Built 1907 Opened 1907 Added to NRHP 25 March 1993 | NRHP Reference # 93000211 Area 5 ha | |
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Location 933 Hopmeadow St. and 29 Massaco St., Simsbury, Connecticut Architectural style Gothic Revival architecture | ||
The Horace Belden School, originally built as the first Simsbury High School, and now the third Simsbury Town Hall, is a Late Gothic Revival style building built in 1907 at 933 Hopmeadow Street in Simsbury, Connecticut, USA. The adjacent Central Grammar School at 29 Massaco Street, now known as the Central Elementary School, was built in the same style in 1913. Both buildings were listed together on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.
The current Simsbury High School is elsewhere.
According to its NRHP nomination:
These schools epitomize in their design and massing the prevailing early twentieth-century philosophy that educational buildings should be monumental structures designed in styles that reflected Euro-English academic traditions. Such architectural precedent had been commonly invoked in the Collegiate Gothic design of earlier college buildings in the state, most notably at Yale, Trinity, and Wesleyan universities, and, later in the 1940s, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Some of this effect is lost at the Central Grammar School because of its siting but the long, low massing of the Belden School on its open site particularly conveys this concept. An imposing almost intimidating structure, it commands respect for the value of education.
The Horace Belden School's designed is believed to follow that of Homerton College at Cambridge University in England.