The first Methodist Episcopal society in Derby was organized in 1793. In the early years, the members did not have their own building. According to The History of the Old Town of Derby (1880), “The ministers preached wherever they found open doors.” This included private homes, taverns and a schoolhouse. Again quoting from the History:

For a long time the society continued small and encountered much prejudice and some persecution. On one occasion, while a meeting was held in the house of Isaac Baldwin, which stood on the flat east of H. B. Beecher’s auger factory, the persecutors went up a ladder and stopped the top of the chimney in the time of preaching, so that the smoke drove the people out of the house. Squibs of powder were often thrown into the fire in time of worship, to the great annoyance of the people.

The Methodists constructed a church on Birmingham Green in 1837. This church continued in use until funds were raised at a tent revival in 1891 to build a new church. The current Derby United Methodist Church, built in the Romanesque style, was completed in 1894 on the site of the earlier church.

The Buck-Foreman Community Center in Portland houses the town’s police, parks and recreation, and youth services departments. The central section of the brownstone building dates to 1852 and was built in the Italianate style as the home of Jonathan Fuller, part-owner of the Shaler and Hall brownstone quarry. When he died in 1876, his daughter Jane inherited the house. At that time, the Town of Portland was looking for a new and more solid building to use as a town hall, as their current building, a former Episcopal church at the corner of Bartlet and High Streets, was a wooden structure built in 1790 and considered to be unsafe (part of the floor even caved in during a Republican Party caucus in 1894!). When Jane Fuller died in 1894, the town acquired the Fuller House and hired architect David Russell Brown of New Haven to remodel it in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The wing on the south side of the building was added in 1896 as the Buck Library, donated by Horace Buck, who was originally from Portland and whose three children had died and were buried in town. A matching addition on the north side of the Town Hall was built in 1941. The building continued in use as a Town Hall until 1999.

The stone Romanesque Revival block of connected buildings at 90-94 Bank Street in New London were built around 1860 (a sidewalk plaque indicates 1876). The commercial building was used by A.B. Currier, an auctioneer, around 1873 and was later home to Darrow & Comstock, ship chandlers. The New London Day newspaper began publishing on the building’s second floor in 1881. More recently, the building has housed Roberts Audio Video store, with the upper floors being used as a residence.

Four successive Litchfield County Courthouses have stood in the center of Litchfield. The first, built in 1752, was a plain building resembling a meeting house. The second, designed by William Sprats and built in 1797, was destroyed by fire in 1886. It was quickly replaced by a new courthouse, which also burned, just after its completion in 1888. Another new courthouse, designed by Waterbury architect Robert Wakeman Hill and constructed of Roxbury granite, was completed in 1889 in the Romanesque Revival style. As Litchfield embraced the Colonial Revival movement in the early twentieth century, a remodeling of the courthouse was undertaken in 1913-1914 to add space and also to better reflect the colonial character of the town. Georgian-style corner quoins were added to the structure and the original turreted tower was replaced with a new cupola. The building now serves as the Litchfield Judicial District Courthouse.

Frederic S. Dennis, in The Norfolk Village Green (1917), writes that the earliest library in Norfolk dates to 1761:

A library company was then formed, and about 150 volumes were collected; and this library remained in activity about thirty-five years, when it was dissolved, the books to be distributed among the original donors. In 1824 a second library was formed and incorporated with 142 volumes, besides periodicals. Like its predecessor it was short lived and dissolved in 1866. The books passed into the hands of Mrs. Charlotte Mills, and Miss Louise Stevens, who subsequently founded a third library, which was in the hands of a committee. This new Library was placed on a business basis and a yearly fee of one dollar was charged for membership. It continued for a year and its books formed the nucleus of a fourth Library. In 1881 Miss Isabella Eldridge opened a reading room in the Scoville house on the Green, and the books of the third Library were placed there.

Isabella Eldridge’s reading room was so successful, that in 1888 she decided to endow a library in memory of her parents, the Rev. Joseph Eldridge and Sarah Battell Eldridge. She hired architect George Keller of Hartford to design the Norfolk Library, which was constructed in 1888 and opened to the public in 1889. The library has a first floor built of red freestone, quarried at Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The upper floors feature fish scale shingles and the original roof had fluted Spanish tile, since replaced. In 1911, Keller designed a reading room, added to the rear of the Library. A later addition is the children’s wing of 1985, designed by Alec Frost and also constructed of Longmeadow red freestone.

