The New Haven Museum and Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery are pleased to present a talk featuring Peter Dobkin Hall on Wednesday, October 17 at 6:00 PM at the New Haven Museum. The lecture, entitled “Thomas Phillips Company: Artisanship & Entrepreneurship in New Haven’s Monument Industry, 1848-1988,” will reveal how English immigrant Thomas Phillips (1805-1887) began his career working for the Ritter family, the city’s preeminent stone carvers. In 1848, he founded his own firm, which dominated the trade until the 1980s. The lecture is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
Starting as a craftsman, Phillips and his successors became true entrepreneurs as technological innovators, quarry-owners, and fabricators of architectural elements, and were organizers of the city’s Victorian gem, Evergreen Cemetery, founded in 1848. When the firm shut down, its extraordinary collection of photographs, drawings, trade publications, and books -- the largest such collection in the United States -- was donated to the New Haven Museum. This illustrated lecture will discuss the growth and decline of the Phillips Company and its role in the development of public art and public space in New Haven in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Peter Dobkin Hall is Professor of Public Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University.
The New Haven Museum, founded as the New Haven Colony Historical Society in 1862, is located in downtown New Haven at 114 Whitney Avenue. For more information, please contact Michelle Cheng, Director of Education at (203) 562-4183 ext. 11 or education@newhavenmuseum.org.
