Tolland County House (1893)
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 Posted in Houses, Tolland, Victorian Eclectic | No Comments »
On Tolland Green is located the Old Tolland County Jail, the earliest surviving section of which dates to 1856. At one time the Jail was attached to a hotel known as the County House (first built in 1786), which could accommodate people who had business at the nearby county court. The hotel was owned by the state, but was managed under contract by a private innkeeper (who was sometimes also the jailer). The court later moved to Rockville in 1888 and the hotel was not rebuilt after it burned in 1893. Instead, it was replaced by a new County House, used primarily as a residence for the jailer and his family. The Victorian building was designed by local builder James Clough. Today, the house and attached jail serve as a museum, operated by the Tolland Historical Society.
The Hicks-Stearns Family Museum (1788)
Thursday, November 26th, 2009 Posted in Houses, Tolland, Victorian Eclectic | No Comments »
This Thanksgiving we focus on a house that is now a family museum. The Hicks-Stearns Family Museum, established in 1980, is a Victorian era home, located on Tolland Green. The earliest parts of the house date to the eighteenth century, sometime before 1788, when then owner Benoni Shepard established a tavern in the home known as Shepard’s Tavern at the Sign of the Yellow Ball. Shepard was also a deacon of the Congregational Church and served as postmaster, with a post office in his home, from 1795 to 1807. The house was occupied by the Hicks family from 1845 into the the 1970s. The family enlarged and embellished the house with many Victorian-era architectural features in the 1870s and 1880s. Charles R. Hicks was a leading merchant in Providence and New York, who retired to Tolland. He married Maria Amelia Stearns Their son, Ratcliffe Hicks, was president of the Canfield Rubber Works of Bridgeport and a member of the state legislature. The Ratcliffe Hicks School of Agriculture at UCONN is also named for him.
The Daniel Benton Homestead (1720)
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 Posted in Colonial, Houses, Tolland | No Comments »
The Daniel Benton Homestead in Tolland was built in 1720 and was home to members of the Benton family until 1932. In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, twenty-four Hessian officers, who had surrendered after the British defeat at Saratoga, were quartered in the house on their journey to Boston, from where they would be shipped back to Germany. Daniel Benton had three grandsons who fought in the war: two died as a result of imprisonment by the British while the third, Elisha Benton, returned home in late 1776, after his confinement on a prison ship, where he had contracted smallpox. Back home, he was nursed by Jemima Barrows, whom he had courted before the war. He died after a few weeks, and she followed shortly after, having contracted the disease during their time together. They were both buried on the property, but were not buried next to each other, as they had not married. The Daniel Benton Homestead is famous as a haunted house and numerous articles with ghost stories about the house have been written on many sites. The house was purchased in 1932 by Florrie Bishop Bowering, a WTIC radio personality, who lived there until she died in 1968. The next owners, Charles B. Goodstein and William A Shocket, donated the house the following year to the Tolland Historical Society to open as a museum.
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