Slater Memorial Museum

National Historic Landmark · Norwich, Connecticut

A Richardsonian Romanesque building of 1888 on the Norwich Free Academy campus, holding something almost nowhere else in America still has intact: a complete Victorian plaster cast collection. When the museum opened, the founders bought around 150 full-size casts of Greek, Roman and Renaissance sculpture - the Venus de Milo, the Laocoon, the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo - so that students in a Connecticut mill town could study the canon without crossing the Atlantic. Every other museum in the country threw theirs out in the twentieth century when casts went out of fashion. Norwich kept its, in the original top-lit hall, and the effect of walking in is genuinely strange. Beyond the casts there is American and Asian art and a good local history collection. It is free, it is a National Historic Landmark, and almost nobody outside eastern Connecticut knows it. Check the opening before you go: it sits on a working school campus and follows the school calendar, so it can be shut in midsummer.

108 Crescent Street, Norwich, Norwich, Connecticut, 06360, United States

Open on a limited week, generally Tuesday to Sunday afternoons during the academic year with reduced or altered hours in summer and at school holidays - it sits on a working school campus and its schedule follows the school rather than a museum calendar. Closed on major holidays. Admission has historically been free or by donation. Confirm before travelling.

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