The house at 120 High Street in South Glastonbury is listed as 118 High Street in the 1978 Historical and Architectural Survey of Glastonbury, where it is described as the John Killbourne House, built in 1740. A plaque on the house reads “Spar Mill, Est. 1740.” Feldspar was quarried in the area in the early twentieth century and the nearby house at 9 Tryon Street is believed to have once been the mill’s office.
The building at 9 Tryon Street in South Glastonbury may have been built as early as 1720. Around that time Thomas Hollister and Thomas Welles started a saw mill on the east side of nearby Roaring Brook. The mill was linked to the shipbuilding industry in the area at the time. By the mid-eighteenth century this early operation had developed into what was known as the “Great Grist mill at Nayaug.” The house at 9 Tryon Street may have been the bake house associated with that mill that is mentioned in a 1783 deed. According to one source, the Welles-Hollister grist mill and bake oven on Roaring Brook at Nayaug was completely destroyed in the great flood of 1869 and the mill had to be rebuilt on the northwest side of the bridge over Roaring Brook at the foot of High Street. Later, in the early twentieth century, there was a feldspar mill on the east side of the brook and the building at 9 Tryon Street may have served as the mill office of owner Louis W. Howe and then as housing for a spar mill worker’s family. Howe sold the house c. 1928 to Mrs. Aaron Kinne, who had the interior remodeled c. 1940 to designs by restoration architect Norris F. Prentice. It was remodeled a second time in 2002.
Israel H. Wilson moved from Danbury to Bethel in 1836 and operated an undertaking business until 1851. He then opened the town’s first hotel, which was located in the house at 4 Chestnut Street. The house was built about 1761 and and at one time was a tavern, operated by P. T. Barnum‘s grandfather, Phineas Taylor, and then by his parents, Philo and Irena Barnum. Wilson was a advocate of the temperance cause: he named the hotel Temperance House and he also erected a temperance hall (no longer standing) just south of the hotel. By the late 1870s the hotel was known as the Bethel House or Bethel Hotel. Wilson retired from the hotel business in 1885. For some years the house was home to the Mead family and it is now a duplex. The house was much altered in the Italianate style in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
In 1776, Martin North moved from Danbury to Winchester Center and built a saltbox house at what is now 102 Newfield Road. In 1941, new owners jacked up the original saltbox roof in order to add a bathroom and two full bedrooms to the rear of the second floor. There is a rear ell that now has the garage.
The house at 259 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was built sometime before 1800 (an chestnut beam in the attic is inscribed with the date 1789). It was the home of Jesse Barber, a cobbler who had a shop north of his house and also a tannery. He would fix the shoes of the children who walked by his home on their way to school. For many years the house’s residents got their water from a spring on the hill to the east which traveled through a system of split and grooved logs laid end-to-end. This was later replaced by a lead pipe that had to be kept unfrozen in the winter to prevent clogging. New owners, Dennis and Wanda Mahoney, replaced this system with an artesian well in 1953. They also extensively restored the house and totally rebuilt the rear ell. An earlier owner, Ambrose Norman, had kept riding horses, but gave up the house to a grain merchant from Granby to satisfy an unpaid feed bill.
The Priest Marsh House in Winchester Center is a saltbox house built in 1774. When Rev. Frederick Marsh (1780-1873) was first offered the pastorate in Winchester in 1808, he declined because the salary was not enough to purchase a home. Eventually the matter was settled, perhaps with the house being part of deal, and Marsh served as pastor for forty-two years.
Elisha Cornwell (1721-1781) one of the original settlers of East Hampton, erected the house at 64 South Main Street (facing Daniels Street) in 1780 on land he had purchased the year before. He quickly sold the house to his daughter and died the following year. Amasa Daniels, Jr. purchased the property in 1803. His granddaughter, Caroline Brown Buell (1842-1927) grew up in the house. Her father, Rev. Thomas Gibson Brown, an itinerant Methodist and chaplain during the Civil War, had married Amasa’s daughter, Caroline. Caroline B. Brown, whose husband, Lt. Frederick W. H. Buell, died of malaria in the Civil War, would become a leader of the temperance movement, writing and lecturing extensively and serving as corresponding secretary of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She retired to East Hampton where she died in 1927.
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