Architectural Style - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Eleazer Wheelock House (1735)

Eleazar Wheelock, who later founded Dartmouth College, was the Congregational minister in Columbia from 1735 to 1770. His house, built in 1735, is located on the Green, next to the Congregational Church. Wheelock, a prominent figure during the Great Awakening, also trained young men for college and in 1743 he began privately teaching a young Mohegan named Samson Occom, who became a missionary to other Indians. He soon started teaching and converting other Native Americans in his home, then founding a school, called Moor’s Charity School in 1754, named for Joshua Moor, who donated land for the school. Wheelock used a school building, which is now located behind the Congregational Church in Columbia. Later, he moved to New Hampshire to establish Dartmouth College.

The Gay Mansion (1795)

Ebenezer King built an elaborate Federal-style mansion, with two porticoed doorways, on North Main Street in Suffield in 1795. In 1811, he sold the house to William Gay, the son of Ebenezer Gay and a prominent lawyer and postmaster of Suffield, who ran the post office from his house. The house came to be known as the Gay Mansion and remained the possession of descendants of the Gay family until 1916. The house is now the official residence of the headmaster of Suffield Academy. (more…)

Welles-Williams House (1712)

In 1711, Reverend Samuel Welles became the second pastor of the Congregational Church in Lebanon. In 1712, he built a house on what is now route 87, across from where William A. Buckingham Birthplace House would be built in 1804. According to a biography of Jonathan Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut who as a boy had been tutored by Welles, “If there were any exceptions to the rule of social equality which existed in the town at this time, one exception might be found in the case of this same Reverend Samuel Welles, whose aristocratic Boston connections had enabled him to build the handsomest house in Lebanon.” In 1719, Rev. Welles had married Hannah Arnold, whose family owned extensive property in Boston. Her parents wanted the couple to move to Boston, so Welles left Lebanon in 1722, looking after his wife’s property after her parents’ deaths and, according to Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (1885), in Boston, “he accumulated more wealth, becoming one of the richest men of the town, and highly respected.” On leaving Lebanon, Welles sold his house to his successor as pastor, the Rev. Solomon Williams, son of the Rev. William Williams of Hatfield. Rev. Solomon Williams’ son, William Williams, was born in the house in 1731 and later went on to become a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Another son of Rev. Williams was Ezekiel Williams, who moved to Wethersfield and was a merchant and sheriff of Hartford County during the Revolutionary War. Their former home came to be owned by David S. Woodworth. In 1857, Charles Lyman Pitcher began working for Woodworth, eventually gaining possession of the farm after Woodworth’s death. Pitcher served in the Civil War and later the farm was managed by his two sons after his retirement.

Samuel Buckingham House (1817)

William Alfred Buckingham, governor of Connecticut during the Civil War and later a U.S. Senator until his death in 1875, was born in 1804 in a house in Lebanon, which was later moved (see comment below) by his father, Deacon Samuel Buckingham, who built a new house on the location between 1808 and 1817. The new Federal-style Buckingham house was later altered through the addition of Victorianizing features, like the bay windows on the front facade.

The John Olds House (1776)

This is the first building to be featured here which is likely not to exist very soon. John Olds is one of the founders of Manchester, who led the people of Orford parish in their quest to seperate from East Hartford in 1823, but his Revolutionary War-era house is in danger of being demolished very soon. The property, on Tolland Turnpike and Slater Road, is owned by TGM Associates, a New York developer. They own the nearby Waterford Commons apartments and hope to develop the land where the Olds House currently sits. Attempts to save the house by the town and historical society have not succeeded, so the house may soon be demolished.

Update: Although there were attempts to save it, the John Olds House was dismantled in 2012.

Osborne Homestead Museum (1840)

The Osborne Homestead Museum is adjacent to the Kellogg Environmental Center and the Osbornedale State Park in Derby. It was originally a farm house built in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1867, Wilbur Fisk Osborne married Ellen Lucy Davis and the couple moved into the house. Osborne’s father, John White Osborne, had founded a brass manufacturing company in Derby which came to dominate the eyelet manufacturing business. Wilbur F. Osborne served as president of various companies and also founded the Derby Neck Library, persuading Andrew Carnegie to assist in funding the library building’s construction. The Osbornes‘ only surviving child was Frances Eliza Osborne, who became a businesswoman, taking over her father’s responsibilities after his sudden death in 1907. In 1919, she married Waldo Stewart Kellogg, a New York architect. Starting in 1910, a Colonial Revival remodeling project began on the house, with additional detailing work done by Waldo Kellogg. The homestead now resembles a Federal-style house. Frances Osborne Kellogg continued to live in the house until her death in 1956. She had deeded her property to the State of Connecticut in 1951 and it became the Osbornedale State Park. The land was once home to the Osbornedale Dairy, which was run by Waldo Kellogg, who improved the herd after the acquisition of a prize bull. The house is open to the public as the Osborne Homestead Museum.

A.L. Sessions House (1903)

Counting down to the New Year makes one think of clocks and Bristol was the center of Connecticut Clock-making. One of the Bristol firms was the E.N. Welch Company, which by the later nineteenth century was in financial difficulty. In 1902, William E. Sessions, whose father owned a foundry business that had produced cases for E.N. Welch, was elected president of the company and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, became its treasurer. By the following year, they had acquired enough stock to take over the company, renaming it the Sessions Clock Company. During this same period, A.L. Sessions, had become a partner with his father, John Henry Sessions, in the family’s trunk hardware-making business, J.H. Sessions & Son. After his father’s death in 1902, the business was then incorporated in 1905 under a special charter by the state of Connecticut, the sole owners being A.L. Sessions, his mother and his wife. William E. Sessions built the mansion, called Beleden, on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol and his nephew, A.L. Sessions, built his own mansion in 1903 on the same street. The Georgian Revival home, constructed of brick and red sandstone, is said to have been designed by a Waterbury architect who had been sent by Sessions to England to study Georgian architecture before beginning to plan the house. Known in Bristol as the “Wedding Cake” House, it later became the Town Club and is now the DuPont Funeral Home.