The Timothy Lester House, on Orange Street in New Haven, has been linked to the architect Henry Austin, but the details of its construction are unknown. Built in 1846, it may have been the first, and is certainly one of the earliest, Italian Villas (including a prominent tower) in New Haven. Lester worked for a boot manufacturing company.
The David Lowry Robbins house is an Italianate building with a Portland brownstone foundation, located on East Robbins Avenue in Newington and constructed in 1875 to 1876. The kitchen wing of the house is part of an earlier home on the site, built by Thomas Robbins around 1730. D. L. Robbins was on the committee which planned the incorporation of Newington in 1871. In the 1920s, the property was used as a prison farm for the Hartford County Jail, on Seyms Street in Hartford. In 1966, the house was remodeled to contain four apartments.
The Wauregan Hotel, originally known as the Wauregan House, was built in downtown Norwich in 1855 and soon became known as one of the finest hotels in New England. When Abraham Lincoln came to give a campaign speech in Norwich in 1860, he stayed in a room at the Wauregan. The Hotel was expanded in 1894 with the absorption of the neighboring Clarendon building, by which the Wauregan added a dining room and a ballroom. By the 1940s, the building’s Italianate cast iron ornamentation had been removed. Abandoned for many years and in a deteriorating condition, the Wauregan Hotel was in danger of demolition, but a preservation effort was successful: the building was restored to its original level of architectural detail and the interior has been adapted for reuse as an apartment building.
William Alfred Buckingham was the governor of Connecticut from 1858 to 1866. A wealthy businessman, he entered politics as a Whig, serving several terms as mayor of Norwich. Buckingham later became a republican, winning election as governor in 1858. In 1860, he traveled with Abraham Lincoln as the Illinois Republican made six speeches throughout Connecticut. The two became friends and the governor responded quickly when Lincoln, as president, requested volunteers after the firing on Fort Sumter. Buckingham served throughout the ensuing Civil War, leaving the governorship in 1866 to return to his former business pursuits. He later served as a U.S. senator from 1869 until his death in 1875. Buckingham‘s house, on Main Street in Norwich, was built in 1847. After his death, it was purchased by the veterans group, Sedgwick Post No. 1 of the Grand Army of the Republic. The house, thereafter known as the Buckingham Memorial, has more recently been turned over to the Norwich Historical Society for use as offices and perhaps, in the future, a museum.
The house of Edward W. Seymour, a Judge on the Connecticut Supreme Court, was built in 1863 on South Street in Litchfield. Today the house is attached to the adjacent St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church and serves as a parish rectory.
The Italianate house at 9 Elm Street in Mystic was built for Leonard W. Morse around 1855. Morse was involved with starting a machine company, begun in 1848, which lasted until the Civil War and sold cotton gins and machinery for the southern states. The house was later owned by Albert L. Pitcher, who published the Mystic Times newspaper.
James A. Norton, a prominent citizen in Guilford, who served on many town committees, built his house in the Italianate style on Fair Street in 1856. A later owner, for over six decades, was John Pitts, who lived to be a hundred. There is a modern addition to the rear which matches the style of the original part of the house. The house is currently for sale.