The house at 49 Barnes Hill Road in Burlington is currently for sale. One of the present owners of the house has provided me the results of some of her research into the history of the property. She writes that
The property was purchased/settled we believe in 1803 (previous owners found a dated cornerstone in the cellar) when Burlington was a part of Bristol (Burlington was incorporated in 1806). The original owners were Amzi [Barnes (1784-1865)] and Sophoronia [Mills] Barnes. We think they built the original structure. They had 10 children, many of whom stayed in the area. Many also died in childhood and are buried in a local Burlington cemetery.
The house has clearly been expanded over time and has been thoroughly renovated for modern living inside. The current main structure we believe dates back to the 1880s and shows up on the Burlington land records then. Our current family room originally served as the “birthing barn” for the new calves on the farm and was later finished as a family room and connected to the main house in the 20th century via a connecting “mud room”.
One of Amzi and Sophronia‘s sons was Isaac Barnes (1830-1909), a meat merchant and lumber dealer who was a member of Connecticut state house of representatives from Burlington in 1867. Another son was Cromwell Barnes, who was the father of Adna North Barnes. Adna had five children with his second wife, Anna Delight Upson Barnes, who are pictured on page 81 of the Images of America volume on Burlington. One of the children was Louis Barnes.
One descendant who lived in the home, Louis Barnes, [was] born during the 1888 blizzard. He was noted as a prize cattle breeder in CT. I believe he is credited with bringing some of the first Swiss cows to America.
There is an article about him, “Louis Barnes: An Award Winning Cattle Breeder,” by James Klaneski, which can be found in the document Some Burlington, Connecticut Articles of the Past Gathered Together, Volume 1 (Chapter 6, page 86) on the Town of Burlington’s website. The obituary of Louis Upson Barnes, who died in 1979, can be read on page 12 of another document on the same site, “Obituaries of Burlington People.” His wife was Laura Raynor Barnes (1891-1973), who wrote a history of the Burlington Congregational Church at its 150th anniversary. The current owner of the house notes that Laura also “ran an International Youth Hostel out of our house sometime in the 1950s/1960s.”
We know that the current Barnes Hill Road was named after the family who built our house. They originally owned the barns across the street, what is now known as the “Cow House” down the road, which apparently originally served as another barn for cattle, and the yellow Victorian style cottage down the street which served as a home for the single farmhands (heresay–I don’t know this all for sure).
At some point in the early-mid 20th century a man named Stanley F. Withe purchased the home and acreage and later sold the property to developers for the modern homes that comprise the surrounding neighborhood. Mr. Withe was an executive with Aetna insurance and served also as a CT State Senator for many years. His son [Stanley F. Withe, Jr.] was arrested in [1964] for operating a counterfeiting operation out of his printing business in Unionville, CT and served time in federal prison.
This home, 49 Barnes Hill Rd was illustrated in the last Connecticut map of Landmark homes, in 1856. This landmarks wee used to navigate public roads at that time and this one could be seen from Rt 4 back then as the hill was kept cleared for its apple orchards, wood lots and grazing land.
The counterfeiting plates used by Stanley Withe were found by the FBI in the Burlington town dump!
I recently read a description of 49 Barnes Hill Road in Burlington, Connecticut. I grew up in this house, and I wanted to correct a few items that were listed in the description.
My parents owned the home from 1950 to 1974, and my six siblings and I were all raised there.
The house looked quite different than it does today. It was white with dark trim and shutters, and there were columned porches along the front of the main house and the wing. There was also a row of 100-year-old maple trees all along the front of the property, on top of the stone wall that is visible in the photo. The people who bought the house from my parents made the majority of the changes to the house, including the blue paint. I was able to visit in 1982, and received a guided tour of all the many changes from the new owners.
The current house was built on the site in 1859. The house that was previously on the site had burned. A number of items from the burned home were salvaged, and subsequently included in the 1859 building. Among these were some small multi-paned windows in the kitchen, and some glass doorknobs that were on all the bedrooms.
The description on your site mentions that the current family room was a “birthing barn”. Actually, it was a woodshed. There are large, high windows on the west side of the family room that were originally doors opening high in the wall to the hill outside. The farmer could back his wagon up to these doors and dump in the wood. During my time in the house, the woodshed had no interior access to the main house. What the description calls a “mud room” was actually a pantry off the kitchen. It was fitted with marble slab shelves, and was used for storing pies and other foods that could be kept cool there. This pantry only opened into the kitchen. This pantry now connects the kitchen and family room, and has a door to the outside. The outside door didn’t exist in my time; the new owners blocked off a door that opened directly from the porch into the kitchen and instead created this new door that opened from the porch into the pantry.
There was also an ice house on the property, located directly north of the main structure. I don’t know if that still exists. This was originally used to store blocks of ice in sawdust. (We used it to store bicycles, lawn mowers etc.)
The description on your site mentions Louis and Laura Barnes. They were dairy farmers that lived down the road in what is called the yellow Victorian cottage in the description. This cottage was not for the farmhands; it was where Louis and Laura lived. My siblings and I often visited Louis’s barns, next to his house, to gawk at the bull he kept (one with a ring in his nose!), and to watch him milk the cows. Louis owned much of the land to the west of our house and ran his dairy cattle there. Laura did not run a youth hostel out of 49 Barnes Hill Rd in the 50s and 60s. (Recall that my family lived in this house in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.) The hostel was run out of the house that Louis and Laura lived in, down at the turn of the road.
The Withes were a family that lived in the house immediately to the south of 49 Barnes Hill Rd. I wasn’t aware of Mr. Withe being arrested in 1964, since I was a child at the time, but I can’t say I’m surprised. As children, we were forbidden to have any contact with the Withes, since my father didn’t consider him a trustworthy man, and had had several negative run-ins with him.