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.

Central Christian Church, Danbury (1936)

The origins of Central Christian Church in Danbury go back to 1817, when it established by the Osborne and Wildeman families. It was a founding member of a new denomination, known as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which grew out of the religious revival of the early nineteenth century. It is the denomination‘s only church in Connecticut. As related by Rev. E.J. Teagarden, in a contribution to James M. Bailey’s History of Danbury, Conn. (1896):

During the first two years of the life of the church the meetings were held each Lord’s Day at the home of Mr. [Levi] Osborne, situated on the corner of what are now Osborne and Summit streets, but at that time far outside the borough limits. [. . .] In 1819 Mr. Osborne fitted up a room for church purposes in the loft of his weaver’s shop, in the same yard with his house. This room served as a place of meeting for twenty-one years.

[. . .] It was not until the year 1827 that the brotherhood at large became a distinct religious body, known as the Disciples of Christ, or Christian Church; but not until many years later did the church in Danbury adopt the name Disciples of Christ. During the periods mentioned they were known as Osbornites, after the name of Mr. Osborne, who had been the presiding officer and leading spirit from the first.

In 1840, the church began to worship in a new building. According to Teagarden, “This new building stood directly opposite the present site of the New England Hotel, about where the electric-light tower now stands.” In 1853 occurred

the removal of the congregation from White Street to Liberty Street, near Main, their present location. At a cost of $2000 the society purchased a house and lot from the Methodist church, which had vacated it for larger quarters.

In February of 1934, the church on Liberty Street burned down. Two years later, the current church, located at 71 West Street, was dedicated.

Oxford Hotel (1795)

Happy Independence Day! Pictured above is the former Oxford Hotel, at 441 Oxford Road in Oxford. It was built as an inn in 1795 by brothers Daniel and Job Candee, members of an influential Oxford family, to take advantage of the new Oxford Turnpike. Daniel Candee, Oxford’s first postmaster, operated the inn until about 1811, followed by his nephew, David Candee, who was innkeeper until his death in 1851. Frederick Candee then inherited the inn from his father and ran it for about twelve years, during which time he expanded the business to include a general store. In 1865 the business passed through inheritance to David R. Lum and it then had many owners over the years. In 1936 it moved back some thirty feet from the street when Oxford Road was paved with concrete. The hotel was converted into a private residence in 1941 by Eldridge Seeley. He removed the building’s front porches and added additional dormers and the two-story colonnade. In 1950, the building was reopened to the public by James and Dominica DeMaio as a restaurant known as the Oxford House. The restaurant closed in 2011, but the building was renovated in 2013. A new restaurant opened in 2014, but closed in 2016, followed later that year by the opening of the current restaurant.

Martha Apartments (1926) & Palace Theater (1928)

Located at 161-169 Main Street in Danbury is the Martha Apartments/Palace Theater complex. Designed by architect Philip Sunderland, the Martha Apartments were erected in 1926. The third storefront from the south end on the building’s ground floor (165 Main Street) is the entrance to the Palace Theater, the fifth largest auditorium in Connecticut. The theater opened on September 6, 1928 as a vaudeville stage seating 1,999 (a way to avoid the law that a 2,000 seat theater had to join the union and pay extra fees). The Palace soon switched over to moving pictures. In 1979, it was converted into a triplex by the addition of partitions, and continued in business until 1995. In 2008, owner Joe DeSilva began to renovate the historic theater to become a venue for film and the performing arts.

North Branford Congregational Church (1909)

The Second Ecclesiastical Society of Branford, also called the North Society, was established in 1724. Work soon began on a meeting house, after a debate that considered three possible sites for the building. It was eventually decided to erect the edifice “on the knoll on the west side of the river, at the place near Samuel Harrison’s.” Work began in 1726 and it was finished in 1732 with the completion of the gallery. As related by Rev. Elijah C. Baldwin in his “Annals of North Branford,” as quoted in Vol. II of S. L. Rockey’s History of New Haven County, Connecticut (1892):

That meeting house had its location very near the present newer structure at the center. It stood and was used until after the present meeting house was finished. It is remembered by some persons now living. Its windows were small and diamond-shaped and numerous. It had doors on the east, west and south sides. The pulpit was high and shut-in galleries went around three sides, and they were quite high. The floor of the house was a step below the sills as you entered. Box pews for families covered the floor. Above the pulpit was hung a square, roof-like structure for a sounding board. In later years the bats had nests in this and occupied them with impunity, because of many years accumulation of dust and filth, that seemed out of the reach of all cleaning efforts that were made in those days. It was no uncommon thing for a bat to get loose during a service and go scooting through the house, to the manifest discomfort of many in the congregation.

The Second Society and Third (Northford) Society of Branford incorporated as the new town of North Branford in 1831. The first town election was held in the basement of the just completed Second Society’s second meeting house. As described in Rockey’s book:

The new meeting house was begun May 26th, 1830, six feet north of the old house, and was dedicated in April, 1831. In the winter of 1870-1, a pulpit recess was added and the house was thoroughly renovated. It has since been kept in good repair. The church property was further improved in the fall of 1886, when a neat frame Gothic chapel and parish house was built, near the main edifice. Its cost was about $2,000, which was largely the gift of Mrs. George Rose and Mrs. Lucretia Plant, assisted by others of the parish. This house was dedicated January 16th, 1887.

On February 1, 1908, the church burned down in a fire, although the 1887 Chapel was saved, thanks to a bucket brigade from the nearby river. A new North Branford Congregational Church edifice was built on the same site and has been in use since Easter, 1909. A parish house, containing the church school and fellowship hall, was erected in 1960, connecting the 1909 Sanctuary to the 1887 Chapel.

John Northrop House (1871)

The house at 89 Main Street in Ivoryton was built in 1870-1871 by Samuel Merritt Comstock for John Northrop (1836-1897), to whom he sold it in 1874. Comstock was head of the ivory cutting business Comstock, Cheney & Co. Northrop was the company’s treasurer and in 1872 he married Comstock’s daughter Elizabeth (1840-1925). After her death, the house passed to Lucia Tully Chapman of New London, who sold it in 1929 to Laura Wright Wetmore, daughter of Northam Wight of the Connecticut Valley Manufacturing Company of Centerbrook. She was the wife of Edward Van Dyke Wetmore of the Essex Paint and Marine Company. The house was originally a Stick Style Victorian residence, but after 1930 it was altered to a colonial revival appearance.

Ward S. Jacobs House (1929)

The Colonial Revival house at 70 Terry Road in Hartford was built in 1929 and is currently home to the Gengras family (only the third family to live in the house). It was designed by the architectural firm of Smith & Bassette for Ward S. Jacobs. The architects’ plans for the house are in the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, as well as a color film of the property from 1941 that shows Editha Jacobs tending to her garden and her husband, Ward S. Jacobs, mowing the lawn. Ward S. Jacobs was a mechanical engineer. In 1908, he acquired the patent and equipment for a device to remove broken taps, created by John Kinvall of Worchester, Massachusetts in 1902. Jacobs named his new enterprise the Walton Company, after the maiden name of his grandmother, Albina Walton Jacobs. He sold the business in 1936. The above photograph was taken in December, 2017, during the 37th Annual Friends of the Mark Twain House Holiday House Tour.