Portland Town Hall is a 2 story brown brick building. The entrance way is via a covered porch which is centered on the building. There is a tower with a working clock. The original town hall is located where the police department is now. It appears this building may have been a school at one time.
The Wangunk ("Big Bend") tribe lived in the area before European settlement. Their name referred to the bend in the Connecticut River which curves around half of the town's perimeter.
Settlement to the nineteenth century
The first European settlers came to Portland in the 1690s. They were attracted by brownstone, which was used both for construction and for gravestones. Proximity to the river meant that the stone could be transported far and wide, and the Portland brownstone quarries supplied to New York, Boston and even San Francisco, Canada and England. By the 1850s, more than 1,500 people were employed in the quarry industry. More than 25 ships transported the stone. By the 1850s, shipbuilding became more important as an industry, and the economic center of town shifted toward the Gildersleeve area. Immigrants from Ireland, then Sweden, then (to a lesser extent) Italy came to town to work the quarries.
Brownstone quarry, about 1911It originally was part of Middletown and then known as East Middletown. In 1767, Chatham, which then included Portland and East Hampton, was founded.
The town was a part of Chatham until 1841, when it became separate. Its name comes from Portland, England, a place famous for its freestone quarries.
Portland's oldest church is the First Congregational Church. In 1710 a meeting was held for the building of a meetinghouse for preaching. The Connecticut General Assembly approved "parish privileges" in 1714. After a vociferous controversy, a location for the new "Third Ecclesiastical Society of Middletown" meetinghouse was decided upon at "Hall Hill". On October 25, 1721, Rev. Daniel Newell, the first pastor, was ordained. The Bristol, Connecticut native and Yale College graduate died in 1731. In 1748 a new meetinghouse was built, and 1843 the name of the society was changed to the "First Ecclesiastical Society of Portland."
Late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Before quarrying became the town's chief industry in the nineteenth century, Portland was known for its shipbuilding. The Gildersleeve village in town is associated with the Gildersleeve family, prominent shipbuilders in the 1800s. The first vessel built in town was launched in 1741. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812 many U.S. Navy vessels were built in various shipyards in town. Tinware and enamel ware were produced in town in the late nineteenth century. Tobacco farming has also been a big industry in the town.
In 1895, the town decided to establish a public library, although private libraries had been in town for more than a century. The Portland Library was originally a room in Town Hall with about 800 books after the private Portland Library Association turned over all of its books. Within months of its establishment, Horace B. Buck, a native resident who later moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, donated $2,000 toward the erection of a separate library building, and the town appropriated another $1,000. Shaler & Hall and Brainerd Quarries contributed the brownstone, and before the building was finished, Buck gave another $500 (after his death, his estate gave another $2,500. The library moved into another building in 1981.
In the early twentieth century, brownstone couldn't compete much with concrete, and the industry went into decline. In 1936, the Connecticut River flooded the quarries, which ended the industry in town, and the shipbuilding industry collapsed as well.
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