At 1332 Storrs Road, on the campus of the University of Connecticut, is a colonial house that has served as student housing and is now UCONN’s Veterans House. The house was built c. 1757 and was the home of Cordial Storrs. This is most likely the Cordial Storrs (1692-1782) described in The Storrs Family (1886), by Charles Storrs:
Cordial Storrs of Mansfield, Conn., third son and ninth child of Samuel Storrs of Sutton-cum-Lound, Nottinghamshire, England, Barnstable, Mass., and Mansfield, Conn., was born in Barnstable, Mass., Oct. 14, 1692, and came with his father to Mansfield, Conn., in or about 1698. He married Hannah, daughter of Thomas Wood of Rowley, Mass. [They had four children]
Mrs. Hannah Wood Storrs died March 18, 1764. There is a tradition that she joined the Separatists and was disciplined by the church, but there is nothing in regard to this on the church records. The Separatist movement followed the great revivals which prevailed in Windham County in 1740-41. Itinerant preachers went about producing violent excitement among the people, decrying the old religious worship, and organizing new churches.
Cordial Storrs married, Oct. 10, 1765, Mrs. Catharine Bicknell, widow of (Capt.) Zachr. Bicknell of Ashford, Conn. He was sixty-seven [actually closer to 73] years of age at the time of this second marriage, and he seems to have contracted it with great care as to financial matters.
The farm and home of Cordial Storrs were in the North Parish. At the first church meeting of the Congregational church in that Parish, he was chosen deacon “by a very unanimous vote;” an office which he held until his death at the advanced age of ninety years, Oct. 1782.
His son Cordial [born 1728] died, unmarried, in 1755, at the age of twenty-seven, and with him the male line of this branch of the family became extinct. [Their son Jabez died in 1826]
Another Cordial Storrs lived from c. 1758 to 1790 and married Lettice Cummings.