Danbury Railway Museum (1903)

By the 1880s, three railroads served the city of Danbury: the Danbury and Norwalk, the Housatonic, and the New York and New England. By 1892, these had all merged with the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Soon after, the public began to demand that the three separate stations be consolidated into one new station. Built in 1903, the resulting Union Station, designed by A. Malkin, has a Richardsonian Romanesque structure with Colonial Revival details. Alfred Hitchcock filmed station scenes for the 1951 film Strangers on a Train on the platform. The station eventually became the northern terminus of the Danbury Branch of Metro-North’s New Haven Line. Metro-North closed the station in 1993, but it was soon restored to become the Danbury Railway Museum. In 1998, the museum restored the original 1912 railroad turntable, essentially a swing bridge, located several hundred yards east of the passenger station.

Thomas Trowbridge House (1874)

The house at 158 North Street in Litchfield was built in 1874 or 1876 for Thomas Trowbridge. This was likely Thomas Rutherford Trowbridge, Jr. (1839-1898), a New Haven shipping merchant who traded with the West Indies. Trowbridge had his summer home in Litchfield, where he died in 1898. Later owners of the house included Mrs. Blanche Bucklin (in 1920) and Franklin Coe, who remodeled the house in 1940 from its original Victorian appearance to the Colonial Revival style.

Humiston School (1912)

The predecessor to the Humiston School in Cheshire opened in 1894 and served as the town’s high school until 1906, when it closed due to dwindling enrollment and a lack of funding. The old building was razed in 1911 and a new school was erected in 1912, with financial support from Miss Julia Ann Humiston. She did not live to see the opening of the school, which was named for father Daniel Humiston. The school closed in 1971 and the building has since been used as school administration offices as as an alternative high school for approximately 15 to 30 students per year.

First Congregational Church of Danbury (1909)

Pioneers from Norwalk first settled Danbury in 1684 and the town’s Congregational Church was first organized in 1696. A meeting house had already been erected on what is now Main Street, a little north of the present Court House. The church currently occupies its fifth meetinghouse, located at 164 Deer Hill Avenue. The building, designed by the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes, was dedicated in 1909. (more…)

Fairfield Country Day School (1891)

Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) was a Congregational minister, author and educator. Before becoming president of Yale University in 1795, Dwight served as minister of the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church in Fairfield from 1783 to 1795. He also started a well-respected academy in Greenfield Hill in 1783-1784. His 1794 poem, Greenfield Hill, references “Fair Verna,” the name he gave to his house and farm in Greenfield Hill. Isaac Bronson purchased Verna Farm in 1796 and it was later inherited by his son, Frederic Bronson. Dwight’s eighteenth-century house was eventually torn down in 1891 by Frederic’s son, Frederic Bronson, Jr., a wealthy New York City lawyer, who commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a grand new house on the site. Bronson also had a windmill built on his property in 1893-1894. After his death, Verna was the home of his daughter, Elizabeth Duer Bronson (1877–1914), and her husband, Lloyd Carpenter Griscom (1872-1959), an influential lawyer and diplomat: during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, he served successively as ambassador to Iran, Japan, Brazil and Italy. In 1933, the Bronson estate was acquired by W. A. Morschhauser, who had the house remodeled and made smaller in 1900: the third story was removed and the number of rooms was reduced from 42 to 13. Since 1949, the house, located at 2970 Bronson Road, has been occupied by the Fairfield Country Day School.