At 96 Webster Street in Hartford is a house in the Italian Villa style with a prominent Second Empire-style Mansard-roofed tower. The house, which has been significantly enlarged, has lost most of its original detailing and has unattractive modern siding, but still has a commanding presence. It was built around 1875 for George W. Fuller, who had a store that sold trunks and luggage.
As Rockville in Vernon developed as an urban center in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, known architects were sought to design prominent buildings. S.M. (or S.W.?) Lincoln of Hartford was the architect of the Citizens Block, a commercial building on the corner of Park Place and Elm Street, built in 1879 by John G. Bailey. In recent years, town officials have been seeking ways to revitalize the now dilapidated structure, ranging from sale to a developer to the use of federal funding. The building currently houses the Rockville Downtown Association.
The Avery-Copp House, at 154 Thames Street in Groton, was built around 1800 by Rufus Avery for his two sons and their families. It was later owned by a cousin, Latham Avery, and then was inherited by his daughter, Mary Jane Avery Ramsdell. The house was Victorianized in the Italianate style around 1870. It passed to Ramsdell’s niece, Betsey Avery Copp and her husband, Belton Copp, in 1895. Their son, Joe Copp, kept the house virtually unchanged after his parents died, preserving it as it had been before 1930. After his death in 1991, at the age of 101, his nieces and nephews sought to make the house a museum. After a period of ownership by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, during which restoration work began on the house, it became an independant museum and opened to the public for tours in 2006.
The building which is now the Norwich Grange Hall was built in 1869 as the West Town Street District School. It replaced an earlier public school on the same site, which had no longer met the needs of the growing school population. Before that, the Bean Hill Academy of 1792 had stood on the site. A private school for thirty years and then a public school, that building had been demolished in 1831. In the 1920s, with the building of the Samuel Huntington School, the 1869 building was sold to the Norwich Grange.
The Robert Coit House is a brick Italianate house on Federal Street, facing the mouth of Prospect Street, in New London. It was built in 1856 for Robert Coit (1785-1874), a merchant who dealt in lumber and coal and owned a chandlery, which outfitted ships for whaling voyages. Coit was also a founder of the Saving Bank of New London, formed in 1827, and served as the bank’s president from 1852 to 1858. The house originally had a wooden bay window over the front that was later removed and bricked in.
The Walker House, at 250 Ellsworth Street, in the Black Rock section of Bridgeport, dates to around 1855. It is said to have been built by Oliver Walker, a partner in the Walker-Rew Shipyard, but is named for Eliphalet Walker, also a shipyard owner. The house, which is Black Rock’s most striking Italianate-style home, was extensively renovated seven years ago, when the rear third of the house was removed and completely rebuilt.
The substantial Victorian house at 83 Washington Street in Norwich was built about 1870. Today, the house is the Herman Belli Liberty House for men, run by the Southeaster Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependance.
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