The house at 820 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was once attached to the neighboring house of hat-maker Joseph Booth, built c. 1800. It was moved to its current address sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. Booth is known to have operated a shop on the property, which later housed businesses that manufactured spectacles, jewelry, harnesses and cigars, but it is uncertain if the house at 820 Worthington Ridge was that shop.
At 12 Church Street in Roxbury is a house built circa 1790 for Judge Nathan Smith (1770-1835). According to Homes of Old Woodbury (1959), p. 250, the front section of the house was built sometime after the original rear section and the columns in front, like those of the Phineas Smith House in Roxbury, came from a church in New Haven that had burned in a fire. Nathan Smith and his brother Nathaniel both attended Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School. Nathan Smith was a lawyer and Whig politician. He served as Prosecuting Attorney for New Haven County from 1817 until his death and as United States Attorney for the district of Connecticut from 1828 to 1829. He was a delegate to the Connecticut state constitutional convention in 1818 and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Connecticut in 1825, losing to Oliver Wolcott. Smith served as a US Senator from 1833 to 1835, dying while in office in Washington, D.C., where President Andrew Jackson and his Cabinet attended his funeral in the Senate Chamber. There is a nineteenth-century barn on the Smith property in Roxbury, perhaps built by Smith’s nephew, Nathan R. Smith (b. 1811).
The house at 218 Main Street South in Woodbury was built about 1798 or a little earlier by Lee Terrill, who sold it just two years later. In 1816, owner Herman Stoddard sold part of the property to the First Congregational Church to build a new meeting house.
A house that dsisplays an excellent example of Eastlake-style decorative woodwork is located at 29 Old Hamburg Road in the Hamburg Bridge area of Lyme. The house was built c. 1798-1804, but acquired its elaborate trim when Henry B. Sisson bought the property in 1867 for $300. Sisson, one of Lyme’s most prominent citizens, was a merchant and served in the state assembly and as town treasurer for 21 years.
Before being subdivided in the twentieth century, the land around the Woodruff House at 126 Woodruff Road in Farmington was farmland. Major Ozem Woodruff (1773-1849), who built the brick house around 1821, was a farmer who raised various livestock and operated a saw and grist mill. He also had an orchard and made gin, cider and brandy. In 1794 Ozem Woodruff married Martha Scott (1775-1843). Woodruff left Farmington in 1847 to join his oldest son Ozem in Louisiana. His youngest son George continued to run the farm in Farmington, which remained in the family into the twentieth century (c. 1934). The house has a large stone masonry addition dating to the twentieth century.
The Williams family, which arrived in Hartford with Thomas Hooker, recieved land grants in the north part of what is now East Hartford. Several generations later, c. 1800, brothers Jonathan (also known as John) and Joel Williams replaced an earlier Williams house with the one that is still standing at 270 Long Hill Street in East Hartford.
The house at 67 Mansion House Road in Southbury was built c. 1820 for Jonathan Stiles by his parents, Abel and Lucinda Stiles. They also built a house (1101 Main Street) for their other son Rufus. Jonathan left his house to his son Ransom, who left it to his daughter Anna and son Walter in 1912. Their sister, Bertha Stiles, married Charles W. Burpee (1859-1945), a newspaper editor and author who also served in the Connecticut National Guard. The Burpees resided at 19 Forest Street in Hartford, but in 1916 they acquired the Southbury house for use as a summer residence. Burpee was managing editor of the Hartford Courant from 1900 to 1904 and then head of the educational and editorial departments of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company of Hartford from 1904 to 1935, serving the last five of those years as editor of the Hartford Times. He was the author of several books, including The Military History of Waterbury (1891); the History of Hartford County (1928); A Century in Hartford, Being the History of the Hartford County Mutual Fire Insurance Company (1931); and The Story of Connecticut (1939). The house passed to Bertha and Charles‘s son Stiles Burpee.
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