Rev. James Lockwood, Wethersfield’s Congregational minister from 1738-1772, had turned down the presidencies of Yale and Princeton to stay in town. In gratitude, members of the congregation of First Church donated the money, materials and labor to build this center-chimney, gambrel-roofed house on Main Street in 1767. It was therefore not a parsonage, but instead a personal gift to the pastor. It currently serves as a rectory for neighboring Trinity Episcopal Church.
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The earliest part of the house was the main block with center-chimney, built around 1761-1767 for merchant Shem Burbank. In 1788, the house was purchased by the merchant, and extensive land owner, Oliver Phelps, who altered the roof to a gambrel style and added other features of the fashionable Georgian style. In 1794, he further altered the house by adding a new wing in the Federal style. The main architect of the addition was Thomas Hayden of Windsor. A young Asher Benjamin, later to become one of the most important architects of the Federal period, was one of the workers on the new wing and carved the Ionic capitals of the wing’s entryway. The interior of the Federal wing is notable for its surviving original French-made wallpaper. When Phelps died, the house was owned by the Hatheway family for a century and is currently open as a house museum, the Phelps-Hatheway House & Garden, administered by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society.
When the new Connecticut State Capitol was built in 1878, the Old State House became Hartford’s City Hall until 1915, when a new Municipal Building was completed. This building’s Beaux-Arts design was chosen after an architectural competition which required that the new structure resemble the Old State House. And as everyone still thought of the earlier building as “City Hall,” the new one would not take that name but was instead to be known as the “Municipal Building.” In addition to the neoclassical ornamentation on the exterior, the structure, designed by Davis and Brooks, is notable for its impressive three-story central atrium.
Built on High Street in Farmington in 1720 for Deacon John Stanley, and later purchased by the Reverend Samuel Whitman in 1735, the Stanley-Whitman House has been a museum since 1935. The house is an excellent example of a New England saltbox. Once thought to have been built in the seventeenth century, it is now dated to 1720, but displays many stylistic features typical of seventeenth century houses, including the second-story overhang with pendant drops and the diamond-paned windows.
Built in 1788-1789 on Main Street in Wethersfield, adjacent to the Joseph Webb House, for the leather worker Isaac Stevens. Joseph Webb, Jr was greatly in debt after the Revolutionary war and sold the land to Stevens, whose house follows a similar Georgian design to that of the Webb House, but on a smaller scale and without a gambrel roof. Title to the house was conveyed to the Colonial Dames in 1945 by its last resident, Jennie Andrews, to prevent its being torn down (note the proximity of the commercial building to the right of the house). After Mrs. Andrews’s death in 1958, the Dames restored the house, opening it to the public in 1963. The Isaac Stevens House, together with the Joseph Webb House and Silas Deane House, today comprise the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.
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Built on Main Street in 1788-1789 for East Windsor Hill’s leading merchant, John Watson. This Adam style house, with a Palladian window and classical proportions, was designed by the architect and builder Thomas Hayden of Windsor. It is the oldest three-story mansion surviving in the Connecticut River valley and resembles the great Federal period mansions built for the wealthy merchants in New England’s coastal cities. It has recently been opened as a bed-and-breakfast.
The Caleb M. Holbrook House once stood at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Gillett Street in Hartford. Built in 1865, the Second Empire style house was later torn down, but Holbrook’s carriage house remains on Gillett Street. Below is the intersection where the house once stood as it appears today (also note that the current apartment building is in the Mission Revival style):
For more on the loss of this building: (more…)
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