Meriden’s City Hall, built in 1905-1907, is one of many buildings in Connecticut influenced by the Federal-style design of the Old State House in Hartford, which was serving as Hartford’s City Hall at the time the Meriden building was being constructed. Meriden’s previous Town Hall, built in the early 1860s, had burned in a fire in 1904. The Civil War monument that stands in front of City Hall is the Soldiers Monument, erected in 1873.
The Rev. James Dana House was built around 1760. Rev. Dana was Pastor of Wallingford’s First Congregational Church during the period of the Revolutionary War. When Rev. Dana arrived from Cambridge, MA to become the church’s minister in 1758, he was soon at the center of what would be called the “Wallingford Controversy.” Dana was supported by those called “Old Lights,” who opposed the “New Light” evangelical preachers of the Great Awakening. As explained by Charles Henry Stanley Davis, in his History of Wallingford (1870), “Dr. Dana was understood to be of the then liberal school of Boston and that region, and of that party which had opposed the revival of religion; his settlement in so large and important a church, would be a triumph of that party, which had already become a minority in the county and in the colony; and therefore the new light men were determined by all means to prevent the ordination, and when the thing was done to undo it if possible.”
According to Gideon Hiram Hollister’s History of Connecticut, Vol. 1 (1858), Dana was settled as minister in Wallingford, “in opposition to a large proportion of the members of the society. It was contended by his opponents that he was not orthodox in sentiment; that he had evaded the enquiries of the committee as to his views on important doctrinal points, and finally replied impertinently; and, after his alleged ordination, it was claimed that the ordination was not valid.”
The Congregational consociations of New Haven and southern Hartford counties joined to declare a sentence of non-Communion against Dana and the Wallingford church. As George Punchard wrote, in his History of Congregationalism, Vol. 5 (1881), the controversy, “resulted in a division of the church, and the formation of a new one by the disaffected brethren, some of whom were among the most influential men of the town. From Wallingford the controversy spread all over the colony, and continued for years, alienating brethren and dividing churches.” Some years later, in 1772, a kind of amnesty was eventually declared for Dana and his church and some of his old opponents were reconciled with him. An example of one of Rev. Dana’s sermons is one he gave on The African Slave Trade in 1791. Dana left Wallingford in 1789 and lived in New Haven until his death in 1812.
The Queen Anne-style Charles Tibbits House was built on North Main Street in Wallingford in 1891 by Gordon W. Hall as a wedding present for his daughter, Georgianna, who had married Charles H. Tibbits. Hall was a founder of the silver manufacturers, Simpson, Hall, Miller and Company. Designed by the New Haven firm of Allen and Tyler, the house was constructed by the C.F. Wooding Company of Wallingford. Sold in 1961 to a doctor who reconfigured the interior, the house has been been restored since the 1990s to be a Bed & Breakfast called the Wallingford Victorian Inn.
John Humphreys was a brother of General David Humphreys. Their father, Rev. Daniel Humphreys, built John a home on Elm Street in what is now Ansonia. The house was acquired by James Stokes, who lived next door, around 1854. Stokes piped water to his own home and barn from a spring on the Humphreys property. The house is not to be confused with the John Humphreys House in Swampscott, MA.
One of the four historic properties owned by the Salmon Brook Historical Society is the Weed-Enders House. The house was originally constructed in 1790, six miles to the west of its present location, by Moses Weed. It was then owned by members of the Weed family and then other families, until it was acquired in 1924 by John Enders, who used it as a hunting lodge. In 1974, after the Enders State Forest was established, the house was moved to be adjacent to the Abijah Rowe House. It is now part of the Samon Brook Historical Society’s museum.
The oldest house in Wallingford is the Nehemiah Royce House on North Main Street. Nehemiah Royce (who died in 1706) and his first wife Hannah, were among the first settlers of Wallingford. Royce‘s saltbox house was built in 1672. The house is also known as the Washington Elm House because it used to be next to the Washington Elm: in 1775, when George Washington was on his way to take command of the Continental Army in Massachusetts, he stopped in Wallingford to purchase gunpowder and addressed the people of the town in front of the house near the Elm. The house was moved to its present location in 1924. For a time it was a museum and then was used as a residence by Choate Rosemary Hall, until donated to the Wallingford Historic Preservation Trust in the 1990s.
The Franklin and Harriet Johnson Mansion, on South Main Street in Wallingford, was built in 1866. By the late twentieth century, it was being used for offices and had lost most of its nineteenth century Italianate decorative features. In 1999, the Johnson Mansion was donated to the Wallingford Historic Preservation Trust to become the new home for the now closed Meriden American Silver Museum. Both Meriden and Wallingford were centers for silver manufacturing. The house is now being restored.
