Bridgeport’s Old City Hall (1854)

This is Bridgeport Week!

The old City Hall of Bridgeport was constructed of Portland brownstone in 1853-54 between State and Bank Streets at a cost of $75,000. The Greek Revival building, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis to resemble a Greek temple, served as both City Hall and as the Fairfield County Courthouse. The original county seat and courthouse had been located in Fairfield, but when a larger building was required, it was decided to move the county seat to Bridgeport, which was experiencing considerable growth at the time. An alternative location for the courthouse was Norwalk, but Bridgeport offered to pay for the courthouse and a jail. The completed building had a large ground floor used as City Hall and two upper floors for court and county business. There was also an auditorium, called Washington Hall, used for public meetings. It was here, on March 10, 1860, that Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to a standing-room-only crowd.

The building served as courthouse until a new and larger one was constructed in 1887-1888 near the corner of Golden Hill and Main Streets. The old building, which continued to be used as City Hall until the 1960s and still contains city offices, was significantly remodeled in 1905. Bridgeport architect Joseph Northrop altered the building, toning down some of Davis’ romantic touches to make the structure conform more to the Neo-Classical style. The building’s dome had already been removed in the later nineteenth century and Northrop additionally altered the entablature and cornice. The first floor and entrance were also lowered to street level. In 1966, the former City Hall was renamed McLevy Hall after Bridgeport mayor, Jasper McLevy. The city is now consolidating its offices and plans to sell McLevy Hall to a developer.

United Church of Stonington (1834)

The United Church of Stonington was formed in 1950 as a union of the Second Congregational Church and First Baptist Church. The church building on Main Street in Stonington Borough was built in 1834 as the Second Congregational Church of Stonington. Richard Anson Wheeler, in his History of Stonington (1900), describes the formation of the church:

The First Congregational Society of Stonington, after several unsuccessful attempts to divide itself into two societies by metes and bounds, called a meeting to assemble on the 28th day of September, 1833, and after mature deliberation took a new departure and adopted a plan for organizing a new church and society in Stonington, viz.: “That whenever forty members of the First Society should withdraw and organize a new Congregational Society at the Borough and elect society officers, and shall give notice to the old society of their doings within thirty days from the day of the meeting, the new society shall then be regarded as organized and receive $1,825 of the old society’s fund.” The conditions were immediately complied with at the meeting. Forty-five members of the society withdrew, formed a new society, and took their money and invested it in a new meeting-house. As soon as the new society was formed, ninety-three members of the First Church seceded and organized the Second Church in connection with said society Nov. 11th, 1833.

The church’s clock, in a recently restored steeple, is owned and regulated by the Borough government.

Truman Kellogg House (1838)

In his 1860 History of Harwinton, R. Manning Chipman writes that “Mercantile business, for the greater part of the last fifty or sixty years, has in Harwinton been transacted at from three to five stores under the care of four or more owners.” One of these owners was Truman Kellogg, who worked with various business partners over the years. Kellogg’s Greek Revival-style house in Harwinton was built around 1838 and has two main entrances, one facing Litchfield Road and the other North Road. In 1853, a sermon was published by Rev. Warren G. Jones, the Harwinton Congregational Church‘s seventh pastor, under the title: An Assured Hope: a Funeral Sermon, Preached on the Occasion of the Death of Truman Kellogg, who Departed this Life December 31st, 1852, aged 64 years. At Harwinton, Conn.

First Church of Christ Congregational, Clinton (1837)

The town of Clinton, originally known as Killingworth, established a congregational church society in 1667. The first meeting house, located in what would develop into Clinton Village, was built of logs and was succeeded by two others, built in 1700 and 1731. In 1735, a second church society was formed in the north part of Killingworth. This later society became a separate town in 1868 and retained the name Killingworth, while the south part became the town of Clinton. The current First Church in Clinton was built in 1837 in a different location than its predecessors: the top of Meeting House Hill, where it faces south and can be seen from Clinton harbor. Also on the hill, near the church, (to the left in the image above) is the Yale College Monument. From 1701 to 1707, Rev. Abraham Pierson, pastor of the church, taught classes of the Collegiate School in the part of Killingworth that would become Clinton. In 1716, the School moved to New Haven and was renamed Yale in 1718.