CANTON/COLLINSVILLE, CT
Come to Canton where the arts flourish!
Tucked among the hills of northwestern Connecticut and in the old factory village of Collinsville on the banks of the Farmington River, you’ll find painting, sculpture, pottery, theater, jewelry, music, photography and so much more. It’s a place whose natural beauty and rich history has inspired creative people for well over a century.
No wonder that world famous artists like painter Milton Avery and photographer Walker Evans have come to Canton to work.
.
HISTORY
Begun as a subsistence farming community in the eighteenth century, early Canton people had to be creative just to survive and then to thrive. Founded along the Farmington River in 1826, the Collins Company became the world’s largest manufacturer of edge tools such as axes, machetes, knives, and shovels shipped around the world. Creative workmen made hundreds of patterns, some with exotic names to suit a variety of purposes from rubber tapping and banana harvesting to firefighting.
Canton has two districts on the National Register of Historic Places (Canton Center and Collinsville) and a museum full of fascinating artifacts housed in an old factory building that was turned into a 1920s recreation hall.
In Collinsville, Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted learned his trade, and John Brown bought weapons to incite a slave rebellion that would start the Civil War.
