The house at 36 Magnolia Street in Hartford was built in 1908 and shortly thereafter became the final home of Henry J. Eaton, Hartford’s former fire chief (from 1868 to 1903), who died in 1922. You can read more about Chief Eaton in my Substack article about him, his white horse, and an 1897 film they appeared in together. I also have a piece about the Chief’s mysterious disappearance in 1876. For at least a few years after his death, his daughter Henrietta Alice Eaton resided in the house with her mother, who died in 1926. During this time, H. Alice Eaton continued two businesses out of the house that had been started by her parents: she carried on her mother’s work as an expert dyer and cleaner of fine clothing and her father’s role as a fire extinguisher agent. You can read more about her and these businesses in my recent Substack article.
At 20 Lenti Terrace in Glastonbury is a substantial stone residence built into a hillside. The house‘s frame is said to have been put up by a dentist, who never completed the home because of the death of his wife. The house was completed in about 1909 by Bartholomew Carini, an immigrant from Northern Italy, who owned thousands of acres of land in town. He employed masonry construction, which is commonly found in vernacular Italian architecture. Another example of similar construction in Glastonbury is the ground level of the house on Main Street known as the “Glastonbury Villa.” Carini, a skilled hewer of oak and chestnut trees to make railroad ties, had arrived in about in Glastonbury in about 1890. He was soon able to purchase his own land and was soon joined by other Italian immigrants who began to grow fruit and establish orchards.
The house was later owned by Frank Lenti, another Italian immigrant, who first opened the famous Frank’s Restaurant in Hartford in 1933. After Lenti’s death in 1954, his wife eventually returned to Italy. For a number of years, the house was vacant and taxes on it went unpaid. The town was about to sell it in an auction in 1969, when Mrs. Lenti suddenly returned from Italy and arranged to sell it privately to pay the back taxes and the town’s cost in arranging the auction.
According to the Glastonbury’s Historic Resources Inventory page for the house, the date of 1909 is set in tesserae over its one chimney. The one-and-a-half house appears to have two-and-a-half stories when viewed from Chestnut Hill Road because it is built on a hill along a retaining wall with the basement exposed on the northeast side. The house’s front entrance is on that side, facing Lenti Terrace. The original floorplan has been altered, with a recessed side porch having been enclosed.
Designed to fit in with the many historical nineteenth-century buildings at Mystic Seaport, the museum’s MIldred C. Mallory Building was erected in 1963 using stone from a house in the Fort Rachel area of Mystic that had been destroyed in the 1938 hurricane. Serving as Mystic Seaport’s members’ lounge and membership office, the building named for Mildred C. Mallory (1897-1961) as a memorial to honor her efforts for the museum’s membership program. The first floor is covered with granite ashlar and the second floor with clapboards.
The hip-roofed house at 19 Gravel Streetin Mystic was built in 1861 by Capt. John E. Williams. His earlier house on the site, built in 1844, was moved to make way for the new house. Capt. Williams was known for being the captain of the clipper ship Andrew Jackson, which was called the “Fastest Ship in the World.” Built by the firm of Irons & Grinnell in Mystic, the ship made a famous run in 1859–1860 around Cape Horn from New York City to San Francisco, which was performed in 89 days and 4 hours. The only other square-rigged ship to perform an 89-day run driving from New York City to California was the Flying Cloud, an extreme clipper which did so twice (in 1851 and 1854), the faster of these times being 89 days and 8 hours. Many consider this to be the record passage, because it was for a completed voyage, anchor to anchor, while the Andrew Jackson‘s time was pilot to pilot as the ship had to spend the night waiting for a pilot boat and did not actually tie up at a San Francisco wharf until the next day.
You must be logged in to post a comment.