In the 1920s, this 1917 Colonial Revival house on Prospect Avenue in Hartford, was occupied by Alfred C. Fuller, founder of the the Fuller Brush Company. Originally from Nova Scotia, Alfred Carl Fuller, the original “Fuller Brush Man,” emphasized door-to-door selling—Fuller‘s memoir was titled, A Foot in the Door. The symmetrical house, which interestingly has non-symmetrical chimneys, was designed by William T. Marchant of Hartford.
The house, which today serves as the Connecticut Governor’s Residence, was originally built in 1909 for Dr. George C.F. Williams, a physician and president of the Capewell Horse Nail Company. Williams hired the firm of Andrews, Jacques & Rantoul, the architects of the Hartford Club, to design his 1908 Georgian Revival home on Prospect Avenue in Hartford. In 1916, additions, designed by the architects Smith & Bassette, were made to the north and south sides of the house. Members of the Williams family resided in the house until 1940 and in 1943 it was purchased by the state to become the Governor’s Mansion. The first governor to reside in the house was Raymond E. Baldwin. Guided public tours of the residence are available.
Meriden’s City Hall, built in 1905-1907, is one of many buildings in Connecticut influenced by the Federal-style design of the Old State House in Hartford, which was serving as Hartford’s City Hall at the time the Meriden building was being constructed. Meriden’s previous Town Hall, built in the early 1860s, had burned in a fire in 1904. The Civil War monument that stands in front of City Hall is the Soldiers Monument, erected in 1873.
The Simsbury 1820 House is an inn which is housed in an elaborate gambrel roofed Federal mansion. The house was built by Elijah Phelps, the son of Maj. Gen. Noah Phelps, who was a hero of the Revolutionary War. Elijah Phelps’s son-in-law, Amos R. Eno, became wealthy by investing the profits of his dry goods business in real estate in New York. He used the 1820 House as a summer residence. His grandson, Gifford Pinchot, a conservationist and governor of Pennsylvania, was born in the house in 1865. In 1884, Amos Eno retreated to the Simsbury House after his son, John C. Eno, embezzled millions from his father’s bank and fled to Canada. In 1890, Amos Eno added a large rear extension to the house, which was later inherited by his daughter, Anoinette Eno Wood, who called the home “Eaglewood,” in reference to her family’s patriotism and her last name. She had the house renovated in the Colonial Revival style. The house remained in the family until 1948, afterwards becoming a restaurant called the Simsbury House. When a developer bought the house and started to auction off its fixtures in the 1960s, the Town of Simsbury decided to purchase it. Little was done to renovate it, however, until in 1985 it was bought and restored by Simsbury House Associates to become an elegant inn.
The Osborne Homestead Museum is adjacent to the Kellogg Environmental Center and the Osbornedale State Park in Derby. It was originally a farm house built in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1867, Wilbur Fisk Osborne married Ellen Lucy Davis and the couple moved into the house. Osborne’s father, John White Osborne, had founded a brass manufacturing company in Derby which came to dominate the eyelet manufacturing business. Wilbur F. Osborne served as president of various companies and also founded the Derby Neck Library, persuading Andrew Carnegie to assist in funding the library building’s construction. The Osbornes‘ only surviving child was Frances Eliza Osborne, who became a businesswoman, taking over her father’s responsibilities after his sudden death in 1907. In 1919, she married Waldo Stewart Kellogg, a New York architect. Starting in 1910, a Colonial Revival remodeling project began on the house, with additional detailing work done by Waldo Kellogg. The homestead now resembles a Federal-style house. Frances Osborne Kellogg continued to live in the house until her death in 1956. She had deeded her property to the State of Connecticut in 1951 and it became the Osbornedale State Park. The land was once home to the Osbornedale Dairy, which was run by Waldo Kellogg, who improved the herd after the acquisition of a prize bull. The house is open to the public as the Osborne Homestead Museum.
Counting down to the New Year makes one think of clocks and Bristol was the center of Connecticut Clock-making. One of the Bristol firms was the E.N. Welch Company, which by the later nineteenth century was in financial difficulty. In 1902, William E. Sessions, whose father owned a foundry business that had produced cases for E.N. Welch, was elected president of the company and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, became its treasurer. By the following year, they had acquired enough stock to take over the company, renaming it the Sessions Clock Company. During this same period, A.L. Sessions, had become a partner with his father, John Henry Sessions, in the family’s trunk hardware-making business, J.H. Sessions & Son. After his father’s death in 1902, the business was then incorporated in 1905 under a special charter by the state of Connecticut, the sole owners being A.L. Sessions, his mother and his wife. William E. Sessions built the mansion, called Beleden, on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol and his nephew, A.L. Sessions, built his own mansion in 1903 on the same street. The Georgian Revival home, constructed of brick and red sandstone, is said to have been designed by a Waterbury architect who had been sent by Sessions to England to study Georgian architecture before beginning to plan the house. Known in Bristol as the “Wedding Cake” House, it later became the Town Club and is now the DuPont Funeral Home.
When Columbia’s library, called the Saxton B. Little Free Library, had outgrown its 1903 building, a farmhouse across the road, adjacent to Columbia Green and built around 1800, was completely remodeled to become the library’s new and expanded home. The house had belonged to Gladys Rice Soracchi, who had been head librarian from 1959 to 1975 (her mother, Lillian Rice, had preceded her as head librarian from 1908-1959). At one time, the house had served as inn.
