Yesterday we featured the c. 1845 house of Capt. Evelyn White in Portland. Next door, at 610 Main Street, is a house he built c. 1859 for his daughter, Arabella (1835-1877), who married Joseph O. Willcox (1833-1922). Joseph served as Justice of the Peace in 1878-1879. The house was owned by a member of the Gildersleeve family in 1927.
The Opera House in Bethel, located at 186 Greenwood Avenue, was built in 1860 [or perhaps as early as 1848?] by Augustus A. Fisher, a hat manufacturer. It housed a hat factory on the first floor, with a public hall above known as Fisher’s Hall. After a fire damaged the roof in the late nineteenth century, it was replaced with the current broad-eaved roof with Italianate brackets. The building later became Nichols’ Opera House, named after John F. Nichols, who ran it as an entertainment complex, with theater, roller skating rink and billiards. After his death in 1918, Daniel Brandon used the lower floor of the building as a brush factory and showed silent movies upstairs in what was called the Barnum Theatre. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was called Leeja Hall and was used for town meetings and as a high school gym. Since that time, the building has been used by various businesses, with an art gallery and later a photography studio above and a restaurant below.
In 1870, John Humphrey Sessions (1828-1899) of Bristol merged his wood turning business with a trunk hinge factory that had been established by his late brother, Albert J. Sessions. The company expanded in the following decades under the leadership of J. H. Sessions, who brought his son, John Henry Sessions, on as a partner. After the elder Sessions’ death in 1899, the family would continue to run the business well into the twentieth century. In addition to the hardware business, the family built a huge foundry on Farmington Avenue in 1895 and acquired a large clock factory on East Main Street in Forestville after taking over the E. N. Welch Manufacturing Company in 1902. Elisha N. Welch (1809-1887) had started manufacturing clocks in the 1850s. The company he founded began to decline after his death in 1887. Although it rebuilt its East Main Street factory complex a year after it was devastated by two fires in 1899, the firm had had to borrow money and continued to suffer financially. William E. Sessions, a son of John Humphrey Sessions, and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, son of John Henry Sessions, soon bought enough Welch stock to take control of the company in 1902. They changed its name to the Sessions Clock Company on January 9, 1903. The company would flourish for many years, but went into decline after World War II. The company was sold in the 1950s and eventually liquidated. By the early 1970s the various factory buildings were sold off. The complex is now known as the Forestville Industrial Center and is now used by small industrial and commercial firms.
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In the early nineteenth century, David Strong ran a tavern on South Main Street in East Hampton. His son, John C. A. Strong, a tobacco farmer, acquired the property after his father’s death in 1825. Thirty years later he replaced the old tavern with an Italianate-style house that still stands at 2 South Main Street. John’s sons, Clark and David, both served in the Civil War and later formed the Strong Manufacturing Company in Winsted.
Horatio D. Chapman (1826-1910), another Civil War veteran, acquired the house in 1869. As related in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1903):
Horatio D. Chapman was born August 7, 1826, in the town of East Haddam. His early educational advantages were such as were afforded by the district and private schools of his native town, but he improved them to the utmost, and before reaching his majority had qualified himself as a teacher, and in that vocation met with marked success, his experience covering a period of twenty years in all. [. . . .]
The attempted disruption of the Union by the seceding Southern States fired his patriotic blood, and on August 6, 1862, he enlisted in Company C, Twentieth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, serving with marked gallantry as corporal, until June 13, 1865, when he was discharged. His regiment was engaged in many of the most important battles of that great struggle, but he passed through them all unscathed, although more than once the cutting of his uniform or his hat by a Confederate bullet warned him, how closely Death hovered over the battlefield. Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were among the memorable engagements in which he participated. Later he followed “Sherman to the sea,” and tramped through the Carolinas and across Virginia’s “sacred soil” to Richmond. During these memorable campaigns, even while on the march, he found time to keep a diary, which—today—is of surpassing interest, and excerpts from which he is constantly asked to read when the “old boys” gather on Memorial Day to revive memories of the past and to lay chaplets upon the graves of the heroes of the Republic.
