Eliel Williams House (1769)

Happy Thanksgiving! A classic example of a colonial house with few alterations is the Eliel Williams House, at 82 Elm Street in Rocky Hill, built in 1769. According to Vol. 3 of the Encyclopedia of Connecticut Biography (1917), Corporal Eliel Williams was

born in Stepney Parish, January 30, 1746, died there August 2, 1819. He was one of the four corporals enrolled under Captain John Chester, and sent from Wethersfield on the Lexington Alarm and fought at Bunker Hill. He married Comfort Morton, a maternal descendant of Governor Thomas Welles, and her great-great-paternal grandmother, Honor Treat, was a sister of Governor Robert Treat, and wife of John Deming, one of the first settlers of Wethersfield.

The house is also known as the Merriam Williams House, after Eliel Williams’ son. According to the same source quoted above,

Merriam Williams, son of Corporal Eliel Williams, was born in Stepney Parish, July 3, 1785, and died May 10, 1857. He was a tanner and currier and shoe manufacturer of Rocky Hill, also a landowner and farmer. He married Elizabeth Danforth, daughter of Thomas Danforth, a manufacturer and merchant of Rocky Hill.

346 Main Street South, Woodbury (1753)

The house at 346 Main Street South in Woodbury was built between 1751 and 1757, with a larger addition dating to the 1760s. Cyrus Lee, the original owner, operated a tavern in the house and a subsequent owner, Captain Isaac Tomlinson, built an addition which served as an inn and tavern and had a second-floor ball room. Julia Marshall, the next owner, had a bar room on the premises. The use of the house for business purposes continued in the twentieth century and, from the 1940s, it housed antiques shops under several owners. The house has a large addition, with separate living quarters, built in 2000. Today the house is home to The joannajohn Collection.

Holley Homestead (1752)

In 1746, Sylvanus Freeman purchased a farm in the Wormwood Hill area of Mansfield and in 1752 he built a gambrel-roofed house on the property. Freeman sold the farm in 1764 and it passed through several other owners until 1817, when it was acquired by Selah Holley, a widow from Charlestown, Rhode Island, whose husband had passed away two years before. She lived in the homestead with her children, among whom was Perry Holley, who continued to reside in the house with his mother after his marriage in 1830 to Lois Fenton. As described in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Tolland and Windham Counties, Connecticut (1903), Perry Holley

was born July 2, 1809, in Rhode Island, and came to Mansfield when a boy. During his boyhood he worked upon the farm, and when still a young man learned the trade of forger, working at the manufacture of bits and augers in various localities where those goods were made; he was also one of the first operators of the trip hammer, being very expert in the handling of the clumsy machine, and consequently commanded good wages. In company with Hiram Parker he operated a forge shop near his house for a few years. After working at his trade for many years, he spent his declining years in Mansfield, farming, and died there in March, 1885. In religion he was a member of the Methodist Church at Gurleyville, and when a young man took a very active part in its affairs. Mr. Holly married Lois Fenton, a native of Mansfield, daughter of Elisha and Phileta (Storrs) Fenton, where her father was a blacksmith. Mrs. Holly died on April I8, 1892, aged eighty-four years, four months, to a day.

The Holley Homestead was sold out of the family in 1889 to Mary F. Sewall of Montclair, New Jersey, who used it as a summer home. One autumn, as she prepared to return to New Jersey for the winter, she asked a local carpenter to build an addition to the house. When she returned next summer, she was astonished to find that he had built what was essentially an entirely new house attached to the old gambrel-roofed colonial. The original house was later altered with the addition of a porch and gables. After 14 years of ownership, Sewell sold the house to Elizabeth Scheib Doty of Brooklyn, whose husband, Ethan Allen Doty (d. 1915), owned a large paper mill called Doty & Scrimgeour. The house, located at 627 Wormwood Hill Road, was next sold in 1931 to Stanley Kunitz, a well-known poet who worked on restoring the structure. It was again sold in 1935 to John Plimpton, who rented out rooms in the house. It is still owned by his heirs.

James Warner House (1760)

The house at 447 Old Main Street in Rocky Hill was built around 1760 and was home to the Deming family. The covered Federal-style front doorway portico was added to the house around 1800. The property was later owned by members of the Merriam family. Around 1863, James Warner acquired the house, which was valued at $10,000 in the 1860 census. The property continued to be farmed by members of the Warner family over several generations. It was passed down to Carl Warner, an optician who later retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he died in 1967. Carl Warner also owned the house next door, which was built in 1773 and later demolished. The current owners of the James Warner House purchased it in October 2011 and have a blog called Confessions of An Antique Home in which they relate their adventures in owning a historic house.

Charles Bulkeley II House (1785)

Charles Bulkeley the 2nd was a ship captain who built the house at 530 Old Main Street in Rocky Hill between 1785 and 1790. He lived just down the street from the house of his father, Charles Bulkeley, Sr. The younger Charles Bulkeley married Eunice Robbins in 1785. After her husband died of smallpox in the West Indies in 1799, Eunice stayed on in the house until her own death in 1835 and passed it down to her unmarried daughter Augusta.