Like Meeker’s Hardware in Danbury, which I featured on this site a few days ago, W. H. Morrison in Torrington was another hardware store that closed in the early twenty-first century after being in business for over a century. The Italianate commercial building at 63 Water Street was erected in 1896 by William H. Morrison to house his plumbing and hardware business. The store finally closed in 2010 after 114 years. The Southern New England Telephone Company rented offices on the second floor until 1930.
According to the website of the Bakerville Library in New Hartford, the building that houses the library was built in 1834. The building was previously used as the Bakerville School. The volume in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series on New Hartford (by Margaret L. Lavoe, 2002) explains that the Bakerville Academy opened in 1873 (replacing an earlier Bakerville schoolhouse on the site) and that research was underway to determine the origin of the building. According to another book published by Arcadia, Connecticut Schoolhouses Through Time (2017), by Melinda K. Elliott, the school was started in 1824 and for a time the upstairs was used by the school and the downstairs was used for meetings and social events. Eventually, both floors would be used as classroom space. Next door was the Bakerville Methodist Church. The church’s horse sheds were attached to the rear of the school building, but they were eventually removed because children would climb out of the second-floor schoolroom onto the shed’s roof. The church burned down in 1954 (a new church was erected in 1960). The school closed when the Bakerville Consolidated School was built in 1941-1942. The Bakerville Library, started in 1949, moved into the former school building in 1951.
The house at 638 Main Street in Portland was most likely built sometime between c. 1855-1859. It was originally the home of Samuel Buckingham, a merchant (possibly the Samuel Buckingham who was born in 1808 and died in 1870). The former Buckingham Store, also built in the 1850s and now home to the Gildersleeve Sprit Shop, is located next door at 642-644 Main Street. Next door to that, at the corner of Indian Hill Avenue, is the former Gildersleeve Store, 646 Main Street, built in 1855.
One of the structures that make up the former American Thread Company complex in Willimantic is a former stable, which housed horses, wagons and hay. It was constructed in 1872-1873 by the Willimantic Linen Company, original builder of the mills that were taken over by the American Thread Company in 1898. Like the adjacent mill buildings, No. 1 and No. 2, the stable was constructed of granite gneiss in the Romanesque Revival style. Because the building is located along a slope leading the nearby river bank, the basement level is visible on the south side (facing the river), but not on the north side.
The National Register of Historic Places notes that the Crofut Block, located at 253-255 Main Street in Danbury, is a good example of Italianate commercial architecture. It provides a date of 1876 for the building and notes that the heirs of the original owners sold the property in the 1890s. The block consists of two attached buildings at 253 and 255 Main Street. Town property listings give a date of 1896 for the section at 253 Main Street. The interior of the store at 255 Main Street retains an original pressed tin ceiling.
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