The least altered Italianate house on Broad Street in Plainville is the one at #28. It was built in 1871 for Henry A. White, a dealer of sewing machines. Could this be the same Henry A. White from Binghampton, New York, who married Olive Allen in 1871?
Adjacent to south of the Hotel Capitol, on Main Street in Hartford, is a commercial block, called the McKone Block, built in the same year, 1875 (as indicated along the top of the building). Between the two structures is a parking lot where an eighteenth-century house once stood, at one time owned by the Hammersley family, which burned down in the 1970s.
The commercial building at 105-115 Asylum Street, on the corner of Trumbull Street, was built around 1855 by Timothy Allyn, who owned the Allyn House hotel and served as mayor of Hartford. The building has been owned by his descendants ever since. In 1896, the building housed Willis & Wilson, a clothing store, whose owners commissioned the architect Isaac Allen, Jr. to design a new two story cast-iron front for the building. Manufactured by the George S. Lincoln Company, the intricately designed front, with broad display windows, has been a Hartford landmark ever since. From 1909 to 1989, the building was home to Willis and Wilson’s successors, Stackpole, Moore & Tryon, a clothing store which later moved down the street. The old building was recently renovated and now houses a bank.
Moorlands is the name of the circa 1836 house that was the Fairfield home of Henry Sheaff Glover, who also resided in New York City. In later years, after their father’s death, Dawson Coleman Glover, married Elizabeth Fowler (1913) and Harriet Coleman Glover married Gardner Willard Millett (1914). Their brother, John Le Roy Gover, attended Yale in 1914-1916. The house, at 290 Beach Road, was built on the site of the Buckley Tavern, built around 1740-1750. According to Benson J. Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, vol. I (1851), when the British forces of Major General William Tryon landed and burned Fairfield in 1779, the Buckley Tavern was saved:
Tryon made it his head-quarters. The naval officer who had charge of the British ships, and piloted them to Fairfield, was Mrs. Buckley’s brother, and he had requested Tryon to spare the house of his sister. Tryon acquiesced, and, feeling his indebtedness to her brother, the general informed Mrs. Buckley that if there was any other house she wished to save she should be gratified. After the enemy left, the enraged militia, under Captain Sturges, placed a field piece in front of the dwelling, and then sent Mrs. Buckley word that she might have two hours to clear the house, and leave it, or they would blow her to atoms. She found means to communicate a notice of her situation to General Silliman, who was about two miles distant. He immediately went to the town, and found one hundred and fifty men at the cannon. By threats and persuasion he induced them to withdraw. The next day Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, with his regiment, arrived from White Plains, and, encamping on the smoking ruins, made Tryon’s quarters his own
Observing the Buckley House not long before it was replaced, John Warner Barber wrote in his Connecticut Historical Collections (1836) that:
At the time of the invasion of the British, a 24 pound shot which was fired from Black Rock, entered the chimney. In the entrance at the door, are still to be seen the marks of twenty seven bullets, on the stair way. The heat was so great during the conflagration, that all the window glass in front of this house were broken.
Potapoug Quarter, originally part of Saybrook, established its own church, Saybrook’s Second Ecclesiastical Society, in 1722 in the area of Center Saybrook, now called Centerbrook. A church, built in 1724, was renovated in 1757. The current Centerbrook Congregational Church was built in 1790-1792 and the old building was sold to Capt. Benjamin Williams and moved to the Williams family’s wharf. In 1839, the current church underwent major renovations, including the construction of a new steeple and the rotation of the originally west-facing building to face south. The adjacent Essex Borough established a separate Congregational church in 1851; the following year became part of the new town of Old Saybrook; and in 1854 became a separate town of Essex. In 1859, Centerbrook, with its much earlier church, and West Centerbrook (Ivoryton) became part of the town of Essex.
Hiram J. Norton (1826-1899) was a machinist. His house, at 31 Maple Street in Plainville, was built around 1860-1865, perhaps at the time of his marriage to Martha Barnes; their son, Raymond D. Norton, was born in 1862. Hiram died in 1899 and is buried in Lake Avenue Cemetery in Bristol.
On Church Lane in Uncasville near the Tantaquidgeon Museum is the Mohegan Congregational Church. In 1827, land for the church was deeded to the Mohegan Tribe by Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon, her daughter Lucy Tantaquidgeon Teecomwas, and her granddaughter Cynthia Teecomas Hoscoat. Their friend, missionary Sarah Huntington of Norwich, raised funds and opposed the relocation of the Mohegans during the era of Indian Removal, inspiring her relative, Congressman Jabez W. Huntington, to support the Tribe’s right to remain in Connecticut. The completion in 1831 of a Christian church played an important role at the time in preventing the removal of the Mohegans from their traditional lands. More recently, proof that the church property was the only plot of land that remained continuously owned by the Tribe was a critical factor in the reinstatement of federal recognition in 1994. With new funds, the Mohegan Tribe has restored the church, which has been for so long been a center of tribal political, social, and cultural life.
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