Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Stonington Custom House (1827)

On Main Street in Stonington is a granite Greek Revival building that served as a custom house. Built around 1827, it originally served as a bank. The Stonington Bank was chartered in 1822 and operated until the end of the Civil War. Stonington had some direct trade with the West Indies and was made a Port of Entry in 1842. It was probably around this time the building began to be used as a custom house.

53 Main Street, Stonington Borough (1787)

Built in 1787, the house at 53 Main Street in Stonington Borough was shared by two brothers, Joseph and Benjamin Eells, whose wives drew a line down the kitchen floor, dividing it in two. The house was later home to the writers Grace Zaring Stone (d. 1991) and her daughter, Eleanor Perenyi (d. 2009). Stone, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Robert Owen, the British social reformer and socialist, wrote novels, including The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Escape (1939) and Winter Meeting (1946) (all three of which were made into films). She began using the pseudonym Ethel Vance for her anti-Nazi novel Escape, because her daughter, who had married the Hungarian Baron Zsigmond Perenyi, was at the time living at her husband’s castle in Ruthenia, then controlled by German-occupied Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine). Eleanor Perenyi later created an extensive private garden at the house in Stonington and wrote a classic book on gardening, called Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (1981).

Stonington Free Library (1900)

The Stonington Free Library Association first met in 1887 and, the following year, established a library in Stonington Borough, located initially in a house on the corner of Main and Church Streets. Outgrowing this space, a new library building was constructed in Wadawanuck Park, on land donated for the purpose by the heirs of Samuel Denison. Opened in 1900, the new library was designed by Clinton and Russell of New York. The Stonington Free Library was expanded to the north in 1956 and again in 1990, with the addition of the Wimpfheimer Wing.

Mystic Congregational Church (1860)

Richard A. Wheeler writes, in the History of the Town of Stonington (1900), that the Mystic Congregational Church

was organized by thirty-seven seceding members from the First Congregational Church of Stonington, with five persons from other churches, on the 30th day of January, 1852, under the approval of a committee of the Consociation of Congregational Ministers and Churches of New London County[.....] The cornerstone of their present church edifice was laid with appropriate ceremonies Nov. 24th, 1859, and went on to completion and dedication. It was enlarged in 1869 by the addition of fourteen feet to its length.

The Williams-Pendleton House (1848)

The Greek revival house at 33 Main Street in Stonington Borough was built in 1846-1848 by Charles Phelps Williams, a prominent shipowner and businessman. The house replaced an earlier one, built shortly after 1768 by Ebenezer Cobb. Williams sold the house, in the year after it was completed, to Gurdon Pendleton, who then sold it to his brother Harris Pendleton, Jr. It was owned by printer Nathan G. Smith and his descendants from 1861 to 1924.

The Harris Pendleton House (1850)

Harris Pendleton was an accomplished Stonington seafarer. His house, at 35 Main Street, was built around 1850 of bricks that had been used as ships’ ballast.

The Clark Greenman House (1841)

Three brothers, George, Clark and Thomas Greenman, founded the the George Greenman & Co. shipyard in Mystic. The brothers soon built three adjacent Greek Revival homes along Greenmanville Avenue. The first was constructed by George in 1839 and this was followed by the houses of Clark and Thomas in 1841 and 1842. The Clark Greenman House has a porch and ornate Victorian decoration, which were added in the 1870s. The house was acquired by Mystic Seaport in 1949, initially serving as the museum’s library and now housing its administrative offices.