Salisbury Connecticut: history, genealogy, Americana

Salisbury, Connecticut -- the northwest-most township of the state, and of Litchfield County -- is where Between the Lakes Group is located, and we're particularly interested in the history here.

The township includes the villages of Salisbury and Lakeville, as well as the hamlets or neighborhoods of Lime Rock, Amesville, Twin Lakes, Taconic, and Mount Riga. Additional historic names for locales in the Town of Salisbury include Furnace Village (=Lakeville), Hammertown, Joyceville, Weatogue, Chapinville (=Taconic), and others.

You would never guess it to look around Salisbury now, but for two hundred years, culminating in the early 1920s, Salisbury was an important iron mining, refining, and manufacturing center. Today, it's a popular and upscale vacation and weekend home locale for New Yorkers and Bostonians.

Our Current Salisbury Offerings:

--Salisbury, Connecticut, Abstract of Early Land Records. This article, abstracting some of the more historically significant early land records, is found in that organization’s Historical Collections of the Salisbury Association, Volume II. It is important to note the limitations of this collection as admitted by the compiler. The abstract doesn’t claim to be complete (original grants are not included, and only the more historically interesting deeds are abstracted, for example). Also, as the compiler notes, any selection process of this sort implicitly is colored by the interests of the compiler. The original records still do exist (they survived the Town Hall fire) and are available for examination at the Town Clerk’s office. Its limitations notwithstanding, this is an interesting compilation and has significant historical value. Download now in PDF format, 28+ pages, $4.00.

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--The Township of Salisbury, Connecticut - The Early Years, by Judith M. Sherman (1988). Most of this material is based on the 1719 – 1742 period – the period when Salisbury was first laid out and settled. In its 83 pages, including extensive tables, references, and footnotes, the paper summarizes the township’s early history in a way that had not been done previously. The author’s background, prior to her graduate education in history, had been in analytical work on Wall Street. She had learned early on, in reading annual reports and 10-Ks of companies looking for investment opportunities (and red flags) and in identifying companies as merger and acquisition candidates, that puffery abounded in the text of annual reports, and that only by starting with the footnotes and the numbers themselves and analyzing them critically could rational business decisions be made. A statement like “Land speculation was rampant in early Salisbury” was the sort of generalization that Sherman had been trained to detect, question – and frequently demolish. Along those lines, this paper presented the first critical view of a real sacred cow of Salisbury history, the first clergyman in town, the Rev. Jonathan Lee. Typescript, PDF format, download now for $5.00.

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--The Litchfield Hills -- an 1898 Connecticut Quarterly article about geography of Litchfield County. (FREE)

--For Lime Rock -- once the headquarters of an industrial empire -- our CD-ROM based on a Heritage Walk we conducted there in October 2004. See our Lime Rock page for more information. (CD-ROM)

--Salisbury Cemetery Records (1913), from the Historical Collections of the Salisbury Association, Volume I. This 45+ page compilation of several cemeteries in the Town of Salisbury (Chapinville, Dutchers Bridge, Mt. Riga, Town Hill, and five small, isolated cemeteries, does not include the old cemetery at Salisbury Center (see our separate download of that material), nor the cemeteries at Lime Rock, and the "new" Salisbury cemetery. Nonetheless, these 688 inscriptions are an important part of the record of Salisbury. PDF format, download for $3.00.

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--Salisbury: Old Section of the New Cemetery (1916), from the Historical Collections of the Salisbury Association, Volume II. This 46+ page compilation of the oldest section of the so-called "New Cemetery" (the one located on Route 41 just north of Salisbury village provides records that will be of use to many who came to Salisbury a bit too late for the smaller and older cemeteries around the township (published separately). A section at the end identifies Civil War veterans buried in this ground as well as some buried elsewhere. PDF format, download for $4.25.

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--"Salisbury in War Time", a Memorial Day 1910 address by Thomas Lot Norton, with a comprehensive list of Salisbury men who served in the Union military forces and their units. 34+ pages. Download, in PDF format, $3.50.

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--Salisbury CT vital records circa 1730 - 1767 from the historical collections of the Salisbury Association, originally published in 1913. 51+ pages. Download now in PDF format, $3.25.

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--Members and officers of the Salisbury Association (1913). This list of 19+ pages from Volume I of the historical collections of the Salisbury Association serves today as a "who was who" of Salisbury at the time. Download in PDF format. $2.50.

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--The 1820 census of children attending school in the Town of Salisbury, by school district. This article constituted Volume III of the historical collections of the Salisbury Association. 22+ pages. Download now in PDF format, $3.50.

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--Lime Rock -- an 1905 article from the Connecticut Magazine by the Rector of the local church about the history of this community. (FREE)

--The Salisbury Academy, documents and student lists, comprising Volume IV of the Historical Collections of the Salisbury Association. 65+ pages, PDF format, download for $5.00.

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--A lengthy illustrated article from 1989 from Volume IV of the Connecticut Quarterly about the history of the Town of Salisbury, including an index. 26++ pages. Download now in PDF format, $2.00.

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--Grave-stone Inscriptions at Salisbury, Connecticut (1898). This 16-page collection of Salisbury gravestone inscriptions, principally at Salisbury center, originally collected by Malcolm Day Rudd, was published as a pamphlet. This download, which is in PDF format, $3.75.

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--A Brief Military History of Salisbury, an address by Malcolm D. Rudd (1911) from the historical collections of the Salisbury Association. 30+ pages. Download now in PDF format, $2.75.

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--About the iron industry -- We're happy to offer two articles by one of the earlier researchers of this subject in one download entitled Early Iron Industry of Connecticut. Yes, there's plenty of Salisbury material in it! See our Iron page for more information.

--The White Oak for 1954, yearbook of Housatonic Valley Regional High School, Falls Village. Includes the town of Salisbury. See our Litchfield County page for more information.

--Changed place names in all of Litchfield County. (FREE)

--The historic iron industry of the Upper Housatonic Valley. (FREE)

--For all of Litchfield County -- our republication of Arthur Goodenough's classic The Clergy of Litchfield County (1909). See our page about Clergy of Litchfield County. (CD-ROM)

What's coming next about Salisbury?

--More sections of the four volumes of the Historical Collections of the Salisbury Association, Inc. (1913 through 1941) -- no question about that! Lots of great information there for historians and genealogists.

--We live and have our business at Twin Lakes, and we're continuing to look for something to product about our home neighborhood. Since the Twin Lakes have been "discovered" (according to the Lakeville Journal), we are carefully documenting what remains of old Twin lakes and what new Twin Lakes is shaping up like. We've started photography but we have much, much more to do. This is a long term project to be sure, and development out here always seems to be getting ahead of our efforts at documenting what was here, sadly.

--We will be publishing Judith Moore Sherman's paper entitled "Land Speculation in Colonial Salisbury", an exhaustive analysis of land transaction records and vital records of the period of the Colonial period. This is the paper that summarily debunked the then-popular myth of hordes of speculators engaging in rampant land speculation in Salisbury in colonial times. This will be published as a download. We've also been collecting additional materials about several aspects of the history of Salisbury Township that are both in and outside the mainstream. (Her introductory paper, laying the groundwork for this one, is now available as a download.)

--We've done two history walks of Lime Rock now under the auspices of the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area, and hosted by Trinity Church, Lime Rock. We're also working on a comprehensive history of Trinity Lime Rock.

CLICK HERE to go to our page about Litchfield County, CT

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We also republish local history about other areas. Please check our listing of future (and present) projects by state, or our catalog.

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Salisbury, CT history

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