Welcome to Thursday Doors! This is a weekly challenge for people who love doors and architecture to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos, drawings, or other images or stories from around the world. If you’d like to join us, simply create your own Thursday Doors post each (or any) week and then share a link to your post in the comments below, anytime between 12:01 am Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time). If you like, you can add our badge to your post.
Welcome back to Thursday Doors. I have been on the road for the past eight days, having returned to Hartford yesterday afternoon from visiting family in Iowa. I am also figuratively returning to Hartford this week. I took these photos the night our daughter Faith and I attended a ballgame in the city. The buildings in the gallery are located in the block immediately north of the ballpark.
The first building is the Barnard Brown School building, which is now home to Capital Prep Magnet School. I would spend some time talking about this, but the sources I found offer contradictory reports and, to be honest, I’m not up for sorting through controversy. Instead, I’m going to focus on the building and the two people it’s named after. I will add that the Hartford Public High School system is the second oldest public high school system in the United States. Hartford High was founded by Rev. Thomas Hooker in 1657.
Henry Barnard (1811-1900) (according partially to Wikipedia) was one of the great pioneers in American education. He was a reformer of public schools in Connecticut and Rhode Island. He was principal of the first State Normal School of Connecticut in New Britain, (now known as Central Connecticut State University). He served in a number of education positions in Connecticut and Rhode Island and he was the first United States Commissioner of Education (1867-1870). He believed that all schools should be “good enough for the richest, and affordable by the poorest.”
Flavius A. Brown was born in 1806. He came to Hartford as a “teacher of writing” and in 1868 was the chairman of the committee to decide what new buildings were needed to accommodate the growing number of students in the city. Note: for the authors out there, by “writing” we mean penmanship.
Just north of the Barnard Brown School building, is Keney Tower. According to, yes, Wikipedia,
The tower stands near the center of the roughly square park. Its base is 30 feet (9.1 m) square, and it rises to a height of 130 feet (40 m). It is built out of ashlar-cut red sandstone quarried in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Its verticality is heightened by corner buttresses, and pinnacles that rise above its roof to finial crosses. There are clock faces on all four sides, above which are lancet-arched louvers around the chamber housing chiming bells that sound every quarter hour.
If you’re a fan of engineering, you will enjoy this article, about how a group of University of Connecticut engineering students, working with the City of Hartford and the group The Friends of Keney Park rejuvenated the clock at the top of the tower after it stopped working four years ago.
Behind Keney Clock Tower Park is the Church of the Sacred Heart. Of course, I couldn’t resist.
Again, welcome back to Thursday Doors. Enjoy the doors in the gallery and please, look at the doors of the other participants.
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