Benjamin Roberts House (1760)

According to An Architectural History of East Hartford, Connecticut (1989), edited by Doris Darling Sherrow, page 12, the house at 58 Central Avenue in East Hartford was long thought to be a Colonial Revival home built in a neighborhood that was developed in the nineteenth century. A restoration in 1987 revealed it was actually an eighteenth century building, albeit with unusual features for a colonial house in the East Hartford area: it is four bays rather than the usual five and has a double overhang and a side chimney. The house now sits on a brick foundation, typical of the nineteenth century, indicating that it was moved from elsewhere in town to the newly opened Central Avenue. When Edward W. Hayden (1840-1879) acquired the lot where the house now stands from his parents in 1870, period documentation reveals that he had already moved some buildings to the site. Hayden was a Civil War veteran, known for the diary he kept during the conflict. He lived at 1871 Main Street and rented out the house he had moved to Central Avenue. The house is thought to be the Hezekiah Roberts House (built by Hezekiah’s grandfather Benjamin), because Hayden had bought part of the Roberts estate off Main Street. Another house Hayden owned, that stood next to the Roberts House, was the home of his grandfather, Rev. Eliphalet Williams. That house was demolished early in the twentieth century, but its original Connecticut River Valley doorway is now at the Connecticut Historical Society.

The Roberts House began on Main Street with a structure that later became the ell of the later main house. That main house was built circa 1760 and is the one later moved by Hayden to Central Avenue. The Roberts House is described in Joseph O. Goodwin’s East Hartford: Its History and Traditions (1879):

[Benjamin Roberts] lived on the Hezekiah Roberts place. He brought up his family in the rear L of that house, which is very old and has a vast chimney. He afterwards built his main house, with a cellar having unusually solid walls, and a staircase down which hogsheads of rum could be, and probably were, rolled, for some of our citizens were West India traders in those days.