street, both built around 1880. The Boss house still stands, but the Barrows mansion was torn down in the 1960s. Barrows was the President and General Manager of the Willimantic Linen Company in the 1870s and 1880s, while Boss was the Agent for the Linen Company in the 1990s, and then continued in the same position for the American Thread Company when it bought out the WLC in 1898. Both Barrows and Boss were very much into materialism, and their large, well-furnished homes were meant to show off their wealth and success. Only 5 or 6 people (Boss, his wife, his two children, and one or two live-in servants) resided in the Boss house’s 20+ rooms. Boss employed maids and a laundress.  Barrows, Boss, and other mill managers were well educated and enjoyed social engagements. Leisure-time activities included music, dancing, peering into stereoscopes, lawn parties, vacations, and entertaining guests.

As you enter the Mill Manager’s Mansion Exhibit, notice how it differs from the Mill Workers’ Row House Exhibit. You enter through an ornate veranda with copper gutters. Notice the colored-glass window. Why do you think the ceiling of the veranda is painted sky blue?

Passing through the front door, on your left is a closet with a decorative doorknob. A tray for cartes de visites sits on table near the door.

The first room you enter has high ceilings, large windows, colorful wallpaper, carpets, lace curtains, and ornate furniture. Did the workers’ house have those things? The design of the wallpaper and the subjects of many of the framed pictures on the walls testify to a desire to bring nature indoors, but in a safe, comfortable way.

For display purposes, we have combined this large room into both a dining room and parlor, but in reality those would have been two separate rooms, both large. The spacious dining room table, matching chairs, full set of china, large mirror, organ, upholstered parlor furniture, Tiffany-style lamps, and phonograph are meant to declare to visitors that this family was affluent, and that the owner of the house was successful. Compare the spinning wheel in the workers’ house — brought to the United States by an immigrant from French Canada — with the parlor wheel in the manager’s house. Can you find evidence that the manager’s family enjoyed the latest technology: indoor plumbing, central heating, a phonograph, a telephone, electricity? What do think is the significance of the photos of Republican politicians? What evidence do you see that the people who lived in this house were educated? (But, at the same time, think about the evidence in the mill workers’ house that even mill hands could read and write.)

Unlike mill workers, each family member of this family probably had their own bedroom and dressing room. Notice how large the bedroom is. These are the things one may find in such a place: a child’s rocking horse, a doll house, a pink marble table top, porcelain & silver items, a sewing machine and sewing set, and traveling trunks.