The Martin Wells House (1800)

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Not much is known about the construction of the house at 646 Wolcott Hill Road in Wethersfield. Most likely built by 1800, it may date to much earlier. The house is associated with the name Martin Wells, perhaps an ancestor or relative of Judge Martin Wells, who lived in the Webb House starting around 1820 and hosted Tocqueville when he visited the Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield in 1831. The Wells House on Wolcott Hill Road at one time had a front porch attached, which was later removed.

Elisha Stillman House (1775)

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The Elisha Stillman House, at 99 Wells Road in Wethersfield, was built around 1775. The property had been owned by Lt. John Stillman, who sold it to his brother, Elisha Stillman, in 1773. Their father, Deacon John Stillman, was married to Mary Wolcott, whose father Samuel Wolcott had owned the land on which the Joseph Webb (1752) and Silas Deane (c. 1770) Houses were later built on Main Street. In 1765, either John or Elisha Stillman sold Deane the land where he later built his home. The Stillman House later became part of the Silas W. Robbins farm property in the nineteenth century.

The Parke-Buckley House (1770)

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Joseph Parke was a cooper who moved from Groton to Middle Haddam in 1758, when the community was still developing into what would become an important shipbuilding port on the Connecticut River. One of Parke’s sons built an asymmetrical saltbox house at Knowles Landing in 1770. After the Revolutionary War, it was occupied by Chauncey Buckley, a wealthy merchant and owner of privateers during the war.

Nathaniel Hayward House (1775)

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Around 1775, Amos Otis built a house for Capt. Dudley Wright, on the site of the old house Wright’s father, Joseph Wright in Colchester. The impressive new house also served as a store, a tavern and, on the second floor ballroom, as the meeting place of the Wooster Lodge of Masons. Capt. Wright’s daughter Lydia married Dr. John Watrous in 1783 and the couple moved into the house’s second floor. Wright lived with them until his death in 1808. In 1823, Dr. Frederick Morgan married the Watrous’s daughter, Caroline Watrous. When Dr. Watrous died in 1842, they lived in the house until 1848, when they sold the house to Nathanial Hayward. Hayward was an inventor who had conceived a process of vulcanization of rubber by treating it with sulphur and a patent for this was issued in 1837 to Hayward’s colleague, Charles Goodyear. [For more information, see Some Account of Nathaniel Hayward’s Experiments with India Rubber which resulted in discovering the Invaluable Compound of that article with Sulphur (1865)]. Hayward had founded the Hayward Rubber Company and built a factory in Colchester in 1847. In 1885, the factory closed, but was reoccupied by the Colchester Rubber Company in 1888, which operated until it was absorbed by the United States Rubber Trust in 1892.

The house was embellished by Hayward, who added a bay window. He also presented his front lawn to the town as a park. The Hayward family lived in the home into the twentieth century. The last descendants to occupy the house in the 1940s wanted it to be razed, but it was purchased and saved, although not kept up for many years. It has recently been a bed and breakfast called the Hayward House Inn, but is now a real estate office.