Located at 37 West Town Street in Lebanon, along the Lebanon Green, is a house built circa 1770. It is referred to as the Lyman House in the nomination for the Lebanon Green Historic District. A driveway next to the house leads to the Lebanon Senior Center. (more…)
At 1696 Main Street in Glastonbury is a center-chimney house built circa 1795 for Jehiel Hale, who had married his cousin Mercy Hale the year before. The property was deeded to Jehiel by his father Theodore Hale in 1797. A later Hale to live in the house was William Turner Hale, a well-known farmer who also had an ice business. William Turner Hale father, Hezekiah Hale, was a sailor who sailed around the world three times and was on the whaling trip made famous in Richard Henry Dana‘s book Two Years Before the Mast (1840).
At 2 South Grand Street at its intersection with Mountain Road in West Suffield is a building consisting of two attached sections. The oldest part of the structure dates to circa 1750. For many years the building was the Terrett House Hotel and tavern. In 1837, the first post office in West Suffield was operated out of the Terrett House, the tavern-keeper serving as the postmaster. The Terrett House was where the second murder in Suffield history took place. As reported in the Hartford Courant on October 28, 1862 (“Murder at West Suffield”):
James Drake, keeper of a hotel at West Suffield, was shot dead on Saturday afternoon by a man named Cullen, a cigar maker, who works at Westfield, but whose family resides at West Suffield. It is said Cullen has allowed himself to be jealous of Drake, (but probably without cause), and has threatened his life on several occasions. Saturday afternoon he came home, and with a loaded revolver went directly to the hotel of Drake, for the purpose of shooting him. He fired two shots into Drake while he was behind the bar, but neither of them proved serious; the latter then ran out of doors and around the house, pursued by Cullen; and as he was again entering the door, a third shot entered his heart, proving fatal
Cullen was soon arrested. The hotel seems to have changed hands a number of times. On April 12, 1904, the Courant noted:
The West Suffield Hotel, better known as the Terrett House, has again changed hands, Alanson Hoffman having sold out his interests to Landlord F. Hart of North Bloomfeld. A telephone service has been added and other improvements have been made.
The Courant reported another sale on March 8, 1910, by Patrick J. Murphy to Charles C. Anderson, “who has had charge of the Buckngham Stables in Springfield for several years.” In 1915, Anderson and James Mitchell, proprietor of the Suffield House, another tavern, were fined $150 each for selling liquor on May 2 to 20-year-old William A. Coulson, who later that same night killed John Wardosky with his automobile while under the influence of liquor. Coulson was charged with manslaughter and pleaded no contest. The tavern-keepers’ fine included the additional charge of “permitting a minor to loiter about their places of business.” (“Liquor Drinking Up Suffield Way.” Hartford Courant, June 10, 1915). An owner in 1990 spray painted the building florescent orange to vent his frustration at bureaucratic red tape that had stalled his efforts to renovate the building to become and arts and crafts mall! A later owner restored it as a multi-family home.
Dr. Joshua Lathrop (1723-1807) graduated from Yale in 1743 and joined his older brother, Dr. Daniel Lathrop, in Norwich, where they opened the first drug store (apothecary), in Connecticut. As explained by Frances Manwaring Caulkins in her History of Norwich (1866), soon after graduating, he
went to Europe, where he prosecuted his medical studies in London. On his return, after an absence of several years, he brought with him a large quantity of medicines, as well as various other merchantable goods, and established himself in business in his native place. His shop was on the main street, near his family residence.
Dr. Lathrop furnished a part of the surgical stores to the northern army in the French war. He often received orders from New York. His drugs were always of the best kind, well prepared, packed and forwarded in the neatest manner. This was the only apotliecary’s establishment on the route from New York to Boston, and of course Dr. Lathrop had a great run of custom, often filling orders sent from the distance of a hundred miles in various directions.
The poet Lydia Sigourney, who grew up in Norwich, remembered Dr. Lathrop from her childhood. In Letters of Life (1866), she writes:
Indeed, I think I see now his small, well knit, perfectly erect form, his mild, benevolent brow, surmounted by the large round white wig, with its depth of curls, the three-cornered smartly cocked hat, the nicely plaited stock, the rich silver buckles at knee and shoe, the long waistcoat, and fair ruffles over hand and bosom, which marked the gentleman of the old school; and he never yielded to modern innovation. A large oil portrait of him, in this costume, with one of his beautiful wife, courteously presenting him a plentiful dish of yellow peaches, adorned their best parlor, covered with green moreen curtains, at which I gazed when a little child with eyes dilated, as on the wonders of the Vatican.
