The Hebron Historical Society

Conclusion – During this tour, you investigated the lives of several Hebron families. The homes where they lived are gone, but their stories are remembered. When you get to the point where you started this tour, ook down Route 316 toward Hebron Center. Imagine what it might have looked like when horses rather than cars provided transportation. What do you think this scene would look like a hundred years from now?

Meet Your Neighbors QR Tours funded by the Hebron Greater Together Community Fund in conjunction with the Hebron Historical Society

Cyrus Mann House # 167 Route 216, Wall Street

Now

After the Hurricane of 1938

Courtesy of Our Town’s Heritage 1708-1958 by John Sibun1975

Cyrus Mann was a Hebron merchant and judge in the early 1800’s. Originally the Mann family owned the house Cesar Peters bought in 1806 just south of this house. In 1783, the Manns built this large stylish house. In later life, Andrew Mann proudly pointed to every tree stump on the property where trees were felled to make the frame. He was quick to point out that his brother who built a house to the north of his used lumber shipped down from Vermont and New Hampshire. That house didn’t last very long and was later converted into a barn. This house remained in the Mann family until the 1880’s. After that it was owned by a series of immigrant families. In 1938, Connecticut was hit by a major hurricane which did a great deal of damage in Hebron. During that storm the north wall of the Mann house was ripped off creating a life-size doll house. The house was repaired and survives to today.

Think About it

If you were to build a house today in Hebron, where would the building materials originate?

Where to go next

From here --walk back to where you started this tour.

Meet Your Neighbors QR Tours funded by the Hebron Greater Together Community Fund in conjunction with the Hebron Historical Society

Please note that most of the structures you will see are privately owned. Please respect these properties by viewing them from the street.

Many of Hebron’s past residents are buried here in Hebron’s oldest burying ground. Each person has their own unique story to tell. These stones only suggest some of what their lives were like. By wandering through the burying ground, you will discover some people from Hebron’s past. In the back corner of this burying ground are unmarked graves. This is where African Americans and paupers who lived in Hebron were buried. African American slaves were first buried in the back because they could not afford to buy a burial plot. By 1810 there were no slaves in Hebron but burials continued in the back corner, so that African Americans could be buried next to their relatives. Some of the African Americans buried here were born in Africa, some were born to enslaved African American mothers and thus by color of their skin were kept enslaved. By 1850, Hebron had the largest population of free African Americans of any town in Tolland County. Their grave sites are lost, but the role they played in creating the town of Hebron appears many times as you walk around Hebron Center.

Think about it

How has American slavery had an effect upon modern Americans?

Where to go next

From here --walk back toward the front of the graveyard.

Meet Your Neighbors QR Tours funded by the Hebron Greater Together Community Fund in conjunction with the Hebron Historical Society

Cesar and Sim Peters site – #127 Wall Street (private property, do not trespass)

Cesar Peters was bought as a slave when he was about 8 years old and spent most of his life in Hebron. In 1787, he and his family were to be separated and sold to pay for debts, but his family was rescued by his Hebron neighbors. Cesar Peters’ family was put under the protective custody of a Hebron neighbor Elijah Graves for two years. In 1789, the Connecticut General Assembly freed Cesar Peters’ family. As a free man the first thing Cesar Peters attempted to sue his abductors for 1000 pounds, a huge sum of money. The case was settled out of court. Cesar Peters moved out of Hebron shortly thereafter. When his first wife Lois died, he married a widow Sim ____ who had a daughter named Celia Peaton. In 1806, Cesar Peters purchased the 2-story house that stood here that had belonged to John Mann, the person who tried to sell his family to settle a debt. Cesar and Sim Peters lived here until he died in 1814 and she died in 1815. Cesar Peters died solvent and owned many fashionable goods like his Yankee neighbors including tea equipment, wine glasses and a set of china.

Think about it

To save Cesar Peters family from being sold, Cesar Peters neighbors made up a fictitious unpaid bill for clothes Cesar Peters had picked up, but not paid for. The trick worked and Cesar Peters’ family was saved.

Do you think Cesar Peters’ neighbors were doing the right thing when they broke the law by writing up a fictitious bill?

Where to go next

From here --walk toward the old burying ground on the sidewalk along Route 316

Meet Your Neighbors QR Tours funded by the Hebron Greater Together Community Fund in conjunction with the Hebron Historical Society

Please note that most of the structures you will see are privately owned. Please respect these properties by viewing them from the street.

Hebron Connecticut Bicentennial Booklet 1976

Until the year 2000, a large 2 story house built by the Owen family stood here. It was built in the 1750’s with a center chimney, wide double doors, and symmetrical windows larger in the principal front rooms and smaller elsewhere. The Owen family were farmers and merchants. By the mid 1700’s, Hebron had outgrown its settlement days of subsistence farms and was actively involved in the West Indian trade. Farmers provided much sought after food and lumber products to West Indian plantation owners who exported sugar, molasses and slaves. Distilling rum became a New England specialty, since New England had plenty of firewood and molasses could be transported cheaply in barrels to be turned into rum. Before the opening of the Midwest with the Erie Canal making wheat plentiful and whiskey cheap, rum was the drink of choice of New Englanders. Rum was also a major product in the triangle trade that brought African captives to the New World as slaves.

Think about it

The Sugar Islands of the West Indies were one of the richest areas of the world in the 1700’s because of the sugar they produced. Sugar is highly addictive and is in many products we eat today like candy. Sugar and sweet corn syrup are added to ketchup, pasta sauce, yoghurt, and salad dressings.

Would you be willing to give up consuming sugar, if it meant people everywhere on the globe could attain a higher standard of living?

Where to go next

From here walk toward the old burying ground on the sidewalk along Route 316

Meet Your Neighbors QR Tours funded by the Hebron Greater Together Community Fund in conjunction with the Hebron Historical Society