Nathaniel B. Wheeler House (1852)

Wheeler House

Nathaniel B. Wheeler, partner in Wheeler & Wilson, manufacturers of sewing machines, acquired land near the Green in Watertown (now 14 Woodbury Road) from Alanson Warren, Sr., on which he built an Italianate house in 1852. Later owners of the house, Harry H. and Charlotte Heminway, hired Waterbury architect Wilfred Griggs to remodel the house. In 1914 it was altered to the Colonial Revival style with the addition of front and rear two-level porches, French doors on the east side and a fanlight over the main entrance.

Dr. John B. Griggs House (1918)

1380 Asylum Ave., Hartford

Dr. John Bagg Griggs was a general practitioner in Farmington, from 1897 to 1899 living with his wife, Mary Ellen Bolter, at 41 Main Street, where their son, Dr. John Bolter Griggs, was born. After next living at 101 Main Street, they moved to Stamford in 1903. After his first wife died in 1905, Dr. Griggs married again and moved with his wife, Valina D. Griggs, to Hartford in 1907. Dr. Griggs practiced as an internist until 1917 and was involved in the first X-ray laboratory in the city, established at Hartford Hospital in 1910 under the leadership of Dr. Arthur Heublein. Completed in 1918, the Griggs residence at 1380 Asylum Avenue in Hartford was designed by architect Edward Thomas Hapgood.

By 1996 the house had been owned by the State of Connecticut for nearly fifty years. Once used as offices but then left vacant and considered to be “surplus property,” the house was bought at auction by Peter and Diane Valin, who lovingly restored the much deteriorated house to once again become a grand West End residence.

Gunn Memorial Library & Museum (1908)

 

Gunn Library

 

Frederick Gunn, founder of the Gunnery School in Washington, was also the founder, in 1852, of the Washington Library Association, of which he became president in 1855. In the 1880s the Library Association evolved into the Washington Reading Room & Circulating Library Association, which opened a reading room in 1891. E.H. Van Ingen pledged land and money toward erecting a permanent library building in 1902 and the completed building was dedicated in 1908. It was designed by noted architect Ehrick K.Rossiter, who had become a summer resident of Washington. The interior has ceiling murals by Washington resident H. Siddons Mowbray and bronze busts by English sculptor A. Bertram Pegram. The local DAR branch had opened a historical room in a nearby house in 1899. This collection was turned over to the library in 1907. Originally located in the library’s basement, the museum later collection moved to the adjacent house, bequeathed to the library by June S. Willis in 1965. A new 7,500 square foot addition, five times the size of the original library, was completed in 1994. The plans were drawn by King & Tuthill.

Gunn Historical Museum
Gunn Historical Museum
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First Magyar Reformed Church (1930)

first-magyar-reformed-church

In the early twentieth century a community of Hungarian immigrants was established in the town of Ashford. There is a Hungarian Social Club at 314 Ashford Center Road and at 200 Ashford Center Road is the former First Magyar Reformed Church. According to Ashford assessor records, the church was built in 1930 and was sold to a private owner in 2003. It was then renovated to become a residence. Next door to the former church is the Woodward Cemetery, which has burials primarily from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

H. E. Bishop House (1906)

Bishop House

The H. E. Bishop House, at 87 East Avenue in Norwalk, is a Colonial Revival residence, built c. 1905-1906. Designed by Joy Wheeler Dow of Wyoming, NJ, architect and author of American Renaissance: A Review of Domestic Architecture (1904), the house is modeled on the c. 1723 house at Shirley Plantation, on the James River in Virginia. The Bishop House attracted much attention after it was built, being featured in several magazines. In “Residence of H. E. Bishop, Esq., at Norwalk, Connecticut” (American Homes and Gardens, Vol. V, No. 21, February, 1908), Francis Durando Nichols writes:

The site chosen for the house was fortunately an elevated corner lot, more spacious by far than is usually to be had in the popular residential section of a city. Taking its situation as a keynote, the designer has given his composition an effect of massive elegance which makes it one of the most striking houses in its vicinity.

In “A New House Inspired by an Old One” (House & Garden, Vol. XVI. No. 1, July, 1909; reprinted in Distinctive Homes of Moderate Cost, 1910), Henry Lorsay, 3rd writes:

The house is surely not one of the million that we are perfectly content to pass by with never a second look. It compels attention, not because of any eccentricity in design, not because of any weird hybrids among its architectural motives, nor because of any unusual and dazzling color scheme, but solely because it does have that elusive quality of architectural distinction.

In “Four Colonial Houses” (American Forestry, Vol. 23, No. 279, March, 1917), Rawson Woodman Haddon writes:

The way by which we may preserve in the domestic architecture of today an undefinable charm—a certain warmth of personality with which American history has invested the wooden house——is what Mr. joy Wheeler Dow shows us in the buildings he has designed, and in his writing upon the various developments of American architecture, both historic and modern.

The house is now used as offices.