Stonington Custom House (1827)

On Main Street in Stonington is a granite Greek Revival building that served as a custom house. Built around 1827, it originally served as a bank. The Stonington Bank was chartered in 1822 and operated until the end of the Civil War. Stonington had some direct trade with the West Indies and was made a Port of Entry in 1842. It was probably around this time the building began to be used as a custom house.

William Wadsworth House (1848)

Located on an elevated lot, at the intersection of Madison and Higganum Roads in Durham, is the William Wadsworth House, built in 1848. Wadsworth was a farmer and a descendant of Col. James Wadsworth, one of the town’s most prominent citizens. William Wadsworth, who also served as town clerk and Justice of the Peace, sold the property to Angeline L. Scranton, although he continued to live in the house until his death in 1870. Scranton married Orrin Camp, of Oquawka, Illinois, in 1873 and sold the house before moving west. The fine Greek Revival-style house has been vacant and in a deteriorating condition for many years.

The Dr. S. Waldo Hart House (1870)

Dr. Samuel Waldo Hart was a leading citizen of New Britain in the nineteenth century. He was the son and namesake of New Britain’s first physician and, according to his biography in the Official Souvenir and Program of the Dedication of the Soldiers’ Monument (1900) [the construction of which he supported], “His father’s practice, which was large in this city, was carried on to its zenith under him.” Furthermore, “He spent much time in travel in Europe and the West and in Central America, where his cultured mind received a keen enjoyment of varied observations. His letters from abroad were entertaining inasmuch as he was a master of English descriptive style.” He also served as the city’s second mayor, from 1872 to 1876. Perhaps built in the 1870s, Dr. Hart‘s house (which also held his office) is on South High Street.

Trinity Episcopal Church, Newtown (1870)

In 1732, Newtown’s Congregational minister, Rev. John Beach, converted to the Anglican Church and traveled to Scotland to be ordained. He then returned to Newtown, where the town’s Anglicans built a small church near the corner of Main Street and Glover Avenue. Its location was marked in 1907 by a memorial tablet. A larger church was built on Main Street in 1746, followed by a third building, formally named Trinity Church and consecrated in 1793 by Bishop Samuel Seabury. The current church was built in 1870. As explained in Newtown’s History and Historian, Ezra Levan Johnson (1917):

In 1866, the parish bought the homestead of Isaac Beers, just south of the old church and separated from it by a branch road connecting at the rear of the Church with the road leading to Sandy Hook. The town relinquished its right to this road. The strip of road, together with the homestead bought of Isaac Beers, made ample room for the site and building of the new Church, without disturbing the old Church building. After the completion of the stone Church, the old building was sold at auction for $100 and torn down. […] The architect was Mr. Silas Norman Beers, one of Newtown’s gifted sons. He, with Mr. Henry Sanford [a merchant] and others of the committee, gave time and strength in unstinted measure to the work, and it was a proud day in February, 1870, that saw the completion of the fourth Church edifice since the first Rector, Rev. John Beach, preached his first sermon in 1732 under the button-ball tree at the four corners below the Street.

Buck-Foreman Community Center, Portland (1852)

The Buck-Foreman Community Center in Portland houses the town’s police, parks and recreation, and youth services departments. The central section of the brownstone building dates to 1852 and was built in the Italianate style as the home of Jonathan Fuller, part-owner of the Shaler and Hall brownstone quarry. When he died in 1876, his daughter Jane inherited the house. At that time, the Town of Portland was looking for a new and more solid building to use as a town hall, as their current building, a former Episcopal church at the corner of Bartlet and High Streets, was a wooden structure built in 1790 and considered to be unsafe (part of the floor even caved in during a Republican Party caucus in 1894!). When Jane Fuller died in 1894, the town acquired the Fuller House and hired architect David Russell Brown of New Haven to remodel it in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The wing on the south side of the building was added in 1896 as the Buck Library, donated by Horace Buck, who was originally from Portland and whose three children had died and were buried in town. A matching addition on the north side of the Town Hall was built in 1941. The building continued in use as a Town Hall until 1999.