The house at 46 Indian Hill Road in Portland was built c. 1784–1785 (or later, in 1796) by Abiel Cheney, Jr. It was later owned by George Lewis, Jr., who ran the nearby shipyard and had another house at 628 Main Street.
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George Lewis, Jr. (1747-1826) was a shipbuilder who erected the house at 628 Main Street in Portland in 1778. His shipyard was nearby, along the Connecticut River. As described in the History of Middlesex County (1884):
For more than a century and a half shipbuilding has been the chief industry of that part of Portland now called Gildersleeve, and it was for a time the most active business in the town. Early in the last century, George Lewis built vessels on the present site of the Gildersleeve yard. The first vessel built in Portland was launched here in October 1741.
Sylvester Gildersleeve purchased the Lewis yard from George Lewis, Jr.’s son, Abel Lewis, in 1838. In 1927, the house the residence of George Lewis’s granddaughter, Elizabeth H. Gildersleeve.
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Abijah Catlin II (1747-1813) built the house at 1 Harmony Hill Road in Harwinton c. 1760-1765. Land in the area had been granted to his father, Abijah Catlin I (1715-1778) in 1739, soon after the Town of Harwinton was formed in 1737. In addition to the house, which he operated as an inn, Catlin also built a store just to the west on the same property. Guests at the inn included General George Washington, General Henry Knox, and the Marquis de Lafayette, who stopped there on their way back to West Pont after meeting with General Rochambeau in Hartford in September, 1780. The house is at the intersection of Burlington and Harmony Hill Roads, a crossroads that became known as Catlin’s Corners.
At 54 Lyme Street in Old Lyme is a three-quarter cape with a gambrel roof, called the Justin Smith House, which was built in 1710. In recent years, the house was saved from demolition and completely restored by its current owners, Brad and Gerri Sweet, who discovered that some of the wood rafters had come from an even earlier building. The house had many owners over the years. Samuel Mather sold it to Nathan Tinker in 1784, who himself sold it in 1790. It was then own successively by three brothers, Joseph, Charles and Simon Smith. After World War One, the house was the residence of Matilda Brown, an artist who was part of the Old Lyme art colony.
At the corner of West Morris Road and Bantam Road (4 West Morris Road), in the Bantam section of Litchfield, is a house that was once operated as a tavern. Leaming Bradley had acquired the property where the house stands in 1782. It is uncertain if the building was already standing at that time, or was erected sometime after. Leaming’s son Aaron inherited the property in 1787 and by 1797 he running a tavern and store in partnership with his son-in-law, Capt. Henry Wadsworth. Bradley & Wadsworth also had other business interests, including a forge, blacksmith’s shop, paper mill, grist mill, sawmill and distillery. In the 1820s, they also owned the house at 1062 Bantam Road. For several decades the area around the tavern was known as Bradleyville. An incident at their tavern in 1810 is said to have in part inspired Litchfield’s Congregational minister, Rev. Lyman Beecher, to write his influential “Six Sermons on Intemperance.” As described in The History of the Town of Litchfield, Connecticut 1720-1920 (1920)
A temperate man himself, Lyman Beecher had never been an advocate of total abstinence. “Two leading members of his own church”, says Miss Esther H. Thompson, Waterbury American, February 22, 1906, “Capt. Wadsworth and Deacon Bradley, kept a tavern and a grocery store in Bantam, where fermented and distilled liquors flowed freely as was then the universal custom in such places. Unseemly carousals were common, in one of which there was a battle wherein salted codflsh figured as weapon, adding thereby no dignity to the church, and deeply grieving the wife of Capt. Wadsworth, who was the sister of Deacon Bradley. She was a woman of superior intellect, deep piety, and early became a believer in total abstinence. It is said that her influence was potent in arousing Dr. Beecher to see and to preach against the evil of intemperance.
Aaron Bradley was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a deacon of the Congregational Church and served terms as town selectman and in the state assembly. In 1830, he sold the property to another son-in-law, William Coe, who expanded the mercantile business in partnership with his brother-in-law under the name Kilborn & Coe (the company continued until 1883). In the 1850s, the tavern was known as William Coe’s Hotel.
On December 5, 1776, Capt. John Brainerd (1754-1820) married Hannah Hubbard and soon after erected a house at what is now the corner of Saybrook Road and High Street in Higganum. John’s father, Jabez Brainerd (c. 1713-1778), once lived in a house that stood at the rear of the property. As related in The Genealogy of the Brainerd-Brainard Family in America, 1649-1908, Vol. II (1908), by Lucy Abigail Brainard,
[John Brainerd] was a militia man in the Revolutionary War, and possibly was at White Plains, N.Y. He joined the Regiment Apr. 7, and was disc. May 19, 1777. He was Sergeant in Lieut. Smith’s Company. He was spoken of as Colonel. He was justice of the peace from 1795 to 1804, inclusive. He lived opposite the Higganum Church, which was then a part of Haddam. He was a farmer.
John and Hannah (Hubbard) Brainerd had eleven children. She died in 1795. John married his second wife, Jane Spencer, in 1800. A later resident of the house, from 1839 to 1883, was Selden Usher (1806-1883), a manufacturer who operated an oakum factory on the Higganum River. The house remained in the Usher family until 1948. The property has a historic barn and a privy.
The house at 35 Main Street in Essex was originally built in the late eighteenth century with a gambrel roof. It was enlarged before 1810 by builder Thomas Millard, likely for the newlyweds, Nathaniel Wilson and Temperance Lay.
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