Plaine Hill
This marker preserves the name Plaine Hill, once used for the elevated village center now known as Woodstock Hill. Its inscription describes an established inland community with numerous buildings, substantial homes, productive land, orchards, and livestock. The words offer a glimpse of how earlier observers viewed Woodstock as a prosperous rural village shaped by agriculture and the surrounding countryside.
Plaine Hill became the center of the community’s religious, educational, and civic life. Its common, church, academy, burying ground, public buildings, and neighboring homes developed along the ridge while farms extended across the surrounding landscape.
The Woodstock Tercentenary Committee placed the marker in 1986 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the town’s settlement. It preserves more than an earlier placename. It records how the community once described itself and draws attention to the rural landscape and historic village that remain visible today.
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Chamberlin Mill
Standing beside the Still River in Woodstock Valley, Chamberlin Mill preserves an important part of the town’s agricultural and industrial history. Mills have operated at this location since the eighteenth century, when Manasseh Hosmer maintained a gristmill here. By the early nineteenth century, Abijah Sessions had established a sawmill on the property, beginning a family […]
Senexet Grange No. 40
Senexet Grange No. 40 was established as a local chapter of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, commonly known as the Grange. Founded nationally in 1867, the organization was created to support farmers and their families through education, cooperation, fellowship, and collective action. The letters “P. of H.” displayed on the building identify its connection […]
Pulpit Rock
When Woodstock’s first English settlers arrived from Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1686, they entered a landscape without churches, meetinghouses, or other public buildings. Until a meetinghouse could be constructed, they gathered for Sunday worship around a large glacial boulder that became known as Pulpit Rock. In this open-air sanctuary, the rock served as a natural focal […]
