Nehemiah Street, a tailor, built his house on Main Street in Farmington in 1769. He was robbed and killed in 1791 in Niagara Falls, where he had driven cattle to sell. In 1829, his house was bought by Leonard Winship, a cabinet maker, who updated the house in the Greek Revival style, altering the roof and adding the attic windows.
Kimberly Mansion, on Main Street in Glastonbury, was built sometime in the early eighteenth century by Eleazer Kimberly, a Secretary of the Connecticut Colony. It was purchased in 1790 by Zephaniah Smith, a former Sandemanian minister, who had become a lawyer. He added an addition to the house, with a separate entrance, to serve as his law office. He and his wife, Hannah Hickok , an amateur mathematician and poet, would raise five talented daughters in the house: Hancy, an inventor; Laurilla, an artist; Cyrinthia, a poet; and Julia and Abby, who would become famous political activists in the nineteenth century. Julia was also a scholar who, in 1876, published the first translation of the Bible into English by a woman.
Although they were involved, together with their mother, in Abolitionism in the years before the Civil War, Julia and Abby Smith became known throughout the country in the early 1870s for their stand against the unfair assessment of their land by the Glastonbury tax collector. By this time, the two unmarried elderly sisters were the only survivors of their family and owned the most valuable property in town, but as women they could not vote and so were taxed without representation. They therefore refused to pay taxes until they were granted a say in the use of their money. The tax man then seized and auctioned off their cows to pay the taxes. This incident, and other confrontations that followed, were extensively covered in contemporary newspapers and the sisters became prominent in Women’s Suffrage circles. After two years of legal wrangling, they would eventually win a court judgment in 1876, but not the vote. After Abby’s death, Julia finally married and moved to New Hampshire, at the age of 87!
The c. 1699 house of Return Strong, Sr. is the oldest on North Meadow Road in Windsor. Return Strong was a tanner, like his father, John Strong. He also served as a Lieutenant in the Hartford County Cavalry Troop, a deputy to the General Court and a Justice of the Peace for the county. Return Strong was the great-grandfather of John Strong of the John and Sarah Strong House.
Located just south of the Buttolph-Williams House, on Broad Street in Wethersfield, is a house of similar age, built in stages between the 1720s and 1750s. The first owner, Benezer Hale, began the construction of the house around 1725 by building what is now the section to the south (the left side). The section to the north (right side) was added later. Capt. Thomas Newson, a privateer during the Revolutionary War, added the lean-to on the rear, which gives the house a traditional saltbox form. Capt. Newson had a reputation for violence towards his slaves and was believed to have murdered a 42-year-old slave woman named Doll, who was found dead on the highway in 1802 from wounds inflicted with an ax. An inquest panel, on which Isaac Stevens sat, determined that the murder was committed by “some person or persons unknown to the jury.”
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The brothers, Timothy and Benjamin Cheney, were important early American clockmakers. Timothy built the Cheney Family Homestead around 1785, and used a nearby brook to operate a grist mill that he built around 1790. After Timothy’s death in 1795, his oldest son, George Cheney, inherited the house. Among George‘s numerous children, his sons John and Seth became noted artists, while Charles, Ralph, Ward, Rush and Frank founded what would become the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company. Today the Homestead is museum, owned and operated since 1969 by the Manchester Historical Society.
An early brick building, constructed on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield, the John Francis Tavern of 1764 was built in the same year the town’s brick meetinghouse was completed. Like the John Robbins House, also used as a tavern and built a few years later in what would become Rocky Hill, the Francis Tavern features a stringcourse as a decorative element.
In 1767, John Robbins built his house, on Old Main Street in Rocky Hill, on land he had purchased from the Duke of Cumberland, who had earlier been granted the land by George II. The house was later used as a tavern, known as the Duke of Cumberland Inn. The brick Georgian-style house was updated in the Colonial Revival style in 1910.
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