Welcome to the Windham Textile and History Museum’s digital archive. The archive brings together the museum’s research, historical documents, photographs, and recordings about Willimantic and the people who lived and worked here.

What you’ll find in this archive:

• Articles on local history. Most of the museum’s history articles were written by Jamie Eves, the museum’s Town Historian, with additional contributions from other local historians and researchers. Together they tell Willimantic’s story from beginning to end: the rise of the thread mills, the workers and immigrant communities who powered them, labor struggles, decline, and what came after.

If you’re new to Willimantic's local history, the Timeline of the Mills collection is a good place to start.

• Primary sources. These are original materials created at the time: historical photographs, documents, oral history interviews, and audio interviews with people who worked in the mills. Use them to see and hear the past directly, and to find evidence for your own research.
• Exhibits. Digital versions of past and current museum exhibits, which group items around a theme.

The Connecticut Digital Archive is a statewide online archive with millions of items from more than 125 museums, libraries, historical societies, and other organizations across Connecticut. The museum uses it to share photographs of objects in our physical collection, so you can explore what we hold without visiting in person.

Because the CTDA brings so many collections together, it’s also a great place to find Willimantic material held by other institutions.

Finding the museum’s collection

Go to Windham Textile and History Museum's CTDA collection to browse everything the museum has added.

Searching across the whole CTDA

1. Start broad. Type one or two words in the search box on the CTDA homepage, like Willimantic. You’ll get a lot of results, and that’s okay.
2. Narrow it down. On the results page, type a second word in the Filter results box on the left, like thread or mill, and press Enter.
3. Use the filters. The left-side panel lets you narrow further:
   • Item Type: images (photos, postcards), documents, books
   • Subject, Persons, Organizations, Geographic Subject: narrow by topic, person, business, or place
   • Held By: shows which institution owns the item. Choose Windham Textile and History Museum to see only our items, or leave it open to see what others have.

Example: Searching Willimantic, then filtering for American Thread, then selecting Item Type: Image brings up photographs related to the thread company from several collections.

Searching inside documents and books

Some items are scanned books, newsletters, or PDFs. When you open one, use the magnifying glass icon in the viewer to search for words inside it.

Tips

• Each organization describes its own items, so the same topic may be labeled differently from one collection to the next. If a search comes up short, try other words, such as mill workers, operatives, or thread mill.
• If you have a question about an item, contact the organization listed under Held By. For museum items, contact us at [email].

Want more detail? See the CTDA’s own guide: How to Search the CTDA