At the corner of the Morrill Highway and Old City Falls Road is a small detached building on what was for many years the property of Arthur and Selena Robinson. It now sits empty and a little forlorn adjacent to the recently renovated farmhouse nearby awaiting a new owner. Like most older buildings, this little building has stories to tell. Some 175 years ago, a small residential tinsmith shop here made maple syrup equipment and cans, sap buckets and skimmers and many other necessary household items.

Once upon a time in one of the farthest reaches of Strafford, a meetinghouse to rival the Strafford Town House once stood. It had seating for 200 and a gilded dome on its steeple. Anyone traveling a little more than a century ago along Brook Road in Strafford (Faye Brook Road in Sharon), could not have missed it. It was the Robinson Meetinghouse in what is now known as the Robinson District adjacent to the four corners of Strafford, Sharon, Tunbridge, and Royalton.

In 1998 Strafford Historian Gwenda Smith wrote a letter to Eilzabeth Markin of The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut. Markin had published an article in the November 1976 issue of The Magazine Antiques on the early 19th century portrait painter Zedekiah Belknap.Smith was writing in regards to the portraits of Jedediah Harris and his wife Judith Harris which hang in the Morrill Memorial Library. Smith felt they might well be among the over 200 hundred portraits done by Belknap. Harris was the mentor and business partner of Senator Justin Morrill, and Morrill gave the first library to his hometown and named it the Harris Library.

As two of Strafford‘s store buildings merit special mention this year —Coburns’ Store building having reached its 100th birthday in I985, and the old White Store in the upper village having been extensively restored —it seems fitting to present here a brief history of our main commercial structures.