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Historical Room Collection Highlights
Aerial photographs: Seventy-one 35 ½" x 36" aerial photographs of Guilford taken in
1947, with a color-coded map index, and two hundred thirty 29 ½" x 25 ½" aerial
photographs in four volumes taken in 1962, with map indexes. The Connecticut
Turnpike, I-95, opened through Guilford in 1956, so this collection also provides
a visual contrast between a pre-turnpike Guilford and its post-turnpike growth.
Annual reports, Guilford Free Library Historical Room: 1980 to latest fiscal year.
Annual reports, Town of Guilford: Reports from 1874 to 1935 (incomplete), and
complete holdings from 1936 to latest publication date.
Books: Family genealogies, local histories, service records for Guilford and Connecticut,
and the Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records currently being published.
Cemetery records: Microfilm and typescript copies of inscriptions in cemeteries in
Guilford and neighboring towns, compiled and indexed under the auspices of the
F.E.R.A. and the W.P.A., supervised by Charles R. Hale; inscriptions copied and
indexed by the Agnes Dickinson Lee Chapter, D.A.R.; and inscriptions for
Guilford, North Guilford, Madison, and North Madison and for graves of soldiers
compiled by individual researchers.
Early Guilford Days: Diaries of fourth grade students 'adopting' Guilford personalities.
Federal Census lists: The 1790 census for Connecticut in book form; the 1800 - 1920
censuses (excluding the 1890 census) for New Haven and Middlesex
counties on microfilm with a finding guide listing the order of the towns included
in the reels; the published indexes to the Connecticut censuses 1800 - 1870; the 1880 United States census and national index and the 1910 Connecticut census index on CD-Rom.
Guilford Fair Premium lists: Booklets for Guilford fairs from 1875 to 1955 (incomplete),
and complete holdings from 1962 to 2001. The advertisements included also
provide illustrative examples of items once manufactured in Guilford.
Guilford High School yearbooks: Complete holdings for high school yearbooks from
1941 to the present. Missing yearbooks were borrowed, photocopied, and made
available in loose-leaf notebooks.
Guilford Keeping Society archives and photographs: Town archives, business ledgers, and
personal papers, with finding guides, and an extensive collection of Guilford
photographs, with a card catalog subject index, are housed in the Historical Room.
Manuscripts: Typed research papers and letters, diaries, and memoirs are assigned call numbers and interfiled with the book collection or filed in the vertical file. The Library of Congress, Special Materials Cataloging Division, is cataloging Historical Room manuscripts, free-of-charge.
Maps: Maps of Guilford include the original home lots, the 1868 Beers Atlas of New Haven
County, Connecticut, two 1852 wall maps and one 1856 wall map, zoning maps, geological survey maps, Sanborn insurance maps, nautical charts, trolley line survey engineering drawings, wetlands and open space maps, and an 1881 'bird's-eye' View of Guilford drawing.
Newspaper index and chronology: Microfilm copies of the Shore Line Times, dating from
1877, and of The Guilford Courier, which started in 1998 and is currently being microfilmed, are completely indexed. Handwritten and typed chronologies for both newspapers are shelved in the Historical Room.
Oral history tapes and transcripts: Over fifty typed and indexed transcripts of taped
interviews on Guilford topics and people; and a book, Taking Time to Remember, an Oral History of Guilford, compiled by Historical Room staff and volunteers, and published by the library in 1988.
Photographs and slides: Over 2,500 photographs, postcards and slides of Guilford people,
houses, and events with a subject finding guide as well as an album of 200 annotated photographs from the "Times Past" column in the Shore Line Times.
Real estate cards: Postcards with photographs of houses and property information for
Guilford houses that were for sale between 1958 and 1978, received from two real
estate agencies, are arranged in archival photo protectors by street address in nine
large loose-leaf notebooks. This collection complements Joel Helander's House-Dating Dossiers, ongoing title searches on Guilford houses which include 170 houses thus far, as well as the Guilford Preservation Alliance's Survey of the Historic Architecture of Guilford, 1981-1982, which includes 450 buildings built before World War II, and two microfilm reels which include Guilford buildings: the W.P.A. Historic American Buildings Survey with measured drawings of five Guilford buildings, and the W.P.A. Federal Writers' Project, Historical Houses in Guilford with photographs and data sheets for 144 houses.
Scrapbooks: Collections of newspaper clippings assembled by Guilford townspeople are
indexed on catalog cards. These are especially valuable for their inclusion of out-of-town papers.
Tax lists: With the financial help of grant monies, the extensive, albeit disbursed,
collections of early Guilford tax lists have been duplicated by microfilming or photocopying the originals in the holdings of the Connecticut State Library, Guilford Town Hall, Henry Whitfield Museum, New-York Historical Society, and Yale University. Altogether these lists span the years from 1690 to 1863.
Serials: The Historical Room has a collection of twenty-two serial titles, seven of which are
currently received, mostly as gifts.
Vertical file: An extensive collection of clippings, pamphlets, and papers on Guilford
people, associations, and topics arranged in folders alphabetically by subject.
A Special Vertical File holds more fragile and original items. Both files are
indexed on catalog cards.
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