In 1849, Sylvester Bailey purchased the land at 103 Main Street in Middlefield and a year later had built a house. Bailey, a gunsmith, established a nearby pistol factory with his partners, Henry Aston, Ira N. Johnson, John North, Nelson Aston, and Peter Ashton. Bailey died in 1864 and the house passed to his three sons, who sold it out of the family in 1866. Three Polish immigrant families then successively owned the house.
The nomination form for the Plymouth Center Historic District lists the house at 717 Main Street as a former ell of the Curtiss Hotel, known as the Quiet House. It gives a date of c. 1860, but I’m not sure if this is the date the ell was constructed or he date it was removed to become a separate house. It was the home of Caroline P. Root. Her son, Edward Root, lived with her. He was a carriage painter.
At 47 Mechanic Street in Pawcatuck is a Greek Revival House, built c. 1840-1845.
The Greenmanville Church at Mystic Seaport was built in 1851 during the area’s heyday as a shipbuilding center. As related in Seventh Day Baptists in Europe and America, Vol. II (1910):
In 1838 three brothers, George, Clarke and Thomas S. Greenman, members of the First Hopkinton church, settled in Mystic, Conn., and commenced the ship-building business. Thirteen years later, 1849, they built a mill for the manufacture of woolen goods. About these industries sprang up a village called Greenmanville. The most of those working in the ship-yard were Sabbath-keepers, and being several miles removed from any Seventh-day Baptist church, it was deemed wise to organize one. This was done in August, 1850, with about forty members. The constituent members were mostly from the First Hopkinton church, a few from the Waterford church, and one from the Newport church. The largest membership, fifty-six, was reached the first year and it held pretty well up to this for thirty years. Its present (1902) number is eighteen.
Though it never enrolled a large number of members, yet it exercised a wide influence in denominational and other circles. George Greenman, a member of this church, was president of the Seventh-day Baptist Missionary Society for thirty-one years. The leading men of the church took an active part in the anti-slavery struggle, and the temperance cause has been supported by these godly men. Clarke Greenman, Thomas S. Greenman and Benjamin F. Langworthy served the town in the state legislature at different times.
The congregation was depleted with the decline of the shipyard in the 1870s and 1880s and the selling of the woolen mill to owners of another denomination. The church closed in 1904 and the building then served as a private residence and an apartment building before it was acquired by Mystic Seaport in 1955. The Seaport moved the church from its original site (near the current Visitor Center) to its present location. For a time, the church was called the Aloha Meetinghouse and was a nondenominational church. Mystic Seaport added the current tower clock, built in 1857 by the Howard Clock Company of Massachusetts. The clock is on loan from Yale, where it was once located in the Old South Sheffield Hall of the Sheffield Scientific School. (more…)
Guilford‘s North West Center School, a one-room school house, was built in 1848. It originally had a columned portico with three steps leading up to the entrance. It served as a school until a consolidation of schools in town in 1871. An agricultural class was taught here in 1922, but the building, located at 85 Fair Street, is now a private home. It once sat further back on its lot, but was then moved closer to the street. The bay windows are also a later addition.
The house at 172 Cherry Brook Road in Canton Center was built in 1830 by Norman Case, who had a woodworking shop on the banks of Cherry Brook where he made wagons and coffins. Once, people attending services at the Congregational Church next door heard a loud pounding, unusual for a Sunday morning. It was Norman Case, making a coffin for his young married daughter, who had died suddenly. Case’s shop became the Canton Center Store in 1875 and was moved closer to the road in 1886. Case’s house was later owned by Walter S. Case (1859-1941), who arrived in Canton in 1893 and ran the store for nearly fifty years, being succeeded by his sons, Gordon and Byron. He made alterations to the house, removing the central chimney and rearranging the interior rooms. Walter S. Case also served as postmaster from 1898 to 1940, followed by his son Gordon Case, who made an addition to the store for the post office.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Methodism gained adherents in what is now the village of Old Mystic in Stonington. Circuit preachers came at regular intervals and services were held in private homes and various other sites until a church was erected in 1849. Built at the foot of Quoketaug Hill, it was destroyed by a fire on February 17, 1851. A new church, located at what is now 44 Main Street in Old Mystic, was completed by the end of the year. The church had an 80-foot spire that was lost in the Hurricane of 1938. A parish house was erected behind the church in 1912. This was enlarged and attached to the church in 1961. (more…)
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