When Albert C. Raymond of Montville and East Hartford died in 1880, he left $10,000 in trust for the establishment of a library in Montville. A library had existed in Montville Center as early as 1823: the Union Library, a private institution located in an old store on the site of the present Congregational Church. As described in Henry A. Baker’s History of Montville (1896),

After the death of Mrs. Raymond, 16 Sept., 1883, the sum donated for the founding of the Raymond Library was received from the executors of the estate of Albert C. Raymond by the Raymond Library Company, who immediately caused a library building to be erected at a cost of two thousand dollars. The building was a beautiful brick structure, built under a contract by Mr. Robert Turner of Norwich, and completed in the winter of 1884-5. At the annual meeting of the Raymond Library Company, held October 14, 1885, the library building was formally opened to the public; a bountiful collation was prepared by the ladies of the town, which was partaken of and heartily appreciated by all the persons who gathered at the chapel of the Congregational church at Montville Center on the occasion.

The Raymond Library has since been expanded with some very obvious modern additions.

The New Britain National Bank building is on on West Main Street, next to the buildings which now serve as New Britain’s City Hall. It was built for the Commercial Trust Company in 1927, which failed during the Great Depression and was bought out by the New Britain National Bank in the 1930s. The building, which is also known as the Anvil Bank for the anvil motif which recurs frequently in its intricate brickwork, was designed in the Romanesque Revival style, with some Gothic elements as well. The bronze doors feature designs of beehives and Mercury and Buffalo coins. The building’s interior is also impressive: the lobby makes use of marble and bronze and has a 30-foot ceiling. The structure has been mostly vacant since 1996 and has suffered from deferred maintenance. After several years of planning to restore and adapt the bank building to new uses, work began a few years ago to covert it for stores and residential units, although progress was later halted by the economic downturn.

The Church of Christ is a Baptist and Congregational church in West Winsted, Winchester. An Ecclesiastical Society in Winsted was first formed in 1778, half way between the societies of Winchester and Barkhamsted. In 1853, as related by John Boyd in Annals and Family Records of Winchester (1873), a committee was appointed to consider “the organization of a second Congregational church and society to be located in the West Village.” The committee reported “that the large increase of population, and the prospect of a more rapid accession in the future, rendered an increase of religious privileges and accommodations indispensable to the well-being of the community ; and recommended an early organization of an Ecclesiastical society, and the location and building of a house of worship.” The new congregation constructed a church in 1857, later replacing it with the current church, dedicated in 1899. With the erection of a new church, the old building, together with an adjoining chapel built in 1860, were purchased and remodeled for business purposes. The dedication of the new church was described in the Hartford Weekly Times of September 7, 1899. The reporter explained that the church was built “of Torrington granite, trimmed with Long Meadow sand stone and is of French Gothic style.” The first and second churches of Winsted, faced with expensive repairs after the Flood of 1955, merged together with the First Baptist Church in 1957. The new federation was called the Church of Christ (Baptist and Congregational). 119 members of the old First Congregational Church, fearing that the use of their church building would be discontinued in favor of using just the Second Congregational Church for worship, left the federation. Their church is now known as the First Church of Winsted (also Baptist and Congregational), while the Second Church building continues under the name of the Church of Christ.

The Royal Arcanum is an organization created in the nineteenth century to provide health insurance to its members. A group of businessmen, who were members in Norfolk, hired architect Alfredo Taylor to design an impressive multi-purpose building in the town center. The large structure was designed to have commercial businesses on the first floor and meeting spaces for the Royal Arcanum Council and the Masonic Lodge on the third floor. It also housed the town’s post office and fire department. The style of the brick building, constructed in 1904-1906, combines Romanesque and Chateauesque elements, with decorative terra cotta panels. Today, the building continues to contain offices, shops and apartments.

Built in 1888, the Alanson Trask House, on Gillett Street in Hartford‘s Asylum Hill neighborhood (pdf), combines elements of the Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival styles. The house has an impressively broad entrance arch and terra-cotta tiles covering the second story.