Whitehouse (1799)

The Joseph Battell House, a 1799 mansion off Norfolk Green on the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate, has long been known as “Whitehouse,” its name predating that of the White House in Washington, D.C. The house was built by Joseph Battell, a wealthy merchant whose store had become the market center for the region. He built the house for his future bride, Sarah Robbins, daughter of Rev. Ammi Ruhamah Robbins, minister of the Congregational Church next door. One of their sons, Robbins Battell, was born in the house in 1819 and died there in 1895. An 1839 Yale graduate, Robbins Battell was an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, and a benefactor to his town and Yale University. Called by Frederic S. Dennis “the father of modern Norfolk,” Battell was also a composer and art collector, who had a picture gallery at Whitehouse containing the works of many notable American artists. His only daughter, Ellen, was raised in Whitehouse and later lived there with her second husband, Carl Stoeckel. They were great patrons of music, constructing the Music Shed on their Norfolk estate in 1906. Carl Stoeckel died in 1925 and when Ellen died in 1939, she bequeathed the estate as a trust, primarily for the performance of music under the auspices of Yale University. It continues as the home of the Yale Summer School of Music–Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Whitehouse, which has been enlarged and altered over the years, is currently being renovated.

William H. Taft Mansion (1870)

Taft Mansion

The Mansard-roofed house at 111 Whitney Avenue in New Haven (pdf) was built in 1870. It is known as the William H. Taft Mansion because the former President (1909-1913) (soon to be Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court) owned the house around the time of the First World War, although he never actually lived in it. He sold the house in 1921. Extensively remodeled in 2008, the house was recently used as the offices of Research Edge, an independent research firm, which later became Hedgeye Risk Management. More recently, the house has become home to the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a Yale conservative group founded in 2010.

Norfolk

Buildings Index

Greenwoods Road East
3 Giles Pettibone Tavern (1794)
9 Norfolk Library (1888)
19 Ralph Emerson House (1806)

Greenwoods Road West
14 Royal Arcanum Building (1904)
20 Infinity Hall (1883)

Litchfield Road
12 Battell Chapel (1887-1888)
12 Church of Christ Congregational (1813)

Stoeckel Road
17 Whitehouse (1799)

Village Green
9 Joseph Jones House (1776)
13 Norfolk Academy (1840)

Links

Norfolk Historical Society
http://www.norfolkhistoricalsociety.com/

Norfolk History (1837)
http://www.rockvillemama.com/norfolkhistory.htm

“Taylor’s Architectural Style Evident Around Norfolk”
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/courant-250/moments-in-history/explore-44/hc-norfolk-architecture-20140717,0,4705573.story

Infinity Music Hall & Bistro
http://www.infinityhall.com/

Books

A half-century sermon delivered at Norfolk, October 28, 1811, fifty years from the ordination of the author to the work of the ministry in that place (1811), by Ammi R. Robbins

A Brief History of the Town of Norfolk Conn., from 1738 to 1844 (1847), by Auren Roys

History of Norfolk, Litchfield County, Connecticut, 1744-1900 (1900), opening chapters by Joseph Eldridge; compiled by Theron Wilmot Crissry

The Norfolk Village Green (1917), by Frederic S. Dennis

Catalogue of the Norfolk Library, Norfolk, Conn., 1888-1907 (1907)

Benjamin Trumbull House (1790)

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The Benjamin Trumbull House in Colchester was built sometime between 1790 and 1801. According to Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, Vol. IV (1907), by Franklin Bowditch Dexter:

Benjamin Trumbull, the only son of the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Trumbull (Yale 1759) who survived infancy, was born in North Haven, Connecticut, on September 24, 1769. He remained in New Haven for two years after graduation, filling the office of College Butler, and pursuing the study of law. On his admission to the bar he returned to the vicinity of the birthplace of his parents, and settled in Colchester, Connecticut, where he had a long career of usefulness. He was sent to the Legislature as a Representative eleven times between 1807 and 1831, and for about twenty years (1818-38) was Judge of the Probate Districts of East Haddam and Colchester.

