In 1776, Norfolk was officially 18 years old. The town had been incorporated in 1758, and the business of civic life was well underway. But it had not been easy to settle the tract of land that was offered for sale by the Colony of Connecticut in 1738. The Green Woods, a dense hemlock forest riddled with swamps and rock ledge, did not appeal to prospective settlers who had to make a living from the land. The tract had been divided into fifty-three rights of four hundred acres each, and all but one of the original buyers returned the right they had purchased for 180 pounds.

This exhibition presents snippets of life in Norfolk in the years before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, and the impact of that war on the town’s residents. Well before military engagement, townsfolk gathered to respond to the British blockade of Boston harbor on June 1, 1774. Norfolk took its first collective actions of support and preparation: to send relief to the inhabitants of Boston, to levy a tax of one half penny on the pound to procure gunpowder, and to establish a pesthouse for small pox.