The George Grannis House (1864)

The house of George Grannis, a photographer, was built sometime around 1864 on Church Street in Waterbury. In the 1870s, the house came to be owned by the Burrall family, being occupied in the early twentieth century by the sisters, Mary and Lucy Burrall, and their lifelong friend, Miss Edith Morton Chase. The daughter of Henry Sabin Chase, first president of the Chase Brass and Copper Company, Edith Chase was a neighbor of the Burrall sisters, who became her companions when she later made the Grand Tour of Europe. In 1917, Chase’s father gave her land in Litchfield, now Topsmead State Forest, where she built a country house. Chase and the Burralls then lived together, dividing their time between summers in Litchfield and winters in Waterbury.

The Daniel Beadle Capron House (1850)

According to the 1867 history, by Alfred Andrews, of the First Congregational Church of New Britain, Daniel Beadle Capron was born in 1813 in Broadlebin, New York. Having moved to New Britain, “he has been a mechanic, but in 1862 was in merchandise on Washington st., and now, in 1867, in shoe and harness business on Main st.” Capron‘s Italianate-style house, built around 1850, originally stood on the corner of High and West Main Street, but was moved, in 1906, further down High Street to make way for the building of the First Baptist Church. The house later served as a funeral home, then the offices of an architectural firm and the city’s Health Department.

Anne V. Torrant School (1874/1912)

The Anne V. Torrant School in Plainville consists of two connected buildings. The earlier Italianate structure was built in 1874, when the town’s various one and two room schools were consolidated into a single building. The second structure was built of brick in 1911-1912. In style, both buildings are similar to other schools built in Connecticut during the same period. The school was called the Broad Street School and later was renamed in honor of Anne V. Torrant, who worked there for fifty years, starting as a teacher in the 1920s and later serving as principal. The school was named for her shortly before her retirement in 1972. Today, the building is no longer a school but has been converted into housing for the elderly and is called the Torrant House.

C.L. Griswold Factory (1870)

According to the History of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1884), the Town of Chester

“is finely situated for manufacturing, having two considerable streams of water running through it, which have their rise in the lower part of Haddam and unite, at tide-water, at the head of the cove. […] The first factory on the south stream is the bitt factory of C. L. Griswold, now occupied by the Chester Manufacturing Company, consisting of Edwin G. Smith, John H. Bailey, and Charles E. Wright, who manufacture auger bitts, corkscrews, reamers, etc. The factory is on the site of a forge built about the year 1816, and occupied by Abel Snow in the forging of ship anchors. About 1838, the building was used for the manufacture of carriage springs, later by C. L. Griswold & Co. for the manufacture of bitts, and by the present owners for the same business.”

The C.L. Griswold Factory building, built around 1870 (or perhaps as early as 1850) continued to be used for manufacturing until 1919. In the 1920s, the building became a Masonic Lodge and was more recently used by the National Theatre of the Deaf. In 2001 the building was purchased by the Chester Historical Society and has been renovated to become the Chester Museum at the Mill.

The Baker-Weir House (1750/1860)

The Baker-Weir House in Windham Center began as a colonial farmhouse, built in 1750. Two Italianate-style wings were added in 1860. The house was owned by the Baker family. In 1851, Anna Bartlett Dwight married Lt. Charles Taintor Baker and, after 1870, they resided in New York and spent their summers at the Baker House in Windham. The couple’s youngest daughter, Anna Dwight Baker, married the artist J. Alden Weir in 1883. The previous year, Weir had acquired a farm in Branchville, which became his primary residence. At the time of Anna Weir’s death in 1892, he had three young daughters to raise, so the next year, Weir married Anna’s sister, Ella Baker. Through his two marriages, Weir inherited the Baker farm and thereafter maintained three homes, one in New York, and his two country studios in Branchville, which is now the Weir Farm National Historic Site, and in Windham, which is still owned by the Weir family. J. Alden Weir died in 1919 and is buried in Windham Center Cemetery.

Watson Coe House (1867)

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The Watson Coe House, built in 1867-1868 on Orange Street in New Haven, is a later example of the many Italianate style houses built in the city in the mid-nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the house at 484 Orange Street was home to Wesley Roswell Coe, who was a Yale professor of Comparative Anatomy, marine biologist and Curator of Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum for sixteen years.