Perhaps the most impressive of the Shingle-style summer houses in the Borough of Fenwick (pdf) in Old Saybrook is the one built in 1900 for Morgan Gardner Bulkeley. A legendary politician, Morgan G. Bulkeley was a four-term mayor of Hartford, 54th Governor of Connecticut (1889-1893), U.S. Senator, first president of Baseball’s National League and the third president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company for 43 years. Bulkeley lived on Washington Street in Hartford and was one of the leaders of the summer community of Fenwick, In 1899 he commissioned the Hartford architect, W.E. Becker to design his summer cottage at 5 Pettipaug Avenue in Fenwick. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 99-108.
Next west of the Bulkeley Cottage is another Shingle-style summer home at 7 Pettipaug Avenue. The rear ell of the cottage was built in 1880 by Rev. William Ford Nichols. Around 1890, the cottage was acquired by Justus Bulkeley, who enlarged it to its present size. You can read more about this cottage and its various owners in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 108-110. The cottage was undergoing alterations when the photo below was taken last week.
