The Little Flower Hall, Baltic, Conn. 20N.

The Little Flower Hall, Baltic, Conn. 20N.

View of a large gable-roofed building with unusual projecting bays containing two-story covered porches. This image is part of a series made by one of the three Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company photographers assigned to cover New England or upstate New York. The quest for images that would be saleable as postcards resulted in the documentation of small towns and small town life at the turn of the 20th century. As the photos were shot, the glass plates were promptly sent back to Belfast, Maine, and processed into postcards at the printing plant on High Street. The eastern Connecticut village of Baltic became a mill town producing cotton and other textiles on the Shetucket River during the second half of the 19th century. Part of the town of Sprague, the village is located just north of the city of Norwich. The industry attracted a large number of workers from elsewhere, many of them Roman Catholic French Canadians and Europeans. This school, which would have been associated with the growing Catholic Diocese in Norwich, played an important part in the development of the Roman Catholic parochial school system in Connecticut. According to The New York Times: "...the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady Mother of the Church, traces its Connecticut history to the village of Baltic in the last century. A textile mill owner in the eastern Connecticut town petitioned an order of Catholic sisters from the Netherlands to send some members over to provide education for the children of his workers. In 1874, the sisters established the Academy of the Holy Family, a school for girls in Baltic that they still run, and later expanded into other educational centers and social and charitable work. Today, the sisters number 100, 8 of whom are Catholic elementary school principals in Connecticut." [https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/14/nyregion/an-old-fashioned-catholic-school-finds-new-success.html] During the first decades of the 20th century, when the school removed to another location in Baltic, the building became The Baltic Inn. The projecting bays, with their cobblestone piers, Colonial Revival columns and picturesque clay tile roofs, may have been early 20th-century additions to an existing early-19th century building.