Maxwell Court (1904)

The Francis T. Maxwell House, at 9 North Park Street in Rockville, Vernon, is a Colonial/Classical Revival mansion, built in 1902-1904. Maxwell was a part-owner of the Hockanum Mills Company. His mansion, known as Maxwell Court, was designed by Charles Adams Platt, who was renouned as an architect and as one of America’s most influential landscape designers. Platt’s design for Maxwell Court, his first large scale project, integrates the mansion and the surrounding landscape. The house is located on a hill above the city of Rockville, near the mills but with broad views to the south and west. With its architecture, gardens and landscape, influenced by the Villa Gamberaia near Florence, the Maxwell estate was influential in the American country house movement. Maxwell Court was featured in such contemporary publications as The Country House, a Practical Manual of the Planning and Construction of the American Country Home and its Surroundings (1906), by Charles Edward Hooper and House & Garden, Vol. IV, No. 4 (October 1903)–an article whose images were reproduced in American Country Homes and their Gardens (John Cordis Baker, ed. 1906). The plan of an estate, clearly modeled on Maxwell Court, appeared in Henry Vincent Hubbard and Theodora Kimball’s An Introduction of the Study of Landscape Design (orig. pub. 1917), the principle textbook for landscape architecture courses in the United States in the early twentieth century. Today, Maxwell Court is the Rockville Elks Lodge #1359. (more…)

Pinehurst (1860)

Pinehurst is an Italianate villa at 154 Washington Street in Norwich. Described as “one of the most picturesque places in Norwich,” it was built around 1860 for Joshua Newton Perkins. According to A Modern History of New London County, Vol. II (1922):

A New York architect, Mr. Gervase Wheeler, and his associate, William T. Hallett, erected the brick house where it now stands. The house was large and commodious, and its position afforded a fine view of the valley and cove. It resembled the Italian villas on the shores of the lakes. A photograph taken in 1866 shows the simplicity and beauty of the plan; the “Newton Perkins Place” was one of the show places of the city.

Mr. Perkins was one of the prominent men of Norwich, active in the advancement of its educational and industrial interests. After a period of some twenty years, business affairs took him to New York, and the house passed into the possession of Robert Bayard of New York. The Bayards did not occupy the house, which was in charge of a caretaker till it was purchased by Mrs. Edward Gibbs, who made many alterations and additions, among them the wide verandas; the “Newton Perkins Place” was merged into “Pinehurst,” its present name.

[…] By an odd coincidence, New York again proved a magnet, and the Gibbs family went to that city to reside. The house again was uninhabited, till 1904, when Frank Allyn Roath, a descendant of Robert Allyn, one of the original proprietors of Norwich, became the owner; Mr. Roath enjoyed his beautiful home but a few short years. He left it to his wife, Gertrude Hakes Roath, who is much interested in horticulture, and a true lover of nature. Under her supervision the grounds show the effects of the renewed care, and many wild flowers are finding homes in congenial soil.

On the verandas of Pinehurst, author Paul Leicester Ford worked on his novel, The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him (1894). Pinehurst was designed to resemble the homes of rural Italy, which have rambling wings added to over generations. Today, the house is the Pinehurst Apartments.

John Rossetter III House (1799)

At 15 Liberty Street in Clinton is a Federal/Greek Revival house. The National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Clinton Village Historic District estimates its date as c.1830. The historic marker, currently on the house, bears the date 1799 and describes it as the homestead of John Rossetter 3rd and Elizabeth Buell. Interestingly, just down the street, at 3 Liberty Street, is the 1734 home of John Rossetter, which passed into the Buell family around 1800.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wallingford (1868)

Anglicans in Wallingford are thought to have first formally organized themselves in 1729, later establishing a Union Church with residents of North Haven in 1741. They erected a Church building near Pond Hill which was soon outgrown, as was a later building the parishioners moved to in the 1750s. A new church was built at the corner of North Main and Christian Streets in 1758-1762. At that time, with parishioners from other towns having established their own separate churches, the former Union Church was renamed St. Paul’s. In 1831, St. Paul’s acquired the land and meetinghouse of the Wells Society, a group of Congregationalists who joined with the Episcopalians. The old Episcopal church building of 1762 was moved, eventually being used as a residence. In 1846, a new Gothic-style church was built on the Wells land, but it was destroyed in a fire in 1867. It was replaced the following year by the current brownstone church, designed by George E. Harney of New York. It was built in the Gothic tradition of the English Ecclesiologists, who modeled their designs on English medieval parish churches.

Clark-Stockade House (1780)

About 1659, Deacon George Clark began construction of the first house in Milford to be built outside the early settlement’s protective stockade. The building, known as the Stockade House, was expanded over time into a saltbox structure. It is also called the “Nathan Clark Stockade House,” named for a grandson of George Clark. This original house was dismantled in 1780 by Michael Peck, a builder, and David Camp, his assistant. They constructed a new house, using building materials salvaged from the one they took down. In the twentieth century, the house served as a rooming house, tea room and Milford’s first public hospital. In 1974, the Clark-Stockade House was moved from Bridgeport Avenue to become part of Wharf Lane, the Milford Historical Society’s complex of colonial houses.

Jonathan Dickerman I House (1770)

The house at 3217 Whitney Avenue in Hamden was built around 1770 by Jonathan Dickerman (1719-1795), father of the Jonathan Dickerman who built the 1792 farmhouse now at 105 Mt. Carmel Avenue. The elder Jonathan Dickerman settled in what is now Hamden in 1743. During the Revolution, he served on New Haven’s Committee of Inspection. The house was next owned by his son, Amos Dickerman and then by Amos’ son Ezra (1800-1860). Three years after Ezra’s death, the house was sold by his heirs. Today, the house has modern siding and has recently lost its original central chimney.