A little fieldstone bank that's now the town's museum

The little building at 8534 State Street stands out on a street of brick and wood because it’s made of stone — split fieldstone, the rounded glacial rocks farmers hauled out of their fields by the wagonload. Someone in Millington took a pile of that and turned it into a bank.

It went up around 1897 or early 1898, a one-story box only about twenty-four feet wide and thirty deep, with two broad arched openings across the front: one for the recessed door, one for a wide window. The first local bank in town had been started a few years earlier by John A. Damon, the village druggist — a reminder of how small-town banking once worked, with the man who sold you cough syrup also holding your savings. A bank in a building this size says a lot about the scale of the place: a farm town that needed somewhere to keep money and lend it, but not much more room than that.

The bank itself didn’t last forever. A successor, the Millington National Bank, bought the building in 1929 and then failed in 1933, in the teeth of the Depression that took down banks all over the country. After that the little fieldstone box just kept finding new work. It was a doctor’s office from 1938 to 1948, the public library from 1952 to 1972, then a photo studio and card shop into the 1990s.

In the end it came home to history. Refurbished, it became the Millington-Arbela Historical Society’s museum, and it landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, mostly for those distinctive stone walls. There’s a nice symmetry to it: a building made from the rocks the first farmers cleared off their land now holds the records of what those farmers built.