Owned for more than 200 years by the Butler family, which came to Wethersfield via Hartford in the 1680s, the Roger Butler House, on Jordan Lane in Wethersfield, was built in 1769, although it may date to the 1750s or earlier. The house once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Rev. Daniel Welch, minister from 1751 to 1782 of Mansfield’s North Society Church (now the Storrs Congregational Church), constructed a house on the Old Turnpike in Mansfield, on land he had purchased in 1755. As this parsonage was his own property (not the church’s), it was passed to his children, eventually becoming the home of his son and successor as minister, Rev. Moses Cook Welch, who had earlier studied law and became known as a great ecclesiastical lawyer. When the original house burned in 1812, it was replaced by the current building. In 1825, when Moses Welch died, his son, the prominent physician Dr. Archibald Welch of Wethersfield, sold the house and farmland out of the family. The property has had a number of owners and was was bought, in 1906, by Martin Hibbard Parker, who had married Edna Mason, a daughter of Charles Mason. The house was restored in the 1990s.
In 1691, the settlement of East Windsor petitioned the Connecticut General Court for the privilege of having its own church and minister, seperate from Windsor. In 1694, the first meeting house was constructed (to be replaced in 1714). The first minister, ordained in 1698, was Timothy Edwards, father of the renowned preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, who was born in the East Windsor Hill neighborhood. East Windsor became incorporated as a seperate town in 1768 and in 1845, South Windsor separated from East Windsor. The area where the Edwards had lived was part of the new town. The current Timothy Edwards Church (First Congregational Church of South Windsor) is on Main Street and was built in 1846.
The George W. Cheney House, one of the Cheney mansions in Manchester, is located across Hartford Road from the Frank Cheney, Jr. House. Built around 1860, the house has a distinctive pyramidal roof, with shed dormers, and a shed-roofed front porch.
Donated by William Wood, of South Windsor, in honor of his parents, Dr. William Wood (a distinguished ornithologist) and Mary Ellsworth Wood, the Wood Memorial Library, on Main Street, served as the one of town’s two libraries from its dedication, in 1928, into the 1970s, when a new library building was constructed on Sullivan Avenue. In 1971, the non-profit Friends of Wood Memorial Library was founded to oversee its continued operation, through private funds, as a library, museum and historical archive. The library, built between 1926 and 1928, was designed by the Hartford architect William Marchant in the Colonial Revival style, with features drawn from the Federal period.
The first St. Joseph Church, Bristol’s first Catholic church, was built in 1855. This original wood building, enlarged in 1879, was eventually replaced by the current granite church, dedicated in 1925. Designed by Joseph A. Jackson in the English Tudor Gothic style (or Perpendicular Gothic), the church is on Queen Street, facing Federal Hill Green.
The Jonathan Camp House, at 1430 Asylum Avenue in Hartford, may look familiar to those interested in American history. It is a virtual replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, in Virginia, but features some grand additions to its model, including a much fancier entry with a semicircular fanlight and side lights, as well as an elaborate balustrade along the roof. Mount Vernon also influenced the design of other Colonial Revival style houses, like the Hill-Stead, but this house, designed by Edward T. Hapgood and built in 1911, follows the first president’s home very closely, with some early twentieth century aggrandizement.
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