At the top of Wall Street, just south of the Town Green, lies the Mill Hill Historic Park. The park holds a very old burying ground, and a collection of buildings at the site of the original town meeting hall. Th is has become a collection of Norwalk’s colonial history, and the buildings here tell that story.
Today, the town house is the home of the Norwalk Historical Society. On exhibit are the artifacts and ephemera of Norwalk from its colonial roots to its industrial and maritime progress.
A one room red wood building exemplifi es the type of hardscrabble school house back in the day, and a yellow wood building represents the Norwalk Law Office of Thomas Fitch. He was Connecticut Colony’s Governor from 1754 to 1766, and the building you see today is somewhat of a recreation. While the original house burned in 1779, the rebuilt kitchen wing is all that we see today. It was restored extensively in the 1970s. Both buildings were moved from their original site, farther down East Avenue, however the town house was always located here.
The burying ground isn’t quite the oldest in Norwalk and many of the people buried there date to the 1800s, but it holds the graves of some prominent
Norwalk people of years past. One interesting story line is that small pox took the lives of many doctors who were treating people with the illness and thus a high number of medical practitioners rest here.
