Adjacent to Yale’s Lewis-Walpole Library, on Main Street in Farmington, is the Timothy Root House. It was constructed for Root, an army captain, in 1784 by the builder Judah Woodruff, who built 21 homes in the town, as well as First Church. Woodruff is buried in Farmington’s Memento Mori Cemetery. The house was renovated in 2001 to house scholars who are working with the library’s collections.
The William Williams House, at the intersection of CT routes 207 and 87 in Lebanon, was built sometime before 1748, when it was purchased by the Revered Solomon Williams. In 1755, Rev. Williams gave the home to his son, William Williams, who would be a delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Ebenezer Talcott was a member of the militia in the Revolutionary War and a mariner. His house, a Georgian Colonial on Main Street in Wethersfield, was built around 1750.
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The earliest (eastern) section of the Strong-Porter House, on South Street in Coventry, was built around 1730 by Aaron Strong. Strong’s niece, Elizabeth Strong, married Deacon Richard Hale, who came from Newburyport Mass. to Coventry. In 1758, the Strongs sold the house to the Porter family, who expanded the western section and added a rear lean-to by about 1777. In 1930, the house was purchased from the Porters by the lawyer and antiquarian, George Dudley Seymour, who lived there during his restoration of the nearby Nathan Hale Homestead. Seymour mistakenly believed that Nathan Hale’s mother Elizabeth Strong Hale had lived in the house. The building is now a property of the Coventry Historical Society and is open to visitors as a house museum.
Jonathan Trumbull, Connecticut’s last colonial governor and first state governor (1769-1784), was born in Lebanon in 1710. Educated at Harvard, Trumbull began working with his father, Joseph Trumbull, as a merchant in 1731. He became a delegate to Connecticut’s General Assembly in the 1730s and his later support of the Patriot cause led to his election as deputy governor in 1766, with the support of the Sons of Liberty. He became governor in 1769, after the death of governor William Pitkin. Trumbull was the only colonial governor to support the American Revolution, organizing Connecticut’s resources to serve the war effort and earning the praise of George Washington. Among the children of Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., who died in 1785, were Jonathan Trumbull, Jr. (a later governor of Connecticut) and the artist, John Trumbull.
The Governor Jonathan Trumbull House was built by his father, Joseph, between 1735 and 1740, and was inherited by Jonathan Trumbull in 1755, who enlarged and remodeled it in the fashionable Georgian style. The building is architecturally notable as the state’s only central chimney house with a center hall. It was also moved slightly north of its first location in 1824. The house has been owned and operated as a house museum since 1935 by the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution.
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