The Rocky History Of Connecticut's Cartoon Museum

In the mid-1970s, longtime Greenwich resident Mort Walker — creator of comic strips “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois” — established the first home dedicated to the collection, preservation and exhibition of cartoon art.

“I remember when we first opened, someone came by asking what we were doing,” says Brian Walker, son of Mort Walker, who died last year at 94.

“I told him it was a cartoon museum and he said, ‘Who’d want to see that?’ Back then people just didn’t get it.”

Times have changed, says Walker who can almost guarantee whenever he does a cartoon exhibit, it’s a hit.

But it took several decades for this realization.

The International' Cartoon Museum in Boca Raton, Fla.

The collection had had a peripatetic history, when the Museum of Cartoon Art moved from the former Mead Mansion in Greenwich to the Ward’s Castle in Port Chester/Rye Brook, New York in 1977, and then to Boca Raton, Fla., in the ’90s, which promised a world-class museum for the collection

But its journey didn’t end there.

When the Boca Raton center closed in the early 2000s, the collection of more than 80,000 pieces returned to Connecticut and remained in storage in Stamford as it went looking for a new home once again.

The collection had had a peripatetic history, when the Museum of Cartoon Art moved from the former Mead Mansion in Greenwich to the Ward’s Castle in Port Chester/Rye Brook, New York in 1977, and then to Boca Raton, Fla., in the ’90s, which promised a world-class museum for the collection

But its journey didn’t end there.

When the Boca Raton center closed in the early 2000s, the collection of more than 80,000 pieces returned to Connecticut and remained in storage in Stamford as it went looking for a new home once again.

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