The oldest surviving Catholic church building in Hartford, the Portland brownstone Gothic Revival St. Peter’s Church, was completed in 1868. It was designed by James Murphy, who had once been an associate of Patrick Keely. The parish was established nine years earlier, in 1859, and served the city’s growing Irish-American population. The tower was added in the 1920s.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the Gothic Revival style was frequently used for Episcopal and Catholic churches (note, for example, Christ Church Cathedral and St. Peter’s Church). Some Congregational churches were also built in that style, including the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, the only Gothic Congregational church in greater Hartford. which was built in 1865 and designed by Patrick Keely. A noted architect of Catholic churches, Keely would later design Hartford’s St. Joseph’s Cathedral, which was destroyed by fire in 1956.
The Asylum Hill Church’s first pastor was Joseph Twitchell, who was a good friend of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). The Clemens family rented a pew in the church. Today the church is also known for its yearly Boar’s Head and Yule Log Festival.
Hartford’s fist Episcopal church was completed in 1795 and looked very similar to contemporary white Congregational meeting houses. Following the disestablishment of the Congregational Church as the official church of Connecticut in 1818 and the growth of the original Episcopal congregation, it was apparent by the 1820s that a larger building should be built. When Christ Church’s rector, Rev. Nathaniel S. Wheaton, was on a trip to England collect books for the Episcopalians’ new Washington College (now Trinity College), he sketched many of the Gothic churches there and, on his return, noted New Haven architect Ithiel Town was hired to design the new church in a Gothic Revival style. Town had previously designed Trinity Church on New Haven Green.
Christ Church was built in 1828 and consecrated in 1829. While the church’s overall shape still resembles a meeting house, by choosing a Gothic style the Connecticut Episcopalians were announcing their separate identity from the Congregationalists by linking themselves to the Anglican tradition. Various alterations have been made over the years by a number of noted architects. In 1919, the church was chosen to be the Cathedral of the Diocese of Connecticut. As the Cathedral is currently covered in scaffolding, the photo above focuses on the Bell Tower, which was added in 1838.
EDIT (5/30/08): I have replaced the original picture with a new one. There is still scaffolding, but more of the church is visible than in the first picture.
Built on Forest Street in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood in 1871 for a lawyer named Franklin Chamberlin, this house was bought two years later by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She lived here with her husband, Calvin Stowe (a retired minister and professor) and two unmarried twin daughters, Hatty and Eliza. In 1878 she completed her last novel Poganuc People, based on her early years growing up in Litchfield. After Stowe died in 1896, the twins sold the house and it was later bought, in 1927, by Katharine Seymour Day (Stowe’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Isabella Beecher Hooker), who left it to become a museum. The house was restored in the 1960s and is open to the public as part of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.
Built in 1846 in Woodstock as a summer home for Henry Chandler Bowen. He had grown up in the town, but later went to Brooklyn, NY and became a wealthy dry goods merchant. He was also an abolitionist and Republican, who hosted famous Fourth of July celebrations on his property, which included such guests as Ulysses S. Grant (who had to endure Bowen’s teetotaling). The Gothic Revival house and the grounds, which include a boxwood garden, reflect the ideas of Andrew Jackson Downing (as presented in such books as The Architecture of Country Houses) on rural dwellings and country landscaping. The house is now a museum administered by Historic New England.
Built at the corner of Forest and Hawthorn Streets in Hartford for the lawyer, John Hooker and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker. The original structure of 1853 was expanded into a Gothic Revival villa by architect Octavius Jordan in 1861. This was the first house built in the notable Hartford neighborhood of Nook Farm. Isabella, an important figure in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The house was altered in the early twentieth century when part of the roof was raised in 1906 and the porte-cochere added in 1924. Today the house is surrounded by 1950s-era apartment buildings and is itself an apartment building.
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