Benjamin Trumbull’s son, Lyman Trumbull, was born and raised in the house. Lyman Trumbull later became a senator from Illinois and a founder of the Republican Party and an associate of Abraham Lincoln. He helped author the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ending slavery. The house is on the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

Capt. James Monroe Buddington House (1854)

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The 1854 Greek Revival home (with later Victorian additions) of Captain James Monroe Buddington, is on Monument Street in the Groton Bank neighborhood of Groton. Capt. Buddington was a whaling captain, famous for his recovery of the HMS Resolute. The Resolute was a British ship that, in 1852, was part of a four ship expedition sent to the Arctic to investigate the fate of the lost John Franklin Expedition, which had been searching for the Northwest Passage to Asia. The Resolute became lodged in ice in the Canadian Arctic and in 1854, after a year-and-a-half of being trapped, the ship was abandoned by her crew. Capt. Buddington, on the whaling ship George Henry, found the deserted Resolute, which had become freed from the ice and was drifting, having traveled nearly 1200 miles! He sailed the lost ship back to New London, arriving on Christmas Day, 1855. The US government restored the ship, which was returned to Britain and presented to Queen Victoria amid much fanfare. The Resolute would continue in service until 1879. When she was decommissioned, Queen Victoria had several desks made from her timbers and one was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. The famed Resolute Desk has been used by many presidents since then, frequently as the President’s desk in the Oval Office.

Gideon Welles House (1783)

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The Gideon Welles House, on Hebron Avenue in Glastonbury, was built in 1783 by Samuel Welles, a Revolutionary War captain, for his son of the same name, who had married Anna Hale in 1782. The most famous member of the Welles family to live in the house was Gideon Welles, who was born there in 1802 and would become Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy during the Civil War. The house was inherited by Gideon‘s brother Thaddeus Welles, but Gideon Welles made a notable return visit in 1864 for the funeral of his nephew, who had been a casualty of the war. During the visit, Welles sat on the porch with Admiral David G. Farragut to plan what would become the successful Union victory at the Battle of Mobile Bay. Gideon Welles had been living in a house on Linden Place in Hartford before the Civil War and later lived in a house on Charter Oak Place. Welles also wrote about his time in Lincoln’s cabinet in his book, Lincoln and Seward and in his posthumously published diary.

The house was lived in by members of the Welles family until 1932. It was originally located where the Welles-Chapman Tavern now stands, but was going to be demolished in 1935 to make way for a Post Office. Dr. Lee J. Whittles and others in town formed a committee to save the house and in 1936, Ernest Victor Llewellyn purchased the house and moved it to a neighboring lot on the New London Turnpike (Hebron Avenue). This committee would eventually become the Historical Society of Glastonbury. In 1974, the house was again moved further up Hebron Avenue to become a Senior Center. Still owned by the town today, the building now houses businesses and shops.

Oldgate (1790)

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In 1786, the wealthy Farmington merchant Zenas Cowles bought a house on Main Street, at Meadow Lane, that had been lived in by blacksmith Isaac Bidwell (and earlier by the town’s first two ministers). Zenas’s brother, Solomon Cowles, lived in a house just across Meadow Road. In 1790, Zenas employed the British architect William Sprats to build a newer and grander house around the older one. Sprats had been a British officer during the Revolutionary War, but was captured and remained in America after the war. He may have employed former Hessian soldiers, who had also been prisoners, as carpenters in the construction of the house. Designed in an elaborately detailed Georgian-style, the house is known as Oldgate because of the property’s front gate, which features a broken scroll pediment and an Asian design signifying “peace and prosperity.” In the nineteenth century, the house was home to Thomas Cowles, a prominent Farmington resident, politician and abolitionist. A later owner of the house was Rear Admiral William Sheffield Cowles, whose wife, Anna Roosevelt Cowles, was the sister of President Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Farmington in October of 1901.