Stonington Connecticut

While visiting relatives in Rhode Island this weekend I spent Saturday afternoon walking around Old Stonington.  It was a fairly mild day however it was also a foggy day which made for some interesting photographs.

Stonington is located along the south eastern shore of Connecticut and only a few miles from my home town of Westerly, Rhode Island.  Stonington was established during the mid 1600's and today has over 18,000 residents.  The first lighthouse established by the US Federal Government in 1823 and was located in Stonington.  The area supported a small fishing, whaling and sealing fleet.  It was also a way station for travelers between Boston and New York. Trains brought travelers from Boston to Stonington who then took a steamship to New York.

My British friends might find it interesting to note that Stonington was successfully defended against  HMS Naval bombardments in1775 and again in 1814.  During the bombardment of 1814 Stonington casualties included a mauled cow, a killed a goose, one hen, 3 hogs and an elderly lady who was on her dying bed. 

Site Maintenance at the Boat Museum

This past winter I worked with the Site Maintenance group at the Ellesmere Port Boat Museum. This article was written for the Museum Times and talks a little about some of the work we completed this winter.

The Site Maintenance team under the direction of Ronnie McEwin have been hard at work performing many of the routine maintenance tasks such as repairing walkways, clearing the locks of debris, clearing walkways of moss, cutting lawns, and moving equipment. The team has also been hard at work doing exterior restoration work on the historic museum buildings repairing doors and windows.

An example of some of the work done by the team is the restoration of the window sills on the engine room.  Frank Perra and  Jim Donaldson took on the challenge to restore the sills this past winter. The images below illustrate the restoration work performed on two of the engine room windows. Once warmer weather sets in the glazing on the window grills will also be replaced by the team which will complete the restoration of the windows.

Engine Room windows to be repaired showing decayed sills		A before and after view of the window sill. The top shows the condition of the sills after they were repaired and the bottom shows the decayed sill before restoration.
The decayed area of the sill was removed before the new sill cap was applied to restore the sill to it’s original appearance.		This is an end view of the cap that was applied to finish the sill.  The intent was to retain as much of the original sill as possible and restore it in a way that it looked like the original as well as retain as much of the original window sill as possible.