Norfolk Curling Club

About Norfolk Curling Club

Norfolk Curling Club: Seventy Years in Connecticut’s Icebox

Norfolk Curling Club was established in 1953 in the hills of northwestern Connecticut, a corner of the state known as “the icebox of Connecticut.” Members first curled on outdoor ponds, and in 1956 the original Norfolk curling shed went up, a wooden building likened to a tobacco barn. The first indoor curling followed on New Year’s Day 1957 at ten degrees below zero; artificial ice arrived in 1958, the first Men’s Invitational Bonspiel was held that December, and in 1959 the club bought a set of 32 matched Ailsa Craig granite stones.

Disaster struck in 2011, when the original clubhouse was destroyed in an arson fire. Members rebuilt over two years at a cost of nearly $2 million, and the new facility on Golf Drive opened on November 23, 2013, with two sheets of dedicated curling ice. Membership has since roughly doubled, from 50 or 60 at the time of the fire to about 115, with members ranging from teenagers to curlers in their late eighties and some traveling in from neighboring Massachusetts.

The volunteer-run nonprofit, a member of the Grand National Curling Club and the United States Women’s Curling Association, offers learn-to-curl classes, a teen league and a five-week spring league for beginners. The year 2026 marks seven decades since the first Norfolk curling shed went up.