Thomas Eldredge, and his brothers George and Elam, purchased land on Gravel Street in Mystic from their father in 1842. Thomas erected the house at 31 Gravel Street soon after. The three brothers were all shipmasters and mariners. Thomas was a captain for over 45 years and was known as “the Commodore of the Mallory line.” He sold the house when he retired. He moved to New York and maintained a summer home in Mystic on Prospect Hill. After a fire in 1879 the house’s original roof was replaced with a Mansard roof.
The grand residence known as Boxwood, located at 9 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, was built in 1842 for the merchant Richard Sill Griswold (1809-1849). A third story was later added by Richard Sill Griswold, Jr. (1869-1901). In 1890, his wife opened the Boxwood School for Girls in the house. The building had connections with the Old Lyme art colony. The summer Lyme School of Art held studio classes at Boxwood in 1905 and artists could rent rooms in the house while the boarding school students were not in residence. Among the residents that year were the future president Woodrow Wilson and his wife Ellen Axson Wilson, who was enrolled at the art school. When Mrs. Griswold died in 1907 the boarding school closed, but Boxwood Manor continued as a summer inn with its gardens being a celebrated attraction. On Christmas Eve, 1943, James Streeto, the caretaker of the estate, was murdered on the property. The woman he was involved with at the time, Delphine Bertrand, threatened with the death penalty for the murder, pled guilty to the charge of manslaughter, but the charges were dropped when two men later confessed to the murder and were convicted. The inn closed in 1958 and the property was bought by Dr. Matthew Griswold, who altered it into apartments and a restaurant. The Griswold family sold the building in 1975 and it was converted into condominiums.
The house at 28 Pearl Street in Middletown was built by Charles Brewer (1778-1860) sometime between 1839 and 1851. It was one of three houses he built on Pearl Street during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and may have been intended to be a rental property. The house was owned in the later nineteenth century by Rev. Eleazor Foster, who was pastor of Middletown’s First Universalist Church from 1866 to 1868, and then by the printer J. Peters Pelton, who built a house on Court Street in the 1880s.
Charles Brewer is described in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1903):
Capt. Charles Brewer second son of George was born in Springfield Mass. March 24, 1778, and removed to Middletown on attaining his majority. He was a silversmith, and for fifty nine years was a manufacturing and merchant jeweler, being a successful and a leading merchant of his time. He was a captain in the old militia for many years, and was known as “Capt.” Charles Brewer. With his son-in-law, Edwin Stearns, he gave the real estate for and was instrumental in the building the Universalist Church at Middletown. Fraternally he was a member of St. John’s Lodge, F. & A. M., and some of his silver work was used for many years in that lodge. Capt. Brewer built the family home on the corner of Pearl and Court streets as well as the two houses south of it on the east side of Pearl street. He was married February 18, 1801, to Hannah daughter of Barakiah Fairbanks. She was born September 28, 1777, and died May 24, 1855. Capt. Brewer died May 10, 1860. They were the parents of a numerous family of children[.]
The William T. Tibbals House, at 11 Old Middletown Road in the Cobalt section of the town of East Hampton, has an unusual shape that some have classified as an octagon but seems closer to an oval and is said to be known as “the round house.” The roof may have had an octagon shape at one time, but today it seems to have the sides of a dodecagon, or 12-sided polygon. The house was built in 1857, which was during the peak of the fad in construction of octagon houses, and it has the stucco exterior and bracketed roof typical of octagon house construction, so perhaps we could consider it a relative of the octagon houses. It was built for William Thadeus Tibbals, operated an oakum works (used for caulking wooden ships) on Cobalt Stream that had been started by his father, Thadeus Tibbals, in 1828. After William’s death, his widow lived in the house and his son, Irvin Tibbals, who continued the oakum business with William’s brothers.
