The Italianate house at 9 Elm Street in Mystic was built for Leonard W. Morse around 1855. Morse was involved with starting a machine company, begun in 1848, which lasted until the Civil War and sold cotton gins and machinery for the southern states. The house was later owned by Albert L. Pitcher, who published the Mystic Times newspaper.
The Historical Society of East Hartford has a complex of three historic buildings in Martin Park. The oldest is the Makens Bemont House, commonly called the Huguenot House. It was built by Edmund Bemont in 1761 and was purchased, four years later, by his son, Makens Bemont, a saddle maker. The house’s last owner donated it to the Historical Society in 1968 and in 1971 it was moved to the park from its original location at the intersection of Tolland Street and Burnside Avenue. Since its relocation and restoration, the Huguenot House has acquired a reputation as a haunted house.
Samuel Johnson, the first Episcopal clergyman in Connecticut, organized Christ Church in Guilford in 1744. The Episcopalians first used a small church, built in 1748 and located within the bounds of Guilford Green. In 1834, the church was sold, with the proceeds financing the construction, in 1834-1838, of a new Gothic-Revival church with a grandly imposing tower. Local builder William Weld constructed a chancel in 1872 and another addition, for an organ, was built in 1890.
Selden Brewer was a successful tobacco grower in East Hartford, who built his impressive house between 1827 and 1833. A tradition about the house states that Selden’s father, Samuel Brewer, transported the bricks used in the house‘s construction from Wethersfield over the frozen Connecticut River in 1827. The house originally stood on Main Street, on the northern end of the Brewer Tobacco Plantation, but in the 1980s, through the efforts of the Historical Society of East Hartford, it was moved to its current location at the intersection of Main and Naubuc Streets. The Historical Society’s offices are on the second floor and the rooms on the first floor can be rented for meetings and small banquets. [It’s interesting to compare images of some of the rooms as they appear today compared with historical photos taken of the furnished rooms over sixty years ago].
East Hartford has an octagon house on Naubuc Avenue. According to one source, it was built in 1852 for Rev. Benjamin C. Phelps, the minister at Hockanum Methodist Church. According to another source, the house was built in 1858 for the Curtis family and was owned, after 1867, by the Hollister family.
Daniel R. Williams was a marine entrepreneur who sold seine fishing nets out of the basement of his house, on Gravel Street in Mystic. The house was built in 1834 and an outbuilding on the property was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
On Boston Street in Guilford is a 1764 gambrel-roofed house built by Ebenezer Hopson. In 1789, Rev. Jesse Lee preached the the first Methodist sermon in Guilford in the Hopson House. The home’s Greek Revival doorway was added around 1841.
