John Fuller House (1824)

The house at 463 Halliday Avenue in Suffield was built in 1824 by George Fuller. It remained in the Fuller family (and is known as the John Fuller House) until the Town of Suffield bought the property in 1887 to serve as a Town Farm. The house became the town’s “poorhouse” or “alms house,” whose able-bodied residents were required to work at the adjacent farm. In 1886, a man known as “Old Cato” died in the house who had been a slave owned by Major John Davenport in Stamford in the years before the War of 1812. The house was sold back to private ownership at auction in 1952.