Located next door to the E. Allen Moore House on Sunnyledge Street in New Britain is the house built for Moore’s friend, James S. North, at 9 Sunnyledge. North was president of the C. J. White Manufacturing Company, makers of hose-supports and garters. He was later the superintendent of the New Britain General Hospital. Before moving to Sunnyledge, North had previously lived at 21 Franklin Square. His stuccoed house on Sunnyledge, built in 1913, was designed by architect William F. Brooks.
In 1899 work began on a large Colonial Revival mansion, completed in 1900 in what had been a field just southwest of Walnut Hill Park in New Britain. It was erected by E. Allen Moore, son of the artist Nelson Augustus Moore (1824-1902). In 1899 Ethelbert Allen Moore was a manufacturing superintendent at the Stanley Works and would become the company‘s president in 1918. He retired in 1929 and in 1950 published his book Tenth Generation, a history of the Moore family in America. In 1891 Morse had married Martha Elizabeth, daughter of William H. Hart, then president of Stanley Works. She named the new property “Sunnyledge,” after a traprock ledge just west of the house. The new road they opened was called Sunnyledge Street. The house was designed by William F. Brooks of Davis & Brooks, with two later additions by architect Oliver M. Wiard.
Grace Baptist Church in Bristol was founded in 1888 and was originally known as the Swedish Baptist Church. The name was later changed when its parishioners began to include many who were not of Swedish descent. The church was located on Goodwin Street until 1942 when it moved into a converted residence at 38 Prospect Place. Outgrowing the building, a new church was built at the corner of King Street and Louisiana Avenue, completed in 1957. (For more info, see: “Baptist Church Launches $40,000 Building Drive,” Hartford Courant, February 5, 1955).
The Benjamin Williams, Jr. Homestead was erected in 1814 at what is now Essex Square in Essex. In 1925 the old house was removed and replaced by the Essex Square Theatre building. The theatre showed movies and also had space for four retail stores and four offices. Films played there until 1972 and in 1984 the building was acquired by Talbots.
In 1778, residents of the area around what is now Prospect Green withdrew from the Congregational church in Cheshire and formed their own ecclesiastical society, known as the Columbia Society. Their meeting house was located on the Prospect Green, which is the highest inhabited elevation in New Haven County. The Prospect Congregational Society was formally established in 1798 and continued meeting in the original simple structure until a new edifice was erected in 1841, to the west of the Green. The previous meeting house was moved to a another site nearby where it was used by the Methodist church until 1858. After a fire destroyed the 1841 building, a new fieldstone church was erected. This too was destroyed by fire and was replaced by the current church, built in 1941.
The John Wesley Pentecostal Church was founded in Manchester in 1897. In the fall of 1907 (“Holiness Meeting in Manchester; In Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene,” Hartford Courant, April 10, 1908) the church became part of the Church of the Nazarene, a national evangelical denomination that formed in 1907-1908 through a series of mergers between various holiness churches and denominations, with the western-based Church of the Nazarene merging with the eastern-based Association of Pentecostal Churches of America. In 1958, the Manchester Church of the Nazarene moved from their original 1898 church at 466 Main Street to a new church at 236 Main Street. It was the culmination of a five-year building plan that included construction of a youth center (1954) and a parsonage (1957). The church’s pastor, Clarence E. Winslow, designed the buildings and prepared landscaping plans, personally clearing the land with the help of volunteers. Groundbreaking for the church occurred in the summer of 1957 and the following April (“Steeplejack Chore Planned by Pastor,” Hartford Courant, April 21, 1958) Rev. Winslow was lifted 90 feet by a giant crane to place a cross on the newly raised steeple. Rev. Winslow later moved to Florida where, in the 1970s, he led supporters of Creationism against the teaching of Evolution in Florida schools.
The Church of the Nazarene opened the Cornerstone Christian School in 1981. A new church building was erected at 218 Main Street in 1989, with Rev. Phillip Chatto this time attaching the cross at the top of the steeple (“Crowning touch installed at Manchester church,” by Randy Burgess, Hartford Courant, March 29, 1989). The previous church, now called the McLain Building, became part of the Cornerstone Christian School, housing the junior and senior high schools, and the former sanctuary was converted into a fellowship hall and gymnasium.
“New Place” is a dorm of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington. It was built in 1906 at 53 Main Street on the site of the old Rev. Samuel Whitman House. As related by Julius Gay in Farmington, Connecticut, the Village of Beautiful Homes (1906):
Crossing the road up the mountain we find on the corner the square house with the pyramidal roof and the chimney in the center, owned and occupied by the Rev. Samuel Whitman during his ministry. Parts if not the whole of the building are much older than its well-preserved walls would indicate. Tradition says the kitchen was built out of the remains of the old meeting-house and the Rev. William S. Porter who knew more about the history of the town than any man who lived or is likely to live, says that the house, probably the front, was built by Cuff Freeman, a colored man of considerable wealth, of course after the death of Mr. Whitman.
New Place was erected in 1907 by builder R.F. Jones of Hartford for Elizabeth V. Keep, then headmistress of Miss Porter’s School. Mrs. Keep lived there until her death in 1917. She willed the property to Miss Porter’s School. Her son, Robert Porter Keep II, became headmaster in 1917 and he and his wife, Rose Anne Day Keep, resided at New Place until 1929.
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