Trinity Episcopal Church, Torrington (1897)

Trinity Episcopal Church in Torrington has a prominent location at the corner of Water and Prospect Streets. The origins of the parish go back to 1843, when it was a mission of Christ Church in Harwinton. The original church building on the site was built of wood in 1844. The parish grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century as Torrington industrialized. Some of the early members were laborers from England who were brought to work at the Coe Brass Company. The present granite church building was erected in 1897-1898. Adjacent to the church is a is the parish house, built in 1908-1909, which has an upper parish hall with a stage and a lower hall with Sunday school rooms and a chapel. The parish hall and a Tudor Revival-style rectory, built in 1917, surround a distinctive courtyard.

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Lilley Block #3 (1896)

In 1894 a fire destroyed the factory buildings of the Turner and Seymour Manufacturing Company in Torrington. George Lilley, a Waterbury developer who later became governor of Connecticut (serving for a less than four months in office before his death in 1909), bought the company’s land between Water Street and the Naugatuck River. Between 1896 and 1912, he erected several commercial buildings along Main and Water Streets, one of which is the building at 29-57 Water Street, built in 1896. Designed by Theodore S. Peck, the structure consists of five connected Romanesque blocks, each block being slightly taller than its neighbor as the street ascends a hill. The ground floors contain commercial storefronts, which the upper stories are apartments.

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Tabor-Burr House (1895)

The house at 222 Saybrook Road, in the Higganum section of Haddam, was built in 1895. It is a good example of a vernacular house that has applied Victorian-era decoration and an Eastlake style porch. Adella Tabor bought the land in 1893 and built the house two years later. In 1908, the house was inherited by two sisters, Ella Virginia Burr and Abby Burr, who both died in 1924. The house was then sold out of the family by their niece, Ruth A. Burr.

John Collins House (1770)

The front section of the house at 7 East Street, facing the Green in Litchfield, was added in 1770 (or 1782) to an older section that possibly dates to the mid-eighteenth century. The land was once part of a homelot that was set aside for Rev. Timothy Collins, minister of the First Congregational Church. The older section of the house is thought to have been Rev. Collins’s house, while the front section was added by his son John to serve as a tavern (although it may not have been used as one). In 1913, with the building’s owners were threatening to demolish the house, local residents formed the Phelps House Corporation to purchase the building in order to protect the historical character of the north side of the Green. Today the house is privately owned.

James Gallup House (1854)

The house at 32 Pearl Street, at the intersection with Clift Street in Mystic was built in 1854 in the Greek Revival style by James Gallup, a carpenter-builder. Describing the community of West Mystic around the year 1850, the book Historic Groton (1909) notes that “At the same period the Messrs. Gallup brothers, James, John and Benadam, carpenters, had a shop and lumber yard on the east side of Gravel St.”

J. H. Sessions Clock Company Office (1918)

Yesterday I featured the factory of the J. H. Sessions Clock Company, which is located at 61 East Main Street in the Forestville section of Bristol. Part of the factory complex is the company’s former main office building, a Jacobethan Revival-style structure erected c. 1918. It was designed by Bristol architect Harold A. Hayden, who also drew the plans for the Soldiers’ Memorial Monument of Bristol after serving in World War One.

J. H. Sessions Clock Company (1900)

In 1870, John Humphrey Sessions (1828-1899) of Bristol merged his wood turning business with a trunk hinge factory that had been established by his late brother, Albert J. Sessions. The company expanded in the following decades under the leadership of J. H. Sessions, who brought his son, John Henry Sessions, on as a partner. After the elder Sessions’ death in 1899, the family would continue to run the business well into the twentieth century. In addition to the hardware business, the family built a huge foundry on Farmington Avenue in 1895 and acquired a large clock factory on East Main Street in Forestville after taking over the E. N. Welch Manufacturing Company in 1902. Elisha N. Welch (1809-1887) had started manufacturing clocks in the 1850s. The company he founded began to decline after his death in 1887. Although it rebuilt its East Main Street factory complex a year after it was devastated by two fires in 1899, the firm had had to borrow money and continued to suffer financially. William E. Sessions, a son of John Humphrey Sessions, and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, son of John Henry Sessions, soon bought enough Welch stock to take control of the company in 1902. They changed its name to the Sessions Clock Company on January 9, 1903. The company would flourish for many years, but went into decline after World War II. The company was sold in the 1950s and eventually liquidated. By the early 1970s the various factory buildings were sold off. The complex is now known as the Forestville Industrial Center and is now used by small industrial and commercial firms.

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