Capt. John Brown House (1776)

The house at 37 West Road in Canton was built in 1776 by Capt. John Brown III (1728-1776) to replace his earlier log cabin that stood west of the current house. As related in the 1860 book The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, by James Redpath:

John Brown, the third, at the outbreak of the revolutionary war, was chosen Captain of the West Simsbury (now Canton) trainband; and, in the spring of 1776, joined forces of the continental army at New York. His commission from Governor Trumbull is dated May 23, 1776. After a service of two months’ duration, he fell a victim to the prevailing epidemic of the camp, at the age of 48 years. He died in a barn, attended only by a faithful subordinate, a few miles north of New York City, where the continental army was at that time encamped. His body was buried on the Highlands, near the western bank of the East River.

Capt. Brown’s youngest son Abiel, who continued to live in the house until his death in 1856, wrote the book Genealogical History, with Short Sketches and Family Records, of the Early Settlers of West Simsbury, now Canton, Conn. (1856). Abiel’s brother Owen moved to Torrington and was the father of abolitionist John Brown. The younger John Brown later moved a monument to his grandfather, that once stood in the lot across the street from the house across from the house in Canton, to his farm in North Elba, New York. Brown was executed in 1859 and he was buried on his New York farm where his grave is marked by the same stone.

The house in Canton has a modern ell, shown on the right in the image above.

Burrows Hill School (1730)

At the corner of Burrows Hill Road and Schoolhouse Road in Hebron is the Burrows Hill School. Thought to have been erected between 1725 and 1735, it is the oldest of nine former one-room school houses that remain standing in town. After opening, the school remained in operation until a period circa 1834-1860, when the number of children in the Burrows Hill area declined and the school in the Hope Valley area was growing instead. The Burrows Hill School was again flourishing in 1870 but experienced a decline by the early 1900s, closing for good in about 1911. In 1969, the Hebron Historical Society acquired the building and its furnishings from the Town of Hebron and it is now used it as a museum. In 1993, to protect the old school house from oncoming traffic, the structure was moved to a new foundation, forty feet from its original corner location.

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John Moses House (1745)

According to the Sesquicentennial History of the Town of Canton, published in 1956, the house at 516 Cherry Brook Road was known as Fool’s Paradise. It was built in about 1745 by John Moses. The Sesquicentennial History claims that the North Canton Burying Ground was located on his premises and that his two-year-old daughter Eunice was the first to be buried there in 1754. Other sources note that the cemetery was a gift of Peter Curtiss of West Simsbury (which then included Canton) in 1744 and that the first burial there was in 1756. The house has a modern addition erected in 1983.

Abington Congregational Church (1751)

The oldest ecclesiastical building in the State of Connecticut that has been continuously used for its original religious purpose is the Abington Congregational Church in the Town of Pomfret. Overcrowding at the Pomfret meetinghouse, as well as the great distance residents from the Abington section of town had to travel to attend services there, led to the creation of a separate ecclesiastical society in Abington 1749. The new congregation erected its own meetinghouse in 1751, a building that is one of the few surviving examples in New England of eighteenth-century peg and beam construction. The building was completely remodeled in the Greek Revival style between 1834 and 1840 by the architect-builder Edwin Fitch of Mansfield. Among various interior and exterior alterations, Fitch created a new facade featuring four Doric pilasters and replaced the church‘s 1802 bell tower with the current three-stage steeple.

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William Bevin House (1757)

One of the oldest houses in East Hampton is the colonial saltbox at 53 Barton Hill Road. It was erected circa 1748-1757 by William Bevin, who died in 1793 at the age of 83. The property was maintained by William’s son Isaac Bevin, Sr. (1746-1791) and grandson Isaac Bevin, Jr. (1773-1870), who married Anna Avery of Glastonbury in 1800. In 1832, their sons, William, Chauncy and Abner, later joined by a fourth brother Philo, started Bevin Brothers Manufacturing Company, a bell foundry that is still in business today.