Built between 1984 and 1989, Bridgeport Center is an office complex of low-to-mid-rise buildings connected to form a single continuous structure. A highlight of Bridgeport Center, also known as the People’s Bank Building, is the 16-story office tower. The complex, located at 850 Main Street in Bridgeport and intended to revitalize the city’s downtown, was designed by Richard Meier.
Eliphalet Whittlesey (1679-1757) was born in Saybrook and later settled in the Newington section of Wethersfield, purchasing land from his older brother Jabez. Around 1709, he built a small one-story, two-room house at 20 Rod Highway, now 461 Maple Hill Avenue. His son, Eliphalet II, was born in 1714 and eventually left town with his wife and ten of his children in 1761. Eliphalet III later settled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Another son, Lemuel Whittlesey, remained in Newington, constructing the current Whittlesey Homestead sometime between 1758 and 1772. The house was inherited by his son, Asaph, and then by Asaph’s daughter Delia, who married Homer Camp. Their son was Lemuel Whittlesey Camp. The house has had many owners over the years.
Colchester’s First Ecclesiastical Society was formed in 1706 and a meeting house built on Old Hebron Road. The second meeting house was built in 1714 and the third in 1771. Needing repairs, the third meeting house was pulled down and replaced with the current Congregational church, built in 1841-1842. The church was renovated with a Victorian interior and stained glass windows in 1885, but was remodeled to its current appearance in 1929. The church’s steeple, like a number of others in Connecticut, had to be replaced after the 1938 hurricane. A Baptist church was built on South Main Street in Colchester in 1835-1836. In 1949, the Colchester Federated Church was established, combining the First Congregational and Baptist Churches. The Congregational church was now the united place of worship and the old Baptist church building was sold.
Aaron Chapin became a notable maker of furniture in the late eighteenth century. He was a second cousin of the famous East Windsor cabinetmaker, Eliphalet Chapin and worked in his cousin’s shop between 1774 and 1783. Chapin built his house in East Windsor Hill (now in South Windsor) in 1779, just south of his cousin’s home. Aaron Chapin later established a large shop in Hartford, which was the area’s leading cabinetmaking establishment in the first decade of the nineteenth century, being particularly dominant in the production of Federal-style sideboards.
Originally built on Orange Street in New Haven in 1838, the Everard Benjamin House was moved to the corner of Bradley and Lincoln Streets in the late 1860s. This classical Greek Revival building, designed by Ithiel Town, was set off from the street with a large front lawn in its original location, but the house now right off the sidewalk. Everard Benjamin was a silversmith, jeweler, and watchmaker, who succeeded his father, the silversmith Barzillai Benjamin. The house was later owned by Hobart B. Bigelow, who started by learning the machinist’s trade, becoming a leading manufacturer of boilers and heavy machinery. Bigelow later became mayor of New Haven in 1879 and served as governor of Connecticut from 1881 to 1883.
Beacon Mill Village in Beacon Falls is an example of a nineteenth century mill village adapted to new use as an apartment complex (in this it is similar to the mill village established by the Cheney Brothers in Manchester). The eight surviving buildings of the Beacon Mill Village complex were built between 1853 and 1916. The Town of Beacon Falls, incorporated in 1871, grew up alongside the factories. The Village was originally home to the American Hard Rubber Company in the 1850s. By the time of the Civil War, the complex housed the factories of the Home Woolen Company, which produced shawls for Union soldiers. This company went out of business in 1880, but the Beacon Falls Rubber Shoe Company, founded in 1898 by George Lewis, later moved into the complex. His son, Tracy Lewis, later served as the company‘s president until his death in 1921. The company, which grew to have offices in Boston, San Francisco and New York, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1915, while production remained in Beacon Falls. That same year, the company hired the Olmstead Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, to design a mill town for plant workers. The mill buildings were restored and transformed into an apartment complex in 1986.
The land in West Hartford, where Gurdon Whiting would build a house around 1786, was originally part of a grant to Rev. Joseph Haynes, minister of First Church in Hartford and the son of John Haynes, first Governor of the Colony of Connecticut. Haynes’ daughter, Mary, inherited the property. She married Roswell Saltonstall, the son of Connecticut governor Gurdon Saltonstall. She later married Thomas Clap, President of Yale. Mary, who died in New Haven in 1769, left her land in the West Division of Hartford to her daughter, Mary Whiting, who deeded the land to her son, Gurdon Saltonstall Whiting in 1778. He built the Whiting House in the 1780s, at the time of his marriage. It remained in his family into the 1920s, when it was purchased by Philip Lawler, who had been mayor of West Hartford in 1915. The house, which has survived nearly intact, was in the Lawler family into the 1980s.
