Meet The Neighbors is a unique way to learn about the lives of people who lived, worked, learned and worshipped in Hebron Center, including African Americans and Indigenous Peoples.
By accessing QR codes at various site around the Hebron Green, participants can “Meet their Neighbors” from Hebron’s past.
The 5 QR Tours allow participants to explore life in Hebron Center starting 9000 years ago with Indigenous hunter gatherers through the late 20th century. Descriptions at various sites include how Indigenous People accommodated themselves to English settlement in what would become Hebron. Other sites address topics like how settlers changed Hebron’s ecosystem, how Irish workers accommodated their lives to Yankee culture, or how the Eisenhower Road System made Hebron a suburban community.
Hebron Center is a National Historic District, but unlike most historic districts, which focus on date plaques of when buildings were constructed, the Hebron Historical Society wanted to personalize Hebron’s past by focusing less on architecture and more upon people who lived there.
The resulting five QR tours use Hebron’s sidewalks as avenues to explore people, places and events from Hebron’s past that shaped the Hebron Green neighborhood.
The tours are user- and family- friendly. By clicking on a QR code, participants will access a menu of sites to explore. Although the tours develop in a sequential manner, participants can choose to access sites that are of particular interest to themselves. Each location or “stop” on the tour contains a recent photograph of the building currently. Most tours have images of the same structure from the past. These images are followed by a description of the site either focused on the lives of people who lived at the site or focused on the site’s historic architecture. Some of the tours call upon younger participants to look, imagine or think about sounds that might have been heard when visiting a site 100 – 200 years ago. Before leaving each site, the tours pose a “Think about it” question to connect Hebron’s past with the 21st century.
The five tours are based on the geography of Hebron Center.
A tour along Marjorie Circle and the north side of the Green enables participants to discover the only structure in Hebron Center that remains from before the Revolutionary War.
A tour up Wall Street examines the role of slavery and the West Indian trade on Hebron’s past.
The Hebron business district tour allows tour participants to learn about a unique form of economic exchange between Hebron Center elites and African Americans.
By touring the south side of Hebron Green and Church Street tour, participants learn about the “Year without a Summer” and its effect upon building, as well as some of Hebron Center’s architecturally sophisticated religious structures.
Finally, a tour starting at St. Peters’ Field will explore Hebron’s Indigenous past.
You can see the streets included in each tour here:
The goal of the QR tours is to foster an interest in Hebron’s past and an awareness that people who were associated with sites in Hebron Center were not only key to national and state events, but had a role in international history as well.
The QR Code tours are made possible through the hard work of John Baron, Hebron Historian, and the Hebron Historical Society, with generous support from Hebron Greater Together Community Fund of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.