In Connecticut, American Impressionism took shape in outdoor settings like the mills and bridge at Willimantic that J. Alden Weir painted at least a half dozen times in the 1890s after driving from nearby Windham Center with his art materials. A superb portraitist and still-life painter as well as a pioneering American Impressionist, Weir chose subjects other artists often avoided, including this factory complex, and in 1897 fellow artists applauded when he brought The Factory Village to the National Academy of Design in New York for its first public showing. The painting became an undisputed masterpiece of American Impressionism, a movement Weir helped create in Windham and at his farm in Branchville, Connecticut. Although The Factory Village lacks much of the blurriness often associated with Impressionism, Weir subtly altered the forms and colors of an identifiable scene, flattening the view like a tapestry, simplifying buildings into interlocking geometric shapes, compressing planes, and using visual echoes such as a tree seeming to touch a distant chimney and the chimney smoke mirroring a cloud to express harmony between nature and humans. He knew the cupola-topped building was the spool house of the Willimantic Linen Co., yet many viewers would take it for a church. At the end of the 19th century, as America was becoming a world power while fearing the loss of spiritual values and work ethic, Weir and other Connecticut Impressionists found order and comfort in the state's people, landscape, and history, and in The Factory Village Weir saw a very good world that he thought might endure. Weir also painted this bridge in the 1890s, showing its unusual double arch over the Willimantic River, but development later blocked the site until the Windham Mills State Heritage Park was created in 1994 to preserve and interpret urban cultural history and support economic revitalization. With help from the Department of Environmental Protection, the long-deserted granite mill complex was refurbished for private businesses, interpretive space was established in Mill No. 2, and a riverside park reopened the view for the first time in more than a hundred years. The bridge, once battered by heavy motor vehicle traffic, then became a Bridge of Flowers reserved for pedestrians.