In 1866 Mr. Chapman came back to his native State, settling at East Hampton. For a year thereafter he was foreman in the Skinner saw-mill, and during the next year was in the employ of D. W. Watrous. For three terms he taught a village school in Chatham. Wearying of the teacher’s dais, he accepted an offer to become a traveling salesman for the bell and coffin trimmings industries of East Hampton. In this line of work he was successfully engaged for twenty-five years. In the Spring of 1899 he traveled for N. N. Hill, and he is still erect, hale and hearty, with undimmed mental factulties, at the age of seventysix years. He is a man held in high esteein by the community which best knows and appreciates his worth, and has filled various local offices with marked distinction and fidelity, among them being those of selectman (two years), member of the board of relief, and of the board of education for between twelve and fifteen years. In 1897 he served as doorkeeper for the General Assembly[.]
The house at 6-8 Maple Avenue in Unionville was built in 1882-1883 as a double house by Abner Slade Hart (1823-1912) and his son, Henry W. Hart (1858-1931). As described in the Illustrated Popular Biography of Connecticut (1891)
Abner S Hart was a member of the general assembly in 1887, representing the town of Farmington in the house. Mr. Hart cast his first vote for Henry Clay for president in 1844 and has since been a member of the whig and republican parties. He was born in Barkhamsted, July 15, 1823, and received a thorough education, preparing him for the avocation of teaching in the public schools. He pursued that calling for fourteen years, teaching winters and farming through the summer. In 1866 he established himself in the drug business at Riverton and became postmaster there in 1869. The latter position was retained for twelve years. He has held various local offices, including that of acting school visitor for fourteen years and chairman of the board of relief. Since 1881 he has resided at Unionville, where he is engaged in mercantile pursuits. Mr. Hart is a member of Evening Star Lodge, No. 101, F. and A. M., of Unionville. He is descended from revolutionary stock, both of his grandfathers having served in the war for independence. He has in his possession a sword that was carried in the service by one of them. Mr. Hart is a prominent citizen of Unionville, and is held in thorough esteem in that community as well as in his old home in Barkhamsted.
Abner S. Hart had three sons with his first wife, Julia. The older two continued in business in Riverton, while the youngest, Henry, joined his father in Unionville, where Abner lived with his second wife, Margaret. Abner retired from his store, called A. S. Hart and Son, in 1896, and the business was continued by Henry under the name H. W. Hart and Company. The house remained in the Hart family until 1937. In recent years, it has had significant alterations, with a redesigned entryway and windows, a new porch, and the addition of a rooftop cupola, which is in keeping with the building’s Italianate style.
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There were many controversies related to the construction of the Winchester Town Hall building. In 1877, town leaders appropriated funds to build a town hall so as to provide a safe place for the town records. Before most people in town were aware of it, these men had moved quickly to start construction of the building in an area called the Flat, part of the central business district of Winsted. People in other parts of town, who thought that the building was unnecessary and too expensive, felt that promoters of the Flat had stolen a march on the voters, but at a contentious town meeting those who wanted to press on with the building won out. An injunction to halt construction was soon dissolved by the court and the building was completed in 1878. Bitter feelings over the episode continued for many years. The building was expanded in 1887 and 1904 for use by the County Court. Plans for a 25-foot addition on the front of the building fell through in 1910, but when this was finally done in 1927, the structure gained a more convenient entrance at street level.
Samuel Babcock (1788-1851) was a prominent Middletown manufacturer and politician. Originally from Old Saybrook, he was a silversmith there and around 1812 came to Middletown, where he had a shop near the Episcopal Church. In the 1850 census, he was listed as a spectacle maker (eyeglass manufacturer). He was active in various businesses, including banking, granite-quarrying and railroads. About 1851 he erected an Italianate house on Main Street, in front of Mortimer Cemetery. In 1927, the house was moved to 64 Liberty Street, across from the cemetery to make way for commercial development. At its new location, Salvatore Muscatello, the new owner, converted the second floor into a rental apartment and detached the original rear wing to become a separate house at 5 Frazier Avenue.
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