The building of the Second National Bank of New Haven, founded in 1855, was built at 129-31 Church Street in 1912-1913. It was the bank‘s fourth home, the Post Office and courthouse building next door having replaced its previous one on Church Street. The new building was designed by Starrett & Van Vleck of New York.
The City Savings Bank of Bridgeport was incorporated in 1859. As explained in Samuel Orcutt’s A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport (1886):
About the beginning of the year 1884 it was felt by the trustees that the rooms on Wall street which had hitherto been rented for banking purposes, though twice enlarged, had become entirely inadequate, and that the City Savings Bank should possess a permanent home of its own. After careful deliberation it was decided to purchase one-half the lot of the Bridgeport National Bank, on the corner of Main and Bank streets, and that both institutions should unite in erecting a structure to be known as the United Bank building, of Bridgeport.
The 1885 United Bank Building was torn down in 1912 and replaced by a new Classical Revival-style City Savings Bank building, completed in 1914. Both structures had been designed by architect Warren R. Briggs.
The 1911 Thames National Bank building is at 16-20 Chelsea Harbor Drive (formerly Shetucket Street) in downtown Norwich. As described in A Modern History of New London County, Connecticut, Volume 2 (1922):
The Thames Bank was the second institution of the kind chartered in Norwich, with a capital of $200,000, in 1825. By its charter the bank was obliged to purchase the stock of the Norwich Channel Company, and “maintain a depth of at least ten feet of water in the channel of the Thames river at common and ordinary tides.” The charter also permitted the bank to collect toll from all vessels coming to Norwich. These provisions of the charter were complied with so long as the bank operated under its State charter. The bank was also obliged to receive deposits from the State school fund, ecclesiastical societies, colleges and schools, at par, and pay on such deposits such dividends as were paid to their stockholders. The first bank rooms were on Main street
[…] Prosperity made it necessary to add to the facilities of the bank in order to properly meet the demands of increasing business, and in 1862 the bank erected enlarged quarters on Shetucket street. In 1864 the Thames Bank was succeeded by the Thames National Bank […] Its National Bank charter was renewed in 1884 and again in 1904, the home of the bank centering in the same quarters on Shetucket street until 1911, when the present building begun in 1910 was finished and occupied.
The Eclectic Society was established as a fraternity at Wesleyan University in Middletown in 1837, later adopting the Greek letters Phi Nu Theta. The Society‘s first permanent house, which did not have residential accommodations, was built 1882. In 1906, the Society hired architect Henry Bacon to design a Doric Greek revival structure at 200 High Street. Bacon had previously worked for the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White and would go on to design the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC and to make preliminary sketches for Wesleyan’s Olin library. Completed in 1907, the Eclectic building is seen as a precursor to the Lincoln Memorial, both having a Doric design but lacking the typical accompanying pediment. In 1970, there was a split between undergraduate and alumni members: ties were severed and the alumni organization, the Socratic Literary Society, incorporated a century before, was dissolved. The undergraduates abandoned the use of Greek letters, elected women to membership and sold the house to the University.
In addition to Maxwell Court, architect Charles A. Platt designed another mansion in Rockville for a member of the Maxwell family. At 31 Union Street is the William and Alice K. Maxwell House, known as Kellogg Lawn. The house was built in 1905-1906 for Francis and William Maxwell‘s mother, Harriet K. Maxwell, widow of George Maxwell. It was built in the center of Rockville, on a site where the house of Harriet’s father, George Kellogg, had once stood. Kellogg was one of Rockville’s pioneering industrialists. Today, the mansion is part of Rockwell General Hospital, serving as an entryway to the hospital.
The Francis T. Maxwell House, at 9 North Park Street in Rockville, Vernon, is a Colonial/Classical Revival mansion, built in 1902-1904. Maxwell was a part-owner of the Hockanum Mills Company. His mansion, known as Maxwell Court, was designed by Charles Adams Platt, who was renouned as an architect and as one of America’s most influential landscape designers. Platt’s design for Maxwell Court, his first large scale project, integrates the mansion and the surrounding landscape. The house is located on a hill above the city of Rockville, near the mills but with broad views to the south and west. With its architecture, gardens and landscape, influenced by the Villa Gamberaia near Florence, the Maxwell estate was influential in the American country house movement. Maxwell Court was featured in such contemporary publications as The Country House, a Practical Manual of the Planning and Construction of the American Country Home and its Surroundings (1906), by Charles Edward Hooper and House & Garden, Vol. IV, No. 4 (October 1903)–an article whose images were reproduced in American Country Homes and their Gardens (John Cordis Baker, ed. 1906). The plan of an estate, clearly modeled on Maxwell Court, appeared in Henry Vincent Hubbard and Theodora Kimball’s An Introduction of the Study of Landscape Design (orig. pub. 1917), the principle textbook for landscape architecture courses in the United States in the early twentieth century. Today, Maxwell Court is the Rockville Elks Lodge #1359. (more…)
Walter Percival Crabtree designed the Bristol Trust Company building, now a branch of Webster Bank, which is located at 150 Main Street, on the northeast corner of Main and Riverside Avenue in Bristol. The company was incorporated in 1907, the same year the marble Neoclassical building with monumental brass doors was built. Outside, the building was surrounded by landscaped grounds, while the interior was designed by Mortensen and Holdensen, a Boston firm that created many interiors of public buildings and theaters at the time. The bank was later expanded to the north with the addition of space for a drive-in teller window.
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