He was a man of the most regular and temperate habits, fond of relieving the poor in secret, and faithful in all the requisitions of piety. He was persevering to very advanced age in taking exercise in the open air, and especially in daily equestrian excursions, withheld only by very inclement weather. At eighty-four, he might be seen, mounted upon his noble, lustrous black horse, readily urged to an easy canter, his servant a little in the rear. Continual rides in that varied and romantic region were so full of suggestive thought to his religious mind, that he was led to construct a nice juvenile book on the works of nature, and of nature’s God. Being in dialogue form, it was entitled “The Father and Son;” and we, younglings, received a copy with great gratitude from the kind-hearted author. It was stitched in coarse flowered paper, and sometimes presented as a Thanksgiving gift to the children of his acquaintance, or any whom he might chance to meet in the streets. How well I recollect his elastic step in walking, his agility in mounting or dismounting his steed, and that calm, happy temperament, which, after he was an octogenarian, made him a model for men in their prime.
In 1763, Joshua Lothrop had a house built at 377 Washington Street in Norwich, across the street from his brother’s home. Benedict Arnold may have stayed in the house when he was an apprentice to the Lathrop brothers.
In 1738 Jabez Lathrop sold his family‘s property in Norwich to Captain Joshua Huntington (1698-1745), a prominent merchant. This land probably included the house that exists today at 19 East Town Street, which Huntington proceeded to enlarge. As related in by Mary E. Perkins in Old Houses of the Antient Town of Norwich (1895):
The house, now owned by Mrs. John White, is said to have been built by Joshua Huntington, about 1740. As a large price was paid for this property, and the house has many features which seem to indicate an earlier origin than 1740, it is possible, that, instead of destroying or removing the old Lathrop mansion, Joshua may have altered and remodeled it, but of this we have have no positive proof.
Capt. Joshua Huntington gave his earlier house, at 16 Huntington Lane, to his son Jabez Huntington. The house at 19 East Town Street was later extensively remodeled: the prominent gable on the front facade was added after 1895 (when the book by Perkins was published).
The house at 1370 Enfield Street in Enfield was built in 1783. It was a wedding present from Capt. Ephra[h]im Pease (who lived next door) for his daughter Agnes (1760-1799), who married Rev. Nehemiah Prudden (1749-1815), minister at Enfield’s Congregational Church. After Agnes died, Rev. Prudden married her sister, Sybil (1754-1822), who was the widow of Prudden’s predecessor as minister, Elam Potter (1742-1894). (Potter had been dismissed as minister following a religious controversy in 1776.) In 1811 a volume by Rev. Prudden was published in Hartford with the title: To Marry a Wife’s Sister Not Inconsistent with the Divine Law.
The house at 105 East Pattagansett Road in East Lyme was built circa 1760 by Joseph Smith, the son of Samuel Smith, whose 1695 house survives on Plants Dam Road. During the Revolutionary War, the house was rented to Elisha Beckwith, a notorious Tory, who was known to pass intelligence to the British force based at Sag Harbor, Long Island. The British would cross Long Island Sound at night, hide their boat at Crescent Beach and leave the next day with supplies provided by Beckwith. Beckwith was likely a valuable source of information for Benedict Arnold during the raid on New London on September 6, 1781. The Connecticut Gazette of November 30, 1781 (also quoted in John Warner Barber’s Connecticut Historical Collections under the date December 6, 1781) reported that
Last Friday a guard under the command of Ensign Andrew Griswold, stationed at Lyme, discovered a whale boat in a fresh pond near Black Point; and suspecting it came from Long Island, they set a guard of five men over the boat; and the night after four others of the guard with Ensign Griswold, went towards the house of the noted Elisha Beckwith; one of the party named Noah Lester, advanced faster than the rest, and was challenged by Beckwith’s wife, who was near the house; this alarmed ten men who were in the house, well armed, and they immediately seized upon and made prisoner of Lester, and carried him into the house. Soon after the other four of the guard came to the house, (not knowing Lester was a prisoner,) and went directly in; where they discovered the ten persons in arms: a scuffle immediately ensued between them; and after some lime the guard secured six of the party, among whom was Elisha Beckwith; the other four made their escape into the woods, but they all except one were taken the next day. They came in the above boat from Long Island, and were under the command of Thomas Smith, formerly of Middletown, who had a Captain’s commission under the British King. Elisha Beckwith went off with the enemy the 6th Sept. last, when they made their descent on this place. The above culprits are secured in Norwich gaol.
After spending time in the Hartford Jail, Beckwith eventually reunited with his family in Nova Scotia in 1782.
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