The house at 690 Hopmeadow Street in Simsbury was built between 1905 and 1910 for Joseph Ralph Ensign and his wife, Mary Phelps Ensign. Joseph Ensign had succeeded his father, Ralph Hart Ensign, as president of the Ensign-Bickford Company. In 1955, the house became the Parish House for First Church across the street. Today, it is home to a branch of Webster Bank and the Arts Exclusive Gallery.
The Johnson Building, at 111–115 Bank Street in Waterbury, is a concrete Late Gothic Revival-style commercial building. The 1925 structure has been altered with the addition of a modern storefront.
The building which today serves as the hall for Granby Grange No. 5 was built just after the Civil War (c. 1866?) as a one-room schoolhouse. In 1902, the town hall moved into the building after an earlier town hall burned down. In 1946, the Granby Grange bought the building from the town and moved it 150 feet south to its current location, at 212 North Granby Road, across from the First Congregational Church. The Granby Grange was first established in 1875, but in 1890 a group purchase of bad seeds led to its disbandment. It was reestablished in 1926 and has continued ever since.
The East Village-Barn Hill Schoolhouse of 1790 is a one-room schoolhouse at at Wheeler and Old Tannery Roads in Monroe. It has been restored as a museum by the Monroe Historical Society.
Morris Plan banks, private banking organizations which gave small loans to industrial workers, emerged in the second decade of the twentieth century and thrived through the end of the Great Depression. The Morris Plan Bank in Bridgeport was designed by Ernest G. Southey and was built at 102 Bank Street in 1924. Today, the building is part of the City Trust Building Complex, a commercial and apartment complex which also includes the Bridgeport City Trust Company Building (1927-1929) and associated Trust Department Building (the latter also designed in the Colonial Revival style by Southey), and the Liberty Building (1918).
The first church to be built in the village of Riverton in Barkhamsted was the Union Episcopal Church. The Gothic structure was constructed of rusticated granite in 1829-1830 under the superintendence of Jesse Ives, first keeper of the Old Riverton Inn. For about thirty years, the church was used as a museum for the Hitchcock Chair Company, whose factory was located just down the street. After closing in the 1990s, the museum sold off its collection in 2003. Two years later, the former church was sold to Peter Greenwood, a glass blower, who converted it into a studio and gallery.
The house at 170 Water Street, on the west side of Wadawanuck Square in Stonington, was built in 1833 for Sarah Potter Denison Palmer (1785-1862), a decade after the death of her husband, Luke Palmer (1775-1822). Known as the Widow Luke Palmer House, it was described as follows in Grace Denison Wheeler’s The Homes of Our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn. (1903):
The Widow Luke Palmer’s house is one of the old landmarks although none of the older residents seem to know when this house was built; still it is known that Mr. Palmer married Sally P. Denison in 1804, and they lived there. She used to board the men connected with building the Stonington Railroad, Mr. Almy, Mr. Matthews and others, about 1835. The house has been so added to and improved that but little of the original can now be seen. It was owned by Mrs. William L. Palmer, and her heirs sold it to Mr. Henry Davis, whose heirs sold it to Miss Emma A. Smith, and in 1901, the Roman Catholic Society purchased it of her. At various times three clergymen have lived here: Rev. M. Willey, first Pastor of Calvary Church; Rev. R. S. Wilson, Pastor of the Baptist Church, and Rev. A. G. Palmer, who was so long the good minister of the Baptist Church.
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