Julius Gay, a president of the Farmington Savings Bank, was also a historian of the town. His Gothic Revival-style house on Main Street, built in the 1860s or 1870s, was left to Miss Porter’s School in his daughter Florence’s will in 1952.
The Dr. Erastus Cooke House, on Main Street in Wethersfield, was built in 1855 and features a hipped roof.
Edit (7/13/08): According to an April 2008 draft of the Old Wethersfield Master Plan (available as a pdf file), “Within the village center of Wethersfield, Dr. Erastus Cooke operated a chemical factory making dyes, saltpeter, and medicines on Chemical Lane.”
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A 1717 farmhouse, on Main Street in Farmington, was purchased in 1798 and enlarged by Dr. Eli Todd. He had been educated at Yale and settled in Farmington to practice medicine, setting up a hospital for patients with smallpox. Later moving to Hartford, he became a pioneer in the field of psychiatry. He was the principal founder of the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, now known as the Institute of Living, and became its first superintendent, serving until his death in 1833. His house in Farmington would have other owners, including Alfred Pope, who bought the house in 1899 and lived here while his new home, Hill-Stead, was being constructed nearby. Pope made additional alterations to the house in the Colonial-Revival style.
In 1810, cigar-maker Nathaniel Rockwell, Jr. built a center-chimney house on Main Street in East Windsor Hill. Later facing debt, he sold the house in 1835 to Asahel Nettleton, who updated the house in the Greek Revival style. Nettleton, a minister and evangelist was a prominent figure of the Second Great Awakening. He participated in the New Lebanon Conference of 1827, where he and fellow Yale-graduate Lyman Beecher opposed the teachings of Charles Finney. In East Windsor Hill, he helped to found the Theological Institute of Connecticut and contributed proceeds from his volume of Village Hymns for Social Worship to help endow a professorship. Nettleton died in 1844, having willed his estate to the seminary, which later moved to Hartford. Nettleton’s colleague and East Windsor Hill neighbor, seminary professor and president Bennett Tyler, compiled a collection of Nettleton’s works and wrote a Memoir of the Life and Character of Rev. Asahel Nettleton, D.D.
Built in 1828, the Elisha Wadsworth House served as an inn for travelers on the Albany Turnpike until 1862. Originally facing north on the Turnpike (now Albany Avenue), it was rotated 90 degrees to face west, on Prospect Avenue, in 1918. Update: After years of neglect (during which original woodwork was destroyed after a water-pipe burst), the house was thoroughly renovated in 2013.
Rev. Timothy Pitkin, the son of Governor William Pitkin, was the minister of Farmington’s Congregational Church from 1752 to 1785. During the Revolutionary War, he preached a sermon attended by George Washington. In 1803, he sold his 1788 house on Colton Street in Farmington to his son, Timothy Pitkin, Jr. The younger Pitkin, born in 1766, was a Yale graduate who then studied law with Oliver Wolcott. He went on to become a lawyer in Farmington and entered politics as a Federalist, serving in the Connecticut State Legislature and the US Congress. Pitkin, who died in 1847, was also an important early historian of the United States, writing A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America (1816) and the A Political and Civil History of the United States from 1763 to the Close of Washington’s Administration (1828). The house was sold in 1841 to Dr. Edwin Carrington, who died in 1852 and for whom the adjacent Carrington Lane is named. The house combines elements of the Georgian and Federal styles.
The Francis Cowles House, built circa 1840 (another source estimates circa 1844 and another circa 1835) on Main Street in Farmington, represents a transition in style from the Greek Revival (the colonnaded front porch) to the Italianate (the low pitched roof with bracketed cornice). A plaque in the building indicates it was built circa 1835 and was acquired for the school by the trustees of Miss Porter’s estate in 1901. (A now defunct website had mistakenly indicated that the house was purchased by Sarah Porter for her school in 1889). The house now serves as a dorm called “Brick“. The house is located on the site of the house where Sarah Porter’s father, the Rev. Noah Porter, was born, in the house of his father, Robert Porter. (Note: post edited 5/28/15 to reflect corrected info).
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