Roxbury Congregational Church (1838)

Roxbury Congregational Church

In 1731 residents of the Shippaug district of Woodbury petitioned the General Assembly to have their own minister during the winter months, when travel to the meeting house in Woodbury was difficult. The petition was granted and the following year a small meeting house was erected on the crest of the first ridge west of the present Roxbury-Woodbury town line. In 1743 the residents of Shippaug became a separate Ecclesiastical Society from Woodbury under the name of Roxbury. A new meeting house on the same site was built in 1746. The next meeting house was built in the present town center of Roxbury (approximately at what is now 12 Church Street) in 1795. The following year, Roxbury was incorporated as a town. The current meeting house of the Roxbury Congregational Church was built at 24 Church Street in 1838.

Burwell Tavern – Thomas House (1785)

Burwell Tavern - Thomas House

Little is known about the origins of the house at 4 Southbury Road in Roxbury, which originally served as a tavern and stage-coah stop. It is said to have been built in 1785 by a man named Burwell. He may be identified with one of several men named Brothwell (a variant spelling of the same surname) who lived in Roxbury at the time [refer to Roxbury Place-Name Stories (2010) by Jeannine Green, p. 17 for more details]. In 1839 the building was purchased by the Thomas family who owned it for over a century. The most well known member of the family was Harvey Thomas (died 1894). He raised and sold horses. A nineteenth-century barn that survives on the property almost certainly served as his horse barn.

Christ Episcopal Church, Roxbury (1807)

Christ Episcopal Church, Roxbury

An Episcopal parish, believed to be the oldest in Litchfield County, was organized in Roxbury in 1740. The first Episcopal church building in Roxbury was built soon after (certainly by 1763 and perhaps as early as the 1740s). That church, which does not survive today, was located on “Old Roxbury Road” near the junction with “Lower Country Road.” The current church building, at 4 Weller’s Bridge Road, was erected in 1807. It took the name Christ Church in 1841. Its current Carpenter Gothic style dates to 1861, when the structure was rotated from its original eastward facing position to face south and was completely renovated.

St. Patrick Church, Roxbury (1885)

St. Patrick Church

Private homes hosted Masses in Roxbury until a mission church dedicated to St. Patrick was built in 1885 at 25 Church Street. In the 1880s, Irish Catholics had been settling in Roxbury to work in the local quarries. In 1908 the mission was placed in the care of a new parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Washington Depot. In the early 1950s, St. Patrick Church’s bell tower had to be taken down due to storm damage and the entry was altered.

Remember Baker House (1733)

Baker House, Sentry Hill Rd., Roxbury

Ethan Allen’s parents were married in the house at 112 Sentry Hill Road in Roxbury. The house was built by John Baker around 1733. John’s daughter Mary Baker married Joseph Allen in 1736 or 1737. Their son, Ethan Allen, was born in Litchfield in 1737 or 1738. John’s son, Remember Baker, married Tamar Warner. He was killed in a hunting accident. Remember Baker, Jr. (1737-1775) was only three years old at time. He grew up in the house and nearby lived his cousins, Ethan Allen and Seth Warner. He later joined them in Vermont as one of the Green Mountain Boys who first battled the forces of New York State and then joined the Revolution and captured Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. Described by another cousin, Norman Hurlbut, as a great frontiersman, a tough, redheaded, freckle-faced young giant, Remember Baker was more hot headed than Allen or Warner. Later in 1775 he left Ticonderoga on a scouting expedition and was killed on August 22 by two Indians who had taken his boat. They cut off his head and placed it on a pole and carried it to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. British officers there bought the head and buried it. The Baker family occupied the house in Roxbury until 1796. A later owner of the house was Treat Davidson, a prominent citizen of Roxbury who served as a Selectman and owned a gristmill.