Hodge Memorial Library & Museum (1937)

The first public library in the town of Roxbury was established in October 1896. It was housed in the back rooms of the old Town Hall until Charles Watson Hodge, upon his death in 1936, bequeathed $15,000 to erect a building for a library and museum. Completed in 1937 by Clayton B. Squire, the stone building was named after Charles Hodge’s father, Albert Lafayette Hodge. A north wing addition was completed in 1967 through a donation by Everett Hurlburt. A new building, the Minor Memorial Library, was erected in the early 1990s to become the town’s public library, with the Hodge Memorial, at 4 North Street, continuing as a museum open to the public by appointment only.

James Leavenworth House (1842)

The house at 28 Church Street in Roxbury was built c. 1842 by James Leavenworth (b. 1815). It was later owned by Charles Beardsley (1807-1888), builder of the Roxbury Congregational Church, and continued in his family until it was acquired by the church for use as a parsonage. It was the church’s second parsonage, used after the house at 16 Church Street, built in 1883, which is now a private residence. (more…)

Eleazer Welton House (1830)

The house at 72 Welton Hill Road in Roxbury was thought to have been built c. 1790 by the Welton family, which owned land in the eastern part of Roxbury for many years. According to Homes of Old Woodbury (1959), by the early nineteenth century the house was owned by Eleazer Welton, whose widow, Nancy M. Wlton, left it to their son, William Welton. He deeded it to a later Eleazer Welton in 1873. The book Roxbury Place-name Stories: Facts, Folklore, Fibs (2009), by Jeannine Green, dates the house to 1830 and speculates there may have been only one Eleazer Welton. After his first wife Nancy died, he left their son William with her father Syrenus Ward. Eleazer married his second wife, Adelia, in 1849 and his son William was probably quitclaiming his rights in the house in 1873.

Arthur Miller – Marilyn Monroe House (1783)

Glimpsed through the trees in the image above is a house that was once the home of two of the most famous people of the twentieth century. Located at 232 Tophet Road in Roxbury, it has been much altered over the years. It was built for a Revolutionary War veteran and was later the residence of playwright Arthur Miller and his wife (from 1956 to 1961) Marilyn Monroe. The couple had originally planned to replace the old farmhouse with a new home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but they decided the plan produced by the famous architect was too impractical and expensive. According to Homes of Old Woodbury (1959), p. 247, the house was built about 1783 by Captain David Leavenworth. Sheldon Leavenworth sold it to Elliot Beardsley in 1847 and twenty years later it was acquired by Charles N. Ward. Frederick H. Leavenworth bought the house in 1888 and his son sold it to Miller in 1949, the year the playwright wrote Death of a Salesman at his first Roxbury home. Miller lived in Roxbury from 1947 until his death in 2005. The Leavenworth House has has remained in Miller’s family. Ten years after his death, his daughter donated a 100-acre parcel to the Roxbury Land Trust.

Gen. Ephraim Hinman House (1784)

Gen. Hinman House

The house at 1 Church Street in Roxbury was built in 1784 by Gen. Ephraim Hinman (1753-1829), a Revolutionary War veteran, merchant and prominent leader in the Connecticut Militia. Gen. Hinman also served in the state legislature and spearheaded the incorporation of the Town of Roxbury in 1796. He was born in Southbury and, as described in William Cothren’s History of Ancient Woodbury (1854):

Gen. Hinman removed to Roxbury about the year 1784, and built a house in the center of the village, which for a country residence at that period, was regarded as belonging to the first class. For about thirty years he was engaged in mercantile pursuits. During this time he became an extensive landholder, having in his possession at one time, about one thousand acres. He was not a practical farmer. but his love of real estate induced him to retain it, until the interest he paid, connected with losses he sustained, greatly embarrassed him in his declining years, and thus operated disastrously on the pecuniary interests of his son, who became involved in attempting to relieve his father.

Nathan Smith House (1790)

Nathan Smith House (1790)

At 12 Church Street in Roxbury is a house built circa 1790 for Judge Nathan Smith (1770-1835). According to Homes of Old Woodbury (1959), p. 250, the front section of the house was built sometime after the original rear section and the columns in front, like those of the Phineas Smith House in Roxbury, came from a church in New Haven that had burned in a fire. Nathan Smith and his brother Nathaniel both attended Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School. Nathan Smith was a lawyer and Whig politician. He served as Prosecuting Attorney for New Haven County from 1817 until his death and as United States Attorney for the district of Connecticut from 1828 to 1829. He was a delegate to the Connecticut state constitutional convention in 1818 and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Connecticut in 1825, losing to Oliver Wolcott. Smith served as a US Senator from 1833 to 1835, dying while in office in Washington, D.C., where President Andrew Jackson and his Cabinet attended his funeral in the Senate Chamber. There is a nineteenth-century barn on the Smith property in Roxbury, perhaps built by Smith’s nephew, Nathan R. Smith (b. 1811).