Eli Haskell House (1812)

At one end of old Main Street in the East Windsor Hill section of South Windsor are a pair of brick Federal-style houses with identical facades. The first, located at 1909 Main Street, was built by Eli Bissell Hakell, a merchant, in 1812. The second (featured in a post from the earliest days of this website) was built a year later by his father-in-law, Aaron Bissell. Eli Haskell (1778-1861) married two Bissell sisters: first Sophia (1785-1816) in 1810 and then Susan (1790-1871) in 1818. Eli and Susan Haskell later moved to Ogdensburg, St. Lawrence County, New York. Eli’s son, Frederick Haskell (1810-1890), was one of the founders of the Haskell and Barker Car Company.

Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse (1862)

Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse

Pleasant Valley District #5 Schoolhouse, at 771 Elington Road in South Windsor, is a former one-room schoolhouse built in 1862. It replaced an earlier school that had been built on the north side of Ellington Road in 1837. In use as a school until 1952, the building was later renovated and expanded to serve as a museum of town history by the South Windsor Historical Society. (more…)

Elmore-Burnham House (1816)

78 Long Hill Road

Yesterday I featured the Harvey Elmore House in South Windsor. Across the street, at 78 Long Hill Road, is another Elmore family house. It was built by a member of the Elmore family as a one-story gambrel-roofed house sometime before 1816, when Sarah Elmore Burnham moved in. In the 1840s her son Timothy altered and enlarged the house, at the same time altering it in the Greek Revival style. The house remained in the family until 1973.

Harvey Elmore House (1843)

Harvey Elmore House

The Greek Revival house at 87 Long Hill Road in South Windsor was built in 1843 by Harvey Elmore, who first demolished an earlier house on the site. The Elmore family settled the Long Hill area in the early eighteenth century and built many houses along Long Hill Road. Harvey Elmore (1799-1873) farmed the land and was a member of the general assembly of Connecticut in 1842 and 1844 and captain of an independent rifle company attached to the Twenty-fifth Connecticut Militia from 1836 to 1838. He married Clarissa Burnham in 1830 and the couple had two children. Their son, Samuel Edward Elmore, became president of the Connecticut River Banking Company. Their daughter, Mary Janette Elmore (1831-1922), never married and lived in the house until her death at the age of ninety-one. After her death her reminiscences, written when she was eighty, were found in the house’s attic. They were published by the South Windsor Historical Society in 1976 under the title Long Hill, South Windsor, Connecticut. The house was sold out of the family after her death.

Asahel Olcott House (1782)

Asahel Olcott House

The house at 1091 Main Street in South Windsor is currently attracting the attention of the preservation community who have sought to delay its demolition. Its current owners claim that renovation of the building, which has suffered deterioration through neglect over 80 years, is not feasible. Built in 1782, it is known as the Asahel Olcott House and was built by either Asahel (1754-1831) or his father Benoni Olcott (1716-1799). It is an unusual example in Connecticut of a house with a “Beverly jog” (usually only found in houses on the North Shore of Massachusetts). Asahel Olcott was a soldier in the Revolutionary War who responded to the Lexington Alarm in 1775.

John P. Jones House (1882)

John P. Jones House

The Stick Style/Queen Anne Style house at 1063 Main Street in South Windsor was for John Pantry Jones in 1882, the same year he was elected to the Connecticut General Assembly. John P. Jones was born in Hartford in 1832 and his family settled in South Windsor when he was fifteen. Jones was a prosperous farmer and tobacco grower who served in a number of town offices in South Windsor: Assessor, member of the Board of Relief, Selectman, and Agent of the Town Deposit and School Society Funds. He was descended from early settlers of Hartford. His grandfather, Nathaniel Jones, who served in the Revolutionary War, had a farm in Hartford near what later became State Street and Front Street. His father, John Pantry Jones (1791-1880), who served in the War of 1812, ran a retail grocery and oyster business in Hartford for thirty years and had a house at the intersection of State and Commerce Streets. In 1847 the family moved to their farm in South Windsor.