The John and Sarah Strong House (1758)

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The Strong House, on Palisado Avenue in Windsor, was long thought to have been built in 1640 and was known for many years as the Lt. Walter Fyler House. Fyler came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in 1630, settling in Windsor in 1634. He received the land on which the house now stands in 1640 for his service in the Pequot War. Recent research has shown that Fyler’s house actually stood on a different part of his property than the house that was latter attributed to him. The area where this surviving house now stands was later owned by Henry Allyn, who sold it to John Strong, Jr. in 1758. When Strong later sold the property to Alexander Allin in 1762, it contained a dwelling which had not been there before. This is the house which is now called the John and Sarah Strong House.

The original, 1758 gambrel-roofed portion of the house was a half-house, a middle-class home intended to be added to later, as it was with more elaborate additions over the years. The house was saved from demolition in 1925 by the Windsor Historical Society. The house has served the Society as a headquarters, and even as a tea room for several years in the 1920s. Research into this historic structure continues and it is currently open for tours as a house museum.

Oliver Ellsworth Homestead (1781)

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The house of Oliver Ellsworth, on Palisado Avenue in Windsor, was originally at the heart of the Ellsworth estate, called Elmwood. It was built in 1781 by Samuel Denslow, to Ellsworth’s specifications. Oliver Ellsworth had been born on the property in 1745 and went on to become a member of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, an envoy to France, a framer of the U.S. Constitution, the chairman of the Senate Committee that framed the bill organizing the federal judiciary system, and the third Chief Justice of the United States. Ellsworth married Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth in 1772 and the couple lived in the house until his death in 1807. Two sitting presidents visited the house, George Washington in 1789 and John Adams in 1799.

In 1788, Ellsworth commissioned Thomas Hayden, a notable Windsor architect-builder, to construct a two-story addition to the house on the south elevation. The addition’s first floor was a drawing room, in which Ellsworth’s daughter Abigail married Ezekiel Williams, son of the merchant and Hartford County Sheriff, Ezekiel Williams of Wethersfield in 1794. Ezekiel Williams Sr had served with Ellsworth on the Committe of the Pay Table during the Revolutionary War. The Greek Revival-style colonnaded porch was added by Martin Ellsworth in 1836. Members of the Ellsworth family continued to live in the house until 1903. It was then deeded to the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution by Oliver Ellsworth’s descendants. Restored in the 1980s and 1990s, the house is open to the public as the Oliver Ellsworth Homestead.

Daniel Buck House (1775)

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Built on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield in 1775 by Josiah Buck, Sr. for his son and daughter-in-law, Daniel Buck and Sarah Saltonstall, the sister of Silas Deane‘s second wife, Elizabeth Saltonstall Evards. The Daniel Buck House is across the street from the home of Daniel’s brother, Josiah Buck, Jr., who married Deane’s sister, Hannah. The Daniel Buck House is still in the same family. The Buck property contains many original eighteenth century outbuildings and is known as the Old Buck Farm. Now a center for art, the historic barns are home to the Wethersfield Academy for the Arts. Additional land that was once part of the Buck family farm along the Wethersfield Cove are now preserved by the Great Meadows Conservation Trust.

Joseph Booth House (1800)

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Joseph Booth built the house at 826 Worthington Ridge, c. 1800. It was remodeled in the 1830s or 1840s, when a Greek Revival doorway was added. As related in Catharine Melinda North’s History of Berlin (1916):

The property next south of the hotel was owned by Joseph Booth, who built the front part of the house in 1800. The large ell was added later. In the corner of the lot, on the north side of the house, Mr. Booth had a shop for making hats. These hats were made of wool or skins. The boys of the neighborhood earned many an honest dollar by catching mink and muskrats and selling the skins to Mr. Booth, to be worked up into hats. The old gentleman was very deaf and always carried an ear trumpet . He was a good trader and invariably understood the price at about half that mentioned by the boys, and then would never settle on any basis except according to hearing.