Mansfield Training School and Hospital: Superintendent’s House (1870/1931)

The Connecticut Colony for Epileptics was established in Mansfield in 1909. At that time, it was believed that people with epilepsy should be segregated in a “colony” where there daily lives would be carefully regulated. The Colony was located in a rural area and included a farm that supplied the institution with food and provided occupational therapy. An older cross-gable brick farmhouse, built in 1870, became the Superintendent’s house. In 1917, the Colony merged with the Connecticut Training School for the Feeble-Minded in Lakeville and the resulting institution, the Mansfield Training School and Hospital, continued in operation until 1993. The school’s campus would grow to include over fifty buildings. The Superintendent’s house was remodeled in 1931 with the addition of two 2-story wings and an entry portico. The building later served as the Administration Building and then as the Physical Plant. When the school closed, some of the buildings were demolished and the rest were divided between the Bergin Correctional Institution and the University of Connecticut, which uses the property as its Depot Campus. The former Superintendent’s House is on what was the Bergin Correctional Institution‘s property at 251 Middle Turnpike (Route 44). The prison closed in 2011 and the land was transferred to UCONN in 2015.

Westbrook-Gengras Cottage (1928)

The substantial waterfront summer cottage at 20 Nibang Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook was built on a lot acquired in 1928 by Frances Dunham Westbrook and her husband, Stillman Westbrook, Sr. (1888-1943), a senior vice-president at the Aetna Life Insurance Company who oversaw the construction of the Aetna Building on Farmington Avenue in Hartford. He was also the first chairman of the Hartford Housing Authority and Westbrook Village, a housing project that is currently being redeveloped, was named in his honor. In 1948, the cottage was acquired and remodeled by E. Clayton Gengras (1908-1983), who also acquired the Riversea Inn and other properties in the borough. Gengras founded Gengras Motor Cars, which he developed into one of the largest car dealerships in the nation. In recent years, the house has had new owners. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 58-61.

Trumbull Town Hall (1957)

I’ve just completed an index (by address) for the 16 buildings I’ve featured on this site that are in the Town of Trumbull. The most recent of these buildings is featured in today’s post: the Trumbull Town Hall. I’ve previously featured the Helen Plumb Building in Trumbull, which served as town hall from 1883 to 1957. In that year, the new Town Hall, pictured above, opened at 5866 Main Street. Previously this had been the site of the Aaron Sherwood Homestead, built in 1880. The house was later the home of Dr. Clarence Atkins, a dentist, and was then used as a convalescent home called the Hillcrest Hygienic Lodge.

Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library (1898)

The Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library in Old Lyme was established in 1897 as a free public library. It was built on the site of the old Lord family homestead, dating back to 1666, where Phoebe Griffin Lord was born in 1797 and grew up with her sisters and widowed mother. After spending her teenage years with her uncle in New York, she returned to Old Lyme and began a long career as an artist and educator, which she continued after her 1827 marriage to Daniel Noyes, a merchant. In 1831 they purchased the Parsons Tavern , which had been an important meeting place during the Revolutionary War. The tavern’s former ballroom became a classroom. Phoebe Griffin Noyes (1797-1875) contributed a large part to the community’s development as a center of art and culture. To honor her memory, her family decided to erect a library in her honor, which was funded by the gift of her son-in-law, Charles H. Luddington, and opened in 1898. The Evelyn McCurdy-Salisbury wing was added in 1925, and the library was more than doubled in size with an expansion in 1995.

On the site of the old tavern, Ludington built a summer estate in 1893. It was long the home of his daughter, Phoebe’s granddaughter, Katharine Ludington (1869-1953), a notable activist and suffragist.

As Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, said in his address at the opening of the Library

It is fine to see this spontaneous recognition of the obligation which men owe their fellow-men, to contribute their best, whatever that may be, for the promotion of the good of those among whom they have dwelt.

That is what Mr. Ludington has done. He has provided a commodious, spacious, and attractive building to be the literary centre of Lyme. It furnishes a suitable place for the books already brought together by the members of the Library Association. The ample shelves are suggestive of future accessions. The reading room silently invites the neighbors to enjoy their leisure hours in the quiet companionship of the best of contemporary writers and illustrators. Not only the residents of Lyme, but those of the region around, are welcome. Here too is a place for occasional lectures and readings and for exhibitions of historical mementos, or works of art. The building is placed on a beautiful site, and it is associated with the life of a woman whose rare gifts and noble character are to be perpetuated as a memory and an example.

Canaan Savings Bank (1952)

The Operations Center of the Salisbury Bank and Trust Company is located in a brick Colonial Revival building in the Village of Canaan in the Town of North Canaan. The building was erected in 1952 for the Canaan Savings Bank. It replaced an earlier building on the property, called the Cummings Building, that was destroyed by fire. A circa 1905-1910 postcard of that building shows that it then housed the Canaan Post Office, the F.R. Collin jewelry and watch store, and the Canaan Savings Bank.

Choate Rosemary Hall: Paul Mellon Humanities Center (1938)

One of the many Georgian Revival buildings on the campus of Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford is the Paul Mellon Humanities Center. It was a gift of philanthropist and Choate graduate Paul Mellon, an art collector who also founded the Yale Center for British Art. Built in 1938, the building’s design by architect Charles F. Fuller has strong similarities to the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg. The building was renovated in 1989 through another gift from Mellon.

Knollwood (1923)

An excellent example of the Colonial Revival style of architecture is a house called Knowllwood, located at 80 Broadview Street and Woodland Street in Bristol. It was designed by Goodell & Root (another example of their work in Bristol is the Newell Jennings House at 4 Oakland Street) for Howard Seymour Peck (1874-1928) and his wife, Edna R. Peck (1877-1950), who continued to live in the house after her husband’s death. In 1912, the Pecks had an address of 14 Prospect Place in Bristol. Their son, Seymour Roe Peck, was a partner in the company, Peck & Barnard, that would build Knollwood in 1923. Howard S. Peck was the son of Miles Lewis Peck, president of the Bristol Savings Bank, and grandson of the bank’s founder, Josiah T. Peck. As related in the Decennial Record of the Class of 1896, Yale College (1907):

Peck has been taken into partnership with his father, since Sexennial, and their insurance agency is now run under the firm name of M. L. Peck & Son. He has been and still is a clerk in the Bristol Savings Bank, besides. “Took a trip to New York last fall,” he writes. “Was there three days. Stayed with one Dwight Rockwell. Did not see much of him. He was too busy making money. Took in a championship ball game between New York and the Athletics, also the Vanderbilt cup race. Dropped in the Yale Club and found Publius. He was sober. So was I.”

This concise staccato pervades Howard’s answers throughout. “Have you held political office?” “Close second.” “Have you done any teaching?” “One dog. Failure.” . . . “Please give your daughter’s date of birth.” “June 30, 1904. She is a peach.”

It is not clear whether Peck absents himself from class functions from a sense of caution or a wish to hoard. Or may it be, perhaps, a compassionate determination on his part no longer to invite a possibly fatal competition with his prowess?

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