Tool Museum

The Tool Museum. This small but important museum features an extensive and important collection of tools and implements from the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when Connecticut homesteaders and farmers established cottage industries as cabinetmakers, wheelwrights, tanners, shoemakers, coopers, metal workers and other trades. The Tool Museum also houses a fully-operational re-creation of a 19th-century print shop, built around an original and very rare Smith-Hoe Acorn hand press (fewer than 30 hand presses remain in working condition in the United States), with 19th-century type cases, antique equipment and printing samples.