Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Exploring the Nutmeg State One Building at a Time

Architectural Style

Municipal Building, Hartford (1915)

When the new Connecticut State Capitol was built in 1878, the Old State House became Hartford’s City Hall until 1915, when a new Municipal Building was completed. This building’s Beaux-Arts design was chosen after an architectural competition which required that the new structure resemble the Old State House. And as everyone still thought of the earlier building as “City Hall,” the new one would not take that name but was instead to be known as the “Municipal Building.” In addition to the neoclassical ornamentation on the exterior, the structure, designed by Davis and Brooks, is notable for its impressive three-story central atrium.

Stanley-Whitman House (1720)

Built on High Street in Farmington in 1720 for Deacon John Stanley, and later purchased by the Reverend Samuel Whitman in 1735, the Stanley-Whitman House has been a museum since 1935. The house is an excellent example of a New England saltbox. Once thought to have been built in the seventeenth century, it is now dated to 1720, but displays many stylistic features typical of seventeenth century houses, including the second-story overhang with pendant drops and the diamond-paned windows.

Isaac Stevens House (1789)

Built in 1788-1789 on Main Street in Wethersfield, adjacent to the Joseph Webb House, for the leather worker Isaac Stevens. Joseph Webb, Jr was greatly in debt after the Revolutionary war and sold the land to Stevens, whose house follows a similar Georgian design to that of the Webb House, but on a smaller scale and without a gambrel roof. Title to the house was conveyed to the Colonial Dames in 1945 by its last resident, Jennie Andrews, to prevent its being torn down (note the proximity of the commercial building to the right of the house). After Mrs. Andrews’s death in 1958, the Dames restored the house, opening it to the public in 1963. The Isaac Stevens House, together with the Joseph Webb House and Silas Deane House, today comprise the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

(more…)

John Watson House (1789)

Built on Main Street in 1788-1789 for East Windsor Hill’s leading merchant, John Watson. This Adam style house, with a Palladian window and classical proportions, was designed by the architect and builder Thomas Hayden of Windsor. It is the oldest three-story mansion surviving in the Connecticut River valley and resembles the great Federal period mansions built for the wealthy merchants in New England’s coastal cities. It has recently been opened as a bed-and-breakfast.

Holbrook Carriage House (1865)

Update: This Carriage House was demolished in January 2010 after the roof collapsed from heavy snow.

The Caleb M. Holbrook House once stood at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Gillett Street in Hartford. Built in 1865, the Second Empire style house was later torn down, but Holbrook’s carriage house remains on Gillett Street. Below is the intersection where the house once stood as it appears today (also note that the current apartment building is in the Mission Revival style):

For more on the loss of this building: (more…)

Butler-McCook House (1782)

Built on Main Street in Hartford for Dr. Daniel Butler in 1782. Butler had a medical practice and managed mills that his wife, Sarah Sheldon Ledyard, had inherited from her first husband. Their son, John, and his wife, Eliza Lydia Royce Sheldon, added the Greek Revival Portico. In 1865, John and Eliza’s daughter, Eliza Sheldon Butler, hired landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann to design the garden behind the house. The next year, she married John James McCook, one of the famous Civil War Fighting McCooks. For 60 years, Rev. McCook was volunteer rector of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in East Hartford and he later taught at Trinity College. He also did important sociological work in his studies of homeless people.

Rather than abandon a changing Main Street, as so many of the other long-established families were doing in the later nineteenth century, the McCooks remained, instead accommodating their growing family by expanding their attic into a third floor of bedrooms. In 1897, their son John, a doctor, added an office to the house for his medical practice. His sister, Frances A. McCook, was the last of the family to live in the house. When she died in 1971, she left it to the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, and the house is open to the public as the Butler-McCook House & Garden and Main Street History Center.

Informative articles on the house and its residents have appeared in Antiques and the Hog River Journal.

Hurlbut-Dunham House (1804)

Built in 1804 on Main Street in Wethersfield for Captain John Hurlbut, who had served on the Neptune, the first ship from Connecticut to sail around the world. In the 1850s, a later owner added Italianate features to this brick Federal style house. These additions include the projecting cornice with brackets, the entry portico, side veranda, and belvedere tower. Jane Robbins Dunham left the property to the Wethersfield Historical Society and it is now a historic house museum.

(more…)