Keeler Tavern Museum

Come for the cannonball, but stay for the stories.

BY JOE BILLS

n Ridgefield, Connecticut, three centuries of stories are told at the Keeler Tavern, but it’s the cannonball that visitors usually want to see first.

A gambrel-roofed building on Main Street, the Keeler Tavern celebrates 50 years as a livinghistory museum in 2016. “We’re known for the cannonball, but this property has amazing stories from every era of its existence—local narratives that provide a window on national events,” says Hildi Grob, Keeler’s executive director. “Our challenge is determining how best to tell them.” To tell those other stories, the museum has expanded its educational offerings, re interpreted its displays, and deployed costumed guides. But ever since a fateful day back in 1777, this has been “the Cannonball House.”

Ridgefield had been a town for just five years when Benjamin Hoyt—who as a child had survived the 1704 French and Indian raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts—built his home here in 1713. The door of Hoyt’s home, now displayed at the entrance to the taproom, was reinforced with vertical and horizontal boards, a design known as an “Indian door,” intended to withstand tomahawk attacks.

In the early 1770s, Hoyt’s grandson, Timothy Keeler, and his wife, Esther, expanded the house and opened it as T. Keeler’s Inn, creating what quickly became a true town center: an inn for travelers (Ridgefield was 14 hours by