Stone-Otis House (1830)

The Town of Orange was incorporated in 1822 and soon new buildings began to be constructed in the vicinity of the new town’s Green. The Stone-Otis House was one such structure, built around 1830 for Dennis Stone. A prominent citizen, Stone owned the town’s second general store, located in his home. Around 1840, he added a large front display window to the house for the store. Stone and his family later moved to Kansas. The house, which is transitional between the Federal and Greek Revival styles, was sold Phoebe and Charles Otis, a tool and dye maker, in 1887. The family sold the house to the town in 1966. The restored house is now a museum and the headquarters of the Orange Historical Society.

Samuel C. Morgan House (1843)

Samuel C. Morgan (1789-1876) was born in Lisbon, graduated from Yale in 1812, trained as a lawyer and in 1815 began his practice in Jewett City. In 1842, he was elected president of the Quinebaug Bank and moved to Norwich. The Quinebaug Bank had been founded in 1832 and became the First National Bank in 1865. His house in Norwich, at 3 Crossway Street, was built around 1843. The house has interesting corner pilasters with H-shaped moldings.

Huntington-Andrews House (1800)

A house at 118 South Street in Litchfield was built for Rev. Dan Huntington, who served as a minister in town from 1798 to 1809. As related in Memoir and Letters of Frederic Dan Huntington (1906), by Arria S. Huntington.

In his “Family Memorial,” written as an octogenarian, Rev. Dan Huntington says that at this time he was much attracted by the current setting towards what was then called “the West,” the Connecticut reserve lands in Ohio. But the place of assistant minister at Litchfield, Rev. Mr. Champion having become disabled, was offered to him. He accepted, and was ordained to the work of the ministry in September, 1798. This “delightful village” was, as he himself describes it, “on a fruitful hill, richly endowed with schools, both professional and scientific, and their accomplished teachers; with its learned lawyers, and senators, and representatives, both in the National and State departments; and with a population enlightened and respectable. Litchfield was now in its glory. I came among them without patrimony; but with their assistance, in a handsome settlement, I soon found myself in a way to be comfortably at home among them, with a neat domicile of my own.”

Rev. Huntington later moved to Middletown, but in 1816 he gave up the ministry and moved his large family to his wife Elizabeth Phelps‘ homestead in Hadley, Massachusetts. His former Litchfield domicile was later burned (perhaps not completely) and rebuilt in 1862, as mentioned in Alice T. Bulkeley’s Historic Litchfield (1907):

On the site of the Andrews place, a female seminary was established by Miss Henrietta Jones, a descendant of Governor Jones of the New Haven colony. This lady was celebrated for her wit and the energy of her character. The house was burned and the Andrews house built on the site. Judge Charles B. Andrews, the owner of the house until his death, was Governor of the State, and later Chief Justice. He is the only citizen in the history of Connecticut who held the two highest offices in the gift of the State.

Coe-Parsons House (1830)

Durham‘s most elegant Greek Revival style house was built by Benjamin Hutchins Coe on Main Street in 1830. The son of a wealthy Middlefield farmer, Benjamin H. Coe married Lydia Curtis of Durham in 1823. He had ambitions to become an artist and in 1833 moved to New York, where he became an art-dealer and author of books on drawing. He was described by H.W. French, in Art and Artists in Connecticut (1879), as follows:

The drawing-teacher of wide fame, Benjamin H. Coe, was born in Hartford, Conn., Oct. 8, 1799. His pictures are quiet, pleasant views; but his merit lay in his teaching. F. E. Church and E. S. Bartholomew, beside many others, came to him for their first information. He lived as a farmer, till, as he said of himself, he was too old to learn more than the rudiments. Always having possessed a great fondness for art, he mastered these rudiments with wonderful activity and success. He possessed a remarkable faculty for imparting truths in a way to fasten them in memory; and a long life of teaching both private students and large classes in nearly all of the important cities of New England, New York, and New Jersey, sustains this reputation. He had a very large private school in the University Building, in New-York City; moving from there in 1854 to his present home in New Haven. He opened his last school there, which he carried on successfully for ten years; then gave it up to one of his pupils, and entered into the temperance-work, writing and distributing tracts, and working in ale-houses, with the vigor of a young convert. Within a year, failing health has somewhat interrupted this work.

The house was sold to Samuel Parsons, a successful dry goods merchant in New York City. Suffering from tuberculosis, Parsons (1788-1848) had retired to his home town at the age of 45. His widow lived in the house until 1887. John R. Smith, a painter and decorator, occupied the house starting in 1902 with his wife, Hester Eliza Coe, a cousin of Benjamin H. Coe. The house three additions and a porch, all dating to the nineteenth century.

Isaac Buck House (1755)

Isaac Buck built the house at 14 Maple Street in Chester by 1755 on land he had acquired in 1750. He divided the house and barn with his son Justus. Justus’ son, William Buck, sold the house in 1798. Later, in the nineteenth century, the house was owned by Joshua L’Hommedieu. He settled in Chester in 1812 and, with his brother Ezra, became an early manufacturer in town. He also represented Chester in the state General Assembly. At some point the colonial-era Isaac Buck House acquired Federal and Greek Revival-style exterior ornamentation.

Old Town Hall, Hebron (1838)

Hebron‘s Old Town Hall was built in 1838 on Hebron Green as a Methodist meeting house. The earliest Methodist Church in Hebron was erected c. 1805 on Burrows Hill and lasted until 1828, when a new schoolhouse was built that was also used by the church (which had contributed $100 towards its construction) and for town meetings. This was used until the 1838 church building was erected. The old Burrows Hill church building was taken down in 1845. The Methodist Society in Hebron broke up around 1850 and in 1863 the building was sold to the town for use as a town hall, at which time the structure was lowered to one story. It was used for town meetings until 1950 and afterwards was used by various civic organizations for meetings. Since 1971, the Old Town Hall has been owned and maintained as a museum by the Hebron Historical Society, which recently restored the building.

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Torrington Library (1901)

Torrington Library

A history of the Torrington Library is provided in Vol. 1 of William J. Pape’s History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley (1918):

The Torrington Library was founded on October 22, 1864, by a group of what were then Wolcottville residents, each supplying a quantity of books. It was known as the Wolcottville Library Association. Early in 1865 the library and reading room were opened to the public. During its first fifteen years it occupied rooms in the Granite Block. In 1880 it was removed to larger quarters, in the Wetmore Building, on the corner of Church and Prospect streets, subsequently called the Library Building. In 1881 it became known as the Torrington Library Association, and in 1899 it was officially incorporated as the “Torrington Library.”

The library owes its present equipment to two Torrington benefactors, Lauren Wetmore and Elisha Turner. The former, who died in 1890, gave to the public for “the establishment of a free public library and reading room,” the income from the Wetmore Building and personal property to the value of $20,000. Elisha Turner, in 1899, gave the site and present magnificent library structure to Torrington. Mr. Turner died in 1900 and willed a total, including his previous gift, of $100,000 to the association.

The dedication took place in 1901. The building is of white marble in a simple treatment of the Neo-Greek style of architecture.

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