Now located at the entrance to Laurel Grove Road in Middletown, the Harriet Cooper Lane House (named for a long-time occupant) originally stood on Main Street in Durham. The house was built by Robert Smithson in 1741 and was moved to Middletown in 1957.
The home of Charles Bulkeley, on Bank Street in New London, was built around 1790 and replaced an earlier home burned during Arnold’s 1781 raid on the city. Bulkeley was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and a sea captain who sailed with John Paul Jones. In the 1880s, the house became home to the Klinck Meat Market and an ice house was located in the rear. Today the building is the Bulkeley House Restaurant.
John Rider was a Danbury carpenter, who also served as a state militia captain during the Revolutionary War. The house of John and his wife Mary was built in 1785 and was occupied by members of the Rider family until 1925. In 1941, the house was saved from potential destruction through the action of citizens, who formed the Danbury Historical Society and Arts Center. This organization merged, in 1947, with the Scott Fanton Museum to form the Danbury Museum and Historical Society. The Rider House on Main Street is today a museum and has been joined by other historic structures, which together form the Museum’s main campus.
The owners of the Joseph Buckingham House, long known as the Old Buckingham House, located on Main Street in Old Saybrook, believe the house was built in the late seventeenth century. The plaque on the front has the date of 1671. It is a saltbox house with later additions. It was once the home of Rev. Thomas Buckingham, one of Yale’s original founders and trustees, and it is believed to be the site of the first Yale commencement in 1702.
The oldest house in Meriden is the Solomon Goffe House on North Colony Street. As explained in A Century of Meriden (1906):
We know nothing about Mr. Goffe except that he lived here ten years, married a Wallingford girl. Mary Doolitlle, and the birth of one child is recorded. In 1721 he sold the place to Thomas Andrews, of Wallingford, who, apparently, lived there until 1729, when he sold it to Jonathan Collins, of Middletown. The old house was enlarged, perhaps soon after Mr. Collins bought it, for the addition looks as old as the rest, but that there has been an addition is plain to be seen. The dormer windows in the old gambrel roof are probably a later addition, and there have been apparently some changes in the interior. That the house is the one built by Solomon Goffe will be apparent to any one who will examine the old rafters and the huge floor beams. The chimneys in the cellar are enormous and the stones were cemented with clay mixed with straw as were the foundation walls, a sure sign of an early house; another indication of age is the split laths, used in very early houses. The Collins family continued to own the house until 1796 when a son, Jonathan, Jr., sold it to Samuel Taylor of Chatham. Mr. Taylor doubtless lived in it until 1806 when he sold it to his son-in-law, Partrick Clark.
Now owned by the City of Meriden, the house is a museum, open by appointment.
After teaching at the schoolhouse in East Haddam, Nathan Hale went on to become the schoolmaster at the Union School in New London, teaching there from 1774 until the Revolutionary War began in 1775. Built in 1773, the gambrel-roofed school building was originally located on State Street, was moved to Union and Golden streets in 1830 to serve as a private home and was purchased in 1890 by the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. Under their guardianship, the building has been moved several additional times: first to the burial ground on Huntington Street, then, in 1966, to to Crystal Avenue and in 1975 to a spot next to City Hall. In 1988, the town paid to move the school to the Parade, at the foot of State Street. For some time, it has been used as a Visitor Center and museum. The schoolhouse has just been moved a sixth time, to a new plaza adjacent to the Water Street parking garage.
This Memorial Day, we honor the Connecticut patriot and hero of the Revolutionary War, Nathan Hale. The Nathan Hale Schoolhouse, in East Haddam is a one room school, built in 1750. After his graduation from Yale, Hale taught here as schoolmaster for the Winter session, 1773-1774. The building was later moved from Goodspeed Plaza (a location now marked by a bust of Hale) to serve as a house and around 1900 was moved again to its present site on a hill, overlooking the Connecticut River. It is now a museum, operated by the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. Nathan Hale moved on from East Haddam to teach at the Nathan Hale Schoolhouse in New London, where he was working when he joined the Continental Army. He was captured and hanged by the British as a spy on September 22, 1776.
