For more than 180 years, the quaint home of the
Come see for yourself.
Bakerville Library is now a state-recognized historic building.
Making History
On May 5, 2010, the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism’s Historic Preservation Council voted to list the Bakerville Library on the State Register of Historic Places. Elaine Carmelich was instrumental in helping this to happen, researching documents in the library and conferring with Neal Yates, whose book Where Walk the Souls of Heroes, a history of Bakerville and his house here, includes the history of the library.
This means that not only does the state now recognize what we’ve known all along, but also that we are now eligible to apply for state historic preservation grants previously unavailable to us. The library board is interested in applying for grants to help stabilize the building’s foundation.
As you may have read in Kari Banach’s Waterbury Republican-American article (May 19, 2010; a copy is kept in the library if you missed it), “Buildings on the state register are examples of specific architectural periods, longtime local landmarks, or are sites of significant historical events, state records show.”
The Bakerville Library, established in 1949, was built as a Baptist church in 1824, and then known as the Academy and Bakerville School from 1832 to 1941. From 1941 to 1949 it was the Bakerville Community Association. It was in 1949, as we all know, that Barbara Yedlin famously started the library with her son’s storied little red wagon.