Bradin-Robinson Cottage (1885)

The summer cottage at 41 Agawam Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook was built c. 1885 for Rev. James Watson Bradin and his wife Eliza Ann Jackson Bradin. A graduate of Berkeley Divinity School, then located in his wife’s hometown of Middletown, Rev. Bradin become rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Hartford in 1882. At that time the church was located on Main Street, but in 1907 the church left its original home, which was demolished to make way for the Morgan Memorial of the Wadsworth Atheneum. The current St. John’s Episcopal Church, on Farmington Avenue in West Hartford, was consecrated on June 9, 1909. Rev. Bradin continued as rector of the church until 1918. He and his wife had seven children. They named their Fenwick cottage the Kennel. The cottage passed to the couple’s daughters. In 1951 the cottage was acquired by Henry S. Robinson, Jr., a lawyer with the firm of Robinson, Robinson and Cole of Hartford, and his wife Constance Brainard Robinson. She was the daughter of Morgan Bulkeley Brainard, president of Aetna Life Insurance, and granddaughter of Leverett Brainard and Morgan G. Bulkeley. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 148-150.