On Main Street in Old Saybrook is a bed & breakfast called the Deacon Timothy Pratt House. The house was built around 1746 for Timothy Pratt, Sr. and was later occupied by his son Timothy, born in 1748, who was a carpenter and a deacon in the Congregational Church. The house may have served as a private school in the 1790s. It was later known as the Treadway House.
The Shaw-Perkins Mansion, on Blinman Street in New London, was built, beginning in 1756 for the wealthy merchant and shipowner, Capt. Nathaniel Shaw. The house, completed in 1758, was constructed by French Canadian builders, who used granite from the ledge behind the property. Nathaniel Shaw, Jr. inherited the house. He served as Naval Agent for Connecticut and the Mansion was a naval War office during the Revolutionary War. Nathan Hale was a visitor to the Mansion around 1775 and George Washington likely spent the night there in 1776. The house survived Benedict Arnold’s 1781 burning of New London, with only the kitchen being damaged. Shaw’s wife, Lucretia, died in 1781, after becoming ill from nursing prisoners and Shaw himself died the following year from a hunting accident. The house then passed to his brother, Thomas Shaw, and then to his sister, Lucretia Shaw Woodbridge and her husband, Judge Elias Perkins. The house was extensively remodeled by Dr. Nathaniel Shaw Perkins in 1845. His daughter, Jane Richards Perkins (1844-1930), sold the house and its contents to the New London County Historical Society in 1907, on condition she could reside there until her death. The house was restored and is open to the public as a museum.
Built around 1660, the Thomas Lee House in Niantic is one of Connecticut’s oldest wood frame post-Medieval English houses. The original structure consisted of a single-room ground floor with a chamber above. This was expanded, after 1700, with the addition of a West Parlor and Chamber. The lean-to, which makes the house a saltbox, was added about 1765. The Lee family owned the house for two hundred years, until it was sold to a local farmer who used it as a barn and chicken coop. The farmer planned to tear the house down, but in 1914, it was saved by the East Lyme Historical Society, with help from the Connecticut Society of Colonial Wars, the Society of Colonial Dames, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and Lee family descendants. The house was restored under the direction of Norman Morrison Isham, an architectural historian and author of Early Connecticut Houses (1900). It opened to the public in 1915 as a historic house museum, operated by the East Lyme Historical Society.
Across from the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, on South Green, is a house built around 1700 by Amos Tinker. In 1753, it was purchased by John McCurdy, a Scotch-Irish ship merchant who was a patriot during the Revolutionary War. George Washington spent a night in the house in April, 1776, when he was on his way from Boston to New York. In July, 1778, Lafayette was also a guest at the McCurdy home. John McCurdy was the grandfather of Judge Charles Johnson McCurdy, who lived in the home in his later years with his daughter. Judge McCurdy was a lawyer who served as Lt. Governor of Connecticut (1847-1849) and on the state Supreme Court (1863-1867). He was also U.S. Chargé to the Austrian Empire (1850-1852).
David Bishop was a New London builder who started a grocery, lumber and building business with his brothers. In 1872, he purchased a 1796 gambrel-roofed house at 49 Washington Street and raised the building, adding a new first floor for his grocery business. He also lengthened the windows and added dormers and a bay window. The building was restored in the 1990s and the ground floor now houses the offices of New London Landmarks, while the upper level contains two apartments.
The house of Capt. Samuel Mather, on Lyme Street in Old Lyme, is an impressive gambrel-roofed structure built around 1784 or 1790. The width of the house’s clapboard siding is graduated, increasing with each course up to the building’s cornice. Capt. Mather, a descendant of Rev. Richard Mather of Dorchester, was a wealthy merchant involved in trade with the West Indies. He married Lois Griswold and their daughter, Mehitable Mather, married Capt. Thomas Sill. The house is now the Parsonage of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme.
With this post, Historic Buildings of Connecticut celebrates its second anniversary! That’s two years of daily entries of historic buildings! There are many more to do (that’s an understatement!), so please keep reading!!! For our Second Birthday Post, the featured building is the Jacob and Abigail Strong House (also known in the past as the David Strong House) in East Windsor Hill (South Windsor). This is an early “First Period” or Post-Medieval English home, built in 1698. Originally the home of Jacob Strong and his wife, Abigail Bissell, the house is now the residence of Edward Sunderland of Sunderland Period Homes.
