Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Exploring the Nutmeg State One Building at a Time

Colonial

Gay Manse (1742)

Built in 1742 on North Main Street in Suffield for the Reverend Ebenezer Gay, who was ordained as minister of the Congregational church that same year. The “Gay Manse” is notable as one of the earliest gambrel-roofed houses in New England. It is also one of the oldest houses in Suffield and features a classic Connecticut River Valley doorway. When Gay died in 1796, he was succeeded by his son. Rev. Ebenezer Gay, Jr. served until his death in 1837 and also ran a school in one room of the manse, while housing the town library in another. Today the house is owned by Suffield Academy.

Dr. Alexander King House (1764)

Built in 1764 on South Main Street in Suffield for Dr. Alexander King, who was a physician, farmer, and deacon of the Congregational church, as well as serving as a selectman, town clerk and State Representative. The house, which features an original porch leading to the doctor’s office, was later bought and restored by Mr. Samuel Reid Spencer, who gave it to the Suffield Historical Society in 1960. It is currently open as a house museum, which includes galleries on local history.

Rev. James Lockwood House (1767)

Rev. James Lockwood, Wethersfield’s Congregational minister from 1738-1772, had turned down the presidencies of Yale and Princeton to stay in town. In gratitude, members of the congregation of First Church donated the money, materials and labor to build this center-chimney, gambrel-roofed house on Main Street in 1767. It was therefore not a parsonage, but instead a personal gift to the pastor. It currently serves as a rectory for neighboring Trinity Episcopal Church.

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Phelps-Hatheway House (1761)

The earliest part of the house was the main block with center-chimney, built around 1761-1767 for merchant Shem Burbank. In 1788, the house was purchased by the merchant, and extensive land owner, Oliver Phelps, who altered the roof to a gambrel style and added other features of the fashionable Georgian style. In 1794, he further altered the house by adding a new wing in the Federal style. The main architect of the addition was Thomas Hayden of Windsor. A young Asher Benjamin, later to become one of the most important architects of the Federal period, was one of the workers on the new wing and carved the Ionic capitals of the wing’s entryway. The interior of the Federal wing is notable for its surviving original French-made wallpaper. When Phelps died, the house was owned by the Hatheway family for a century and is currently open as a house museum, the Phelps-Hatheway House & Garden, administered by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society.

Stanley-Whitman House (1720)

Built on High Street in Farmington in 1720 for Deacon John Stanley, and later purchased by the Reverend Samuel Whitman in 1735, the Stanley-Whitman House has been a museum since 1935. The house is an excellent example of a New England saltbox. Once thought to have been built in the seventeenth century, it is now dated to 1720, but displays many stylistic features typical of seventeenth century houses, including the second-story overhang with pendant drops and the diamond-paned windows.

Isaac Stevens House (1789)

Built in 1788-1789 on Main Street in Wethersfield, adjacent to the Joseph Webb House, for the leather worker Isaac Stevens. Joseph Webb, Jr was greatly in debt after the Revolutionary war and sold the land to Stevens, whose house follows a similar Georgian design to that of the Webb House, but on a smaller scale and without a gambrel roof. Title to the house was conveyed to the Colonial Dames in 1945 by its last resident, Jennie Andrews, to prevent its being torn down (note the proximity of the commercial building to the right of the house). After Mrs. Andrews’s death in 1958, the Dames restored the house, opening it to the public in 1963. The Isaac Stevens House, together with the Joseph Webb House and Silas Deane House, today comprise the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

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Butler-McCook House (1782)

Built on Main Street in Hartford for Dr. Daniel Butler in 1782. Butler had a medical practice and managed mills that his wife, Sarah Sheldon Ledyard, had inherited from her first husband. Their son, John, and his wife, Eliza Lydia Royce Sheldon, added the Greek Revival Portico. In 1865, John and Eliza’s daughter, Eliza Sheldon Butler, hired landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann to design the garden behind the house. The next year, she married John James McCook, one of the famous Civil War Fighting McCooks. For 60 years, Rev. McCook was volunteer rector of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in East Hartford and he later taught at Trinity College. He also did important sociological work in his studies of homeless people.

Rather than abandon a changing Main Street, as so many of the other long-established families were doing in the later nineteenth century, the McCooks remained, instead accommodating their growing family by expanding their attic into a third floor of bedrooms. In 1897, their son John, a doctor, added an office to the house for his medical practice. His sister, Frances A. McCook, was the last of the family to live in the house. When she died in 1971, she left it to the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, and the house is open to the public as the Butler-McCook House & Garden and Main Street History Center.

Informative articles on the house and its residents have appeared in Antiques and the Hog River Journal.