Capt. Willoughby Lynde House (1799)

The house at 174 North Cove Road in Old Saybrook was built in 1799 by Willoughby Lynde, a wealthy sea captain. Willoughby and his father, Samuel Lynde, engaged in farming and trade with the West Indies. Both were also slave owners. Nine enslaved people worked on the Lynde farm and wharf and also increased the family’s wealth by producing cloth. The Lynde House has an ell, which was built c. 1645 as a separate building. In the eighteenth century, the ell was owned by another mariner, Captain Samuel Doty, a West Indies trader and shipbuilder, who had a shipyard, warehouse and wharf on the Connecticut River. Capt. Doty’s own house was torn down in 1813, when the Samuel Hart, Jr. House was built. He used the ell as a bakery for ship’s bread. The ell was attached to the Lynde House about the time of the latter’s construction. The ell is to the right of the house’s front facade, while on the left is a new addition, constructed since 2008.

Billings Burtch House (1780)

The Billings Burtch House, located at 19 Nothwest Street in Stonington, was built circa 1780. The house may be named for Sgt. Billing Burtch (1746-1836). Grace Denison Wheeler describes the house in her 1903 book, The Homes of Our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn.:

The Billings Burtch house formerly stood where Mr. Peleg Hancox built his fine new house on Water Street, but about 1850 it was moved from there to the corner of Water and High Streets by Mr. Ezra Chesebrough, who purchased it and placed it where it now stands. It was some three feet or more above the road bed, with its yellow front door facing south, the approach to which was by some rambling stone flags, or slabs, about four or five inches thick, and placed as they were broken out with neither form nor comeliness. At one time the house was tenanted by George Howe, who was sexton and tithing-man at the old Baptist Church, and at another time Mrs. Elias Gallup, sister of Mrs. Ezra Chesebrough, lived there and had a millinery store. According to an old letter found, Mr. Billings Burtch died in this house aged ninety-two years.

The house must have been moved again to its current address.

John Twitchell House (1741)

John Twitchell, who in 1714 built what would become the Washband Tavern in Oxford, later erected another house in town, at what is now 7 Academy Road, in 1741. That same year, residents of Oxford petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly to form their own Ecclesiastical Society and the new congregation met at the Twitchell House before their new meeting house was erected next door in 1743. By 1804 a store had been added to the west side of the house. A Masonic Lodge was also organized in the house, which was the site of Oxford’s first post office when Walker Wilmot was appointed postmaster in 1807. Enos Candee bought the house in 1845 and extensively remodeled it. For several years, starting in 1903, the house was used by St. Peter’s Episcopal Church as a rectory.

Burrows House (1825)

The Burrows House at Mystic Seaport, built between 1805 and 1825, was originally erected on Water Street, on the Groton side of the Mystic River. In the 1860s and 1870s, it was the home of Seth and Jane Burrows. By that time the house had been raised above a new story in which Seth Winthrop Burrows sold groceries. The house was dismantled in 1953 to make way for a bank and then reassembled at Mystic Seaport. (more…)