Dr. H. S. Dean House (1820)

The Greek Revival house at 1104 Main Street in South Coventry dates to circa 1820. By 1857 it was the property of the owners of the D & W Huntington silk mill, located along Mill Brook. It was later the home of Dr. Henry S. Dean (1823-1898). Born in Holland, Massachusetts, Dr. Dean, a graduate of Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, practiced medicine in South Coventry and surrounding towns for forty years. In a 1912 poem celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the First Congregational Church in South Coventry, Forrest Morgan honored the late doctor:

Not cold in our hearts the physician, best brother in homes beyond name.
Whose face that the kind soul illumined bore healing wherever it came;
Who not seldom gave life to the new-born, kept sickness a lifetime at bay.
Then closed the cold eyelids forever and paid the last rites to the clay.

Captain David Beecher and Hannah Perkins Beecher House (1762)

The house at 545 Amity Road in Bethany was built in 1760 or 1762. It faces south, parallel to the road, and is built into a hillside. It was originally owned by Captain David Beecher and Hannah Perkins Beecher. The earliest known conveyance of the property was in 1851 from Lysias Beecher to David Beecher and William M. Hull. It passed through other owners until Hubert W. Delano acquired it in 1946. It was conveyed in 1955 to Edna L. Delano (1890-1982), who had been an army nurse in World War One. In 1986, her sons, Hubert and William Delano, gave a parcel of land south of the house, called the Delano Sanctuary, to the Bethany Land Trust in honor of their mother, Edna L. Delano.

This post has been updated on March 26, 2021 with new information from the current owner (since 1986) of the house. The name of the post has also been changed from the “Lysias Beecher House” to the “Captain David Beecher and Hannah Perkins Beecher House” to reflect how it is listed in the State Register of Historic Places.

William Tomlinson House (1836)

The house at 467 Quaker Farms Road in Oxford was built in 1836 by William Tomlinson. It was next owned by Stephen S. Mallett, who sold it in 1899 to Charles Davis, a prominent farmer who was active at Christ Church, located directly across the street. After his death, the house was owned by his step-daughter, J. Mabel Lum (1880-1964), an influential citizen of Oxford who was also active at Christ Church. For a time the property was the Quaker Farms Nursery.