For Halloween I’m presenting an appropriately Victorian house, the Italianate-style Charles F. Loomis House in Suffield. Located at 257 North Main Street, the house was built in 1862 for a member of the wealthy Loomis family. For more images of the house and a discussion of its architecture, check out this post at the blog The Picturesque Style: Italianate Architecture.
Currently dedicated to office use, the Italianate house at 2534 Main Street in Glastonbury was built circa 1852. It was originally the home of Asa Welles, who may be the same Asa Welles (1821-1869) who was a silversmith.
On Johnsonville Road in Moodus, East Haddam, is an Italianate-style house built (according to the sign on the house) in 1842. It was the home of Emory Johnson, who owned twine mills near the Johnson Mill Pond across from his home. In the nineteenth century, Moodus was the “Twine Capital of America,” with twelve mills in operation. Johnson’s father-in-law, Stanton S. Card, owned the Neptune Twine Mills, which he left to his son-in-law at his death in 1867. Johnson had already opened his own mill, called Triton, in 1862. The area of worker housing that grew up around the mills became known as Johnsonville. The two mills continued to be operated by Emory Johnson and then by his son, E. Emory Johnson, who died in 1905. In the 1960s, the house and other Johnsonville properties were acquired by Raymond Schmitt and became a Victorian era attraction. Closed in 1994 and vacant for many years, the property was recently sold.
One of the surviving nineteenth-century commercial buildings on Main Street in Middletown is the Stueck Building, built in 1893 (or perhaps as early as 1880?) at nos. 460 to 470. The building was constructed by Jacob W. Stueck, who operated a bakery. In 1914, his son, Philip Stueck, constructed an attached building on Washington Street that was home to a restaurant called Stueckâs Modern Tavern.
The building at 165 Main Street in East Hartford was built around 1870 and was originally the Hockanum School house. By the 1940s, overcrowding (there were four kindergartens housed in portable classrooms) led to the opening of a new Hockanum School in 1949. For many years the former school building was used by the town as the Hockanum Library.
The Case Block, at 22-28 Spring Street in Bristol, was built as row house block of four apartments by the builder/architect Joel Case. It was constructed a year after Case’s Castle Largo, located on nearby Center Street, which is also built of brick. Case had laid out Spring Street and, after the Case Block, proceeded to build the other houses on the street. After many years of having its original Italianate style obscured by the loss of its exterior decorative elements (including its front entry porches) and many layers of paint, the Case Block was later restored to its original distinctive appearance.
The Town Hall at 9 Devotion Road across from the Green in Scotland was built in 1896 as the Scotland Consolidated School on the site of the former Center District School. At that time the building provided space for the town hall and library on the second floor. (more…)
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