The Elisha Parish-James M. Jones House is a double house at 404-412 Atlantic Street in Bridgeport. The house originally had 2-story verandas on either side of the structure’s front pavilion, which has double bay windows. The verandas on the east side remain, but those on the west side were rebuilt and enclosed in the the mid-twentieth century.
Today, all that remains of the Goodwin Building, on Asylum Street in Hartford, are the outer walls, with their striking English Queen Anne facade utilizing ornamental terra cotta. Built in 1881 as an apartment building by the brothers, James J. Goodwin and Rev. Francis Goodwin, it was designed by Francis Kimball and was modeled on buildings Rev. Goodwin had seen being constructed at the time in England. Kimball, of the firm of Kimball & Wisedell, was the architect for the Day House in Hartford, which also has an English Queen Anne design. The Goodwin Building was expanded in 1891 to Ann Street and in 1900 to Pearl Street. It was a very prestigious address at the time, with even J.P. Morgan living there during his visits to the city of his birth. In 1985-1986, the building’s Arts and Crafts style interior was gutted to prepare for the structure’s incorporation into a new office tower, Goodwin Square, completed in 1989. That same year, the Goodwin Hotel opened in the former apartment building. The hotel closed in 2008 and last year Goodwin Square went into foreclosure.
Located on the West Hartford side (across from the Hartford side) of Prospect Avenue, at #825, is the William Augustus Erving House. It is an elaborate Queen Anne residence, built in 1880 for William Augustus Erving, who was, at that time, secretary of the Hartford County Mutual Fire Insurance Company. His father, Daniel Dodge Erving, had previously served as president of the company and William Augustus Erving became president himself in 1917. According to A Century in Hartford, a history of the company, published in 1931,
Large and well proportioned, he maintained his fine physical vigor mainly by walking; he seldom missed his “morning constitutional” from his home on Prospect avenue to the office, a distance of three miles.
Erving’s brother, Henry Wood Erving, chairman of the board of the Connecticut River Banking Company, lived in a similar house next door.
The Ecclesiastical Society of Poquonock in Windsor was first established in 1726 and a meeting house was built the following year. This was replaced by a second meeting house in 1798. By 1820, church membership had completely diminished, but in the 1840s a new Congregational Church of Poquonock was formed (now the Poquonock Community Church), which built a new meeting house in 1854. The old Society’s church was eventually torn down in 1882, but in 1893-1894 a mortuary chapel for the adjacent Elm Grove Cemetery (earliest stone 1738) was constructed on the same site.
The Wallace Camp House is a Queen Anne-style building, constructed circa 1888 at 92 Woodlawn Terrace in Waterbury. Wallace Camp was an industrialist and employee of the Scovill Manufacturing Company. In more recent years, the house has been a bed and breakfast and has recently been for sale.
As related in Frederick John Kinsbury’s A Narrative and Documentary History of St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church (formerly St. James) of Waterbury, Connecticut (1907): “In 1884 John C. Booth and Mrs. Olive M. Elton presented to the parish the lot at the corner of Church and West Main streets, and a rectory was erected thereon, which was completed in the spring of 1886 at a cost of about $16,000.” The Queen Anne-style building, at 21 Church Street, features a Romanesque Revival archway on the front porch. In the 1970s, this former minister’s residence was converted into an office building.
At 422 Main Street in Portland is a house built in 1887 for Charles L. Jarvis and his wife, Louisa. Jarvis, whose father father was secretary and treasurer of the Middlesex Quarry Company, founded the Charles Jarvis Company, now called Jarvis Airfoil. Designed by David R. Brown of New Haven, the house has recently been repainted by its current owners in authentic Victorian-era colors, which highlight the home’s decorative detailing. (more…)
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