Known as the Hudson House, the house at 430 Oxford Road in Oxford was built c. 1814 by Timothy Candee, who also built a nearly identical house next door at 426 Oxford Road. A Revolutionary War veteran, Candee also built the nearby Congregational Church for the Ecclesiastical Society of Oxford. His brothers, Daniel and Job, built the Oxford Hotel on the other side of Oxford Road.
Noted architect David Hoadley designed the house at 562 Amity Road in Bethany for Darius Beecher (1768-1833). Built in 1807, the house is considered a major example of the Federal style in New England, both in its exterior and interior detailing. It had a number of owners in the nineteenth century, including Abraham Beecher, who sold it to John Thomas, who then gave it to his son Lewis Thomas as a wedding present. Next it was owned by Orrin Wheeler, whose family retained it until 1899. The house was owned for a time in the twentieth century by Huntington Lee and his sister Josephine B. Lee, who added a wing on the south side where the Gale Electric Company made lamps and reproduced antiques. For a brief period in the early 1940s the wing was occupied by William Edwin Rudge, who published a graphic arts magazine called Print. The cover of Volume II, Nos. 3 & 4 (December 1941) featured an illustration of the house by Hugo Steiner-Prag. There also exists an etching of the house by John Taylor Arms entitled “Old Hoadley House, Home of “Print,” Bethany, Connecticut.”
At 477 Simsbury Road in Bloomfield is a house built in 1791 by Joseph Burr. Flax grown in Wintonbury (Bloomfield) was used to make linseed oil and Burr had a linseed oil mill on Loeffler Road, which was then called called Burr Road. (more…)
In 1790, Captain Samuel Stiles (1757-1813), a veteran of the Revolutionary War, erected the house at 169 Melrose Road in East Windsor. As catalogued in The Stiles Family in America: Genealogies of the Connecticut Family (1895), by Henry Reed Stiles:
Capt. Samuel Stiles left the sum of $1,000 to the Scantic Parish (East Windsor) as a fund for the support of the Gospel ministry in that parish. He was also a prominent Free Mason. The following are the inscriptions on his gravestone, and that of his wife, in the Ireland St. graveyard in E. W.:
“Capt | Samuel Stiles | died of a consumption | 9th of January A.D. 1813 | His name will ever be gracious to all who knew him, especially to the congregation with whom he habitually assembled for divine worship. As a tribute of gratitude and as a testimony of respect to his beloved memory this stone is raised by surviving friends to mark the place where his body rests in the silence of the grave.”
“Mrs. Jennet, wife of Capt. Samuel Stiles, died Feb; 20, 1824, ae 62, as a testimony of respect to her beloved memory this stone is raised to mark the spot where her body rests, till it shall arise at the call of him who conquered death.”
In the Hartford City and County atlas of 1869 the house is listed as the home of J. M. Stiles. Quoting again from The Stiles Family, John Morton Stiles was
born at East Windsor, Conn., Jan. 11, 1818; married Dec. 14, 1843, Julia Ann (daughter of Eli and Rocksalena Allen) Gowdy (born Feb. 5, 1819), of East Windsor. He was a farmer at Melrose, Conn., where he died, April 12, 1886.
The was later the Melrose post office for about four decades.
Built c. 1790, the house at 67 Moodus Road in Middle Haddam was originally the home of Captain Ralph Smith (1761-1838), a retired sea captain who became a farmer and owned a gristmill, sawmill and distillery on a stream near his home. His children sold the house to Daniel McLean (1818-1877), a steamship steward, in 1867. Born in Bristol, Rhode Island, McLean had been a customs officer at New Orleans. Dr. George Lawson, who married McLean’s daughter Ida Louise in 1897, had his medical office in the house in the early years of the twentieth century. He used a room off the front parlor as his pharmacy. An interesting news item mentioning Dr. Lawson (“Sick Man Well Enough to Escape from Sheriff”) appeared in The Day on September 8, 1909:
Owing to the dilatory measures employed by the officers of the law, Henry Smith, the suspected murderer of his brother, William Smith, escaped yesterday afternoon from his home at Haddam Neck, shortly before the arrival of Sheriff Davis to arrest Smith. The suspected man said on Monday night, when he got a visit from the sheriff, that he was ill from malaria and the sheriff left him without making an arrest or leaving a man on guard.
Dr. G. N. Lawson of Middle Haddam was called by Smith yesterday afternoon and he arrived at the house about 1 o’clock. The man escaped between the time of the doctor’s call and that of the sheriff, which was about 5 p. m.
The house’s original hip roof and Federal detailing have since been removed.
Benjamin Smith, a descendant of early settlers of Haddam, erected the house at 432 Candlewood Hill Road in 1807, the year he married Lydia Burr, daughter of Captain Jonathan Burr. Their son Benjamin W. Smith inherited the house in 1833. He left Haddam in 1856 and sold the house to the Skinner family. The house once had a central chimney that was removed about 1904.
Located at 1531 Southford Road in the village of Southford in Southbury, the Hurd-Osborn-Oatman House was built in 1806 by George Thompson as a hotel. As explained by John L. Rockey in the second volume of his History of New Haven County, Connecticut (1892):
In the period of time when the turnpike was the great thoroughfare between New Haven and Litchfield, Southford being 20 miles from the former place and 25 miles from the latter, hotels were here kept and were well patronized. [. . . ] The hotel known as the Oatman House for 35 years, was built by George Thompson in 1806, and first kept by him and then by his brother-in-law, Benjamin S. Hurd, followed by John Peck. Enos Foot was the landlord in 1845.
George Thompson and Benjamin Smith Hurd married two sisters, Clarissa and Esther, daughters of Adin Wheeler, who helped to fund construction of the hotel. The hotel had many owners over the years. Benjamin Blagg Osborn, son of merchant and Revolutionary War patriot Shadrach Osborn, was tavern-keeper in the 1820s. Charles R. Oatman (1827-1904), under whose name the hotel was long known, acquired the property in 1870. Oatman married Orinda T. Hurd, daughter of Benjamin R. Hurd, in 1850. The Oatman family owned the hotel until 1899 and even under later owners it was still known for many years as the C. R. Oatman Hotel. It later became the Fennbrock Dairy.
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