History
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, located in New London, Connecticut, was founded in 1926 at the bequest of Harriet Upson Allyn (1840 -1926). She was a life-long New London resident and the youngest of Captain Lyman Allyn's (1797- 1874) six children. She named the museum in memory of her father, a man who commanded a whaling boat by the age of twenty-one and who later became a director of a banking company, an insurance company and a railroad company. Furthermore, Lyman Allyn founded a school for boys in New London in 1817. In 1910 Harriet Allyn had requested, in her will, that the Connecticut Trust and Safe Deposit Company of Hartford use money from her estate to create a park and a museum. In addition, Allyn donated a significant tract of land to neighboring Connecticut College, then a women's school. Allyn's death in 1926 established the beginning of the museum. Initially there was no collection and no building. Architect Charles A. Platt was hired