Architect Charles S. Palmer designed the Torrington Armory, built in November 1910 and opened in February of the following year as a training location for Torrington’s National Guard unit. The Armory, which was used as Torrington High School’s gym from 1926 to 1964, has been operated as a facility for the public by the Torrington Parks and Recreation Department since 1994.
Allen G. Brady, who operated a cotton mill in Torrington, served as a major in the Seventeenth Connecticut Regiment in the Civil War. At the Battle of Gettysburg, Brady took command of the Regiment after the death of Lt. Col. Douglas Fowler during the fighting at Barlow’s Knoll on July 1, 1863. The following day, Brady was wounded in the shoulder. After the War, Brady had a house built on Prospect Street in Torrington, which was at that time a residential area. He later moved to North Carolina to run a rebuilt cotton mill. The Gleeson Mortuary has used the house since 1927.
William Moore was a merchant and postmaster in Canterbury. His house, at the intersection of Routes 14 and 169 in Canterbury Center, was likely built by Plainfield builder Thomas Gibbs, who designed the former Congregational Church and several local houses in what is known as the “Canterbury Style.” The house, which once had a second-floor ballroom, has a dramatic projecting second-story pediment with Palladian window. The property was later owned by Marvin H. Sanger, a merchant, banker and politician, who served in the state legislature and then as Secretary of the State of Connecticut from 1873 to 1877. The house’s shed-roofed front porch dates to around 1920.
Meriden’s first Methodist meetinghouse was built in 1830. This simple structure was later sold and moved to Curtis Street, where it became a carpenter’s shop and later burned down. The first regular Methodist Society was formed in 1844 and a wooden Church was built on Broad Street in 1847. Charles Parker, an industrialist and the first mayor of Meriden, gave a gift which allowed for the construction of a Gothic stone church in 1866. The church was renovated in 1940, but burned the following year. After World War II, money was raised to build the present First United Methodist Church in 1949. The church is at the same location as its predecessor, on East Main Street.
Congregation Chevry Lomday Mishnayes was founded in Hartford by Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia in 1918. Having no permanent home for their first seven years, the congregation built a shul in 1924-1926 on Bedford Street in Hartford’s Clay Arsenal neighborhood. The building‘s exterior has the same design as the many standard brick apartment buildings that were being constructed in Hartford at the time, but with adaptations for its use as a synagogue. In 1964, the congregation moved to a new shul at 191 Westbourne Parkway and in 1983 merged with Teferes Israel, which merged with Beth David Synagogue in West Hartford in 1993. The former shul on Bedford Street is now the Temple of Prayer and Worship for the House of God.
The construction of Temple Beth Israel, on Charter Oak Avenue in Hartford in 1876, established a model for future urban synagogues in Connecticut. Influenced by the design of the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße (1859-1866) in Berlin, Germany and Temple Emanu-El (1868) at 43rd Street and 5th Avenue in New York, Temple Beth Israel has broad steps leading to a series of round arched doorways in a center section recessed between two projecting square towers. Other synagogues to follow this model include Congregation Tephereth Israel (1925) in New Britain and Beth Israel Synagogue (1925) in New Haven. Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, an Orthodox congregation organized on Hartford’s East Side by Eastern European immigrants in 1905, moved to the city’s North End in 1921. The following year, the congregation commissioned the Hartford architectural firm of Berenson & Moses to design a synagogue on Garden Street that was to be similar to Beth Israel in New Haven. The completed building, later known as the Garden Street Synagogue, was used by the congregation until 1962. Following the movement of Jews from the city to the suburbs, Beth Hamedrash Hagadol merged with Ateres Kneset Israel to form the United Synagogues of Greater Hartford, which moved to West Hartford in the 1960s. The Garden Street Synagogue’s Torah Ark, which remained in the building’s basement for two decades, was recently restored by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford. The former Garden Street Synagogue is now The Greater Refuge Church of Christ.
Charles Hobby Pond, born in Milford in 1781, served as Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1850 to 1853 and, after the resignation of Governor Thomas H. Seymour, served as Governor for seven months (1853-1854). Pond’s Greek Revival house, on North Broad Street across from Milford Green, was built in 1845. Pond died in 1861 and in 1864 a relative of the same name, who was a New York businessman, began construction nearby of the estate that would later be known as Lauralton Hall. In the twentieth century, the Pond House became home to the Cody-White Funeral Home, begun in the 1930s by S. Harrington White and purchased in 1956 by Thomas J. Cody, Sr.
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