36 Forest Street, Hartford (1895)

The Queen Anne house at 36 Forest Street in Hartford was built around 1895. It stands on the site once occupied by an earlier house that burned down in 1870. That house, rented for many years by the Rev. Nathaniel J. Burton and his wife, Rachel Pine Chase Burton, was one of the homes of the Nook Farm neighborhood, where Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe also lived. Rev. Burton settled in Hartford in 1857, when he became the pastor of the Fourth Congregational Church. In 1870, he succeeded Horace Bushnell as minister at Park Church, where he remained until his death in 1887. Burton’s son, Richard Burton, was literary critic of the Hartford Courant. He edited a posthumously published collection of his father’s Yale Lectures on Preaching, and Other Writings (1888), republished in 1896 as In Pulpit and Parish. Richard Burton, who was also a poet, later lived in the 1895 house on Forest Street.

Tolland County House (1893)

On Tolland Green is located the Old Tolland County Jail, the earliest surviving section of which dates to 1856. At one time the Jail was attached to a hotel known as the County House (first built in 1786), which could accommodate people who had business at the nearby county court. The hotel was owned by the state, but was managed under contract by a private innkeeper (who was sometimes also the jailer). The court later moved to Rockville in 1888 and the hotel was not rebuilt after it burned in 1893. Instead, it was replaced by a new County House, used primarily as a residence for the jailer and his family. The Victorian building was designed by local builder James Clough. Today, the house and attached jail serve as a museum, operated by the Tolland Historical Society.

Bronson B. Tuttle House (1881)

In 1858, John Howard Whittemore formed a company with Bronson B. Tuttle to produce malleable iron hardware, a company that was eventually known as Naugatuck Malleable Iron. Tuttle’s brick house, unlike that of his partner Whittemore, survives today in Naugatuck Center, at the north end of Church Street. Built in 1879 to 1881, the brick and brownstone residence, designed by Robert Wakeman Hill of Warterbuy, is Queen Anne in style, elaborated with elements of other styles. The gable ends and tower dormers are decorated with a quarter sunburst design. There is quatre-foil-pierced terra-cotta cresting along the roof line. The original wraparound porch was later removed. The house remained in the Tuttle family until 1935, when it was given to the Borough of Naugatuck, the house has served as a school and is now the offices of the Naugatuck Board of Education.

The Taylor-Wheeler House (1889)

The house at 47 Holmes Avenue in Waterbury was built in 1889 by Alfred F. Taylor, who ran a painting company (see advertisement, pdf, p.11). He and his family only occupied the house for a year before he sold it to John S. Wheeler, a retired painter. Taylor then moved to a similar Queen Anne house he had built next door, at 51 Holmes Avenue. According to the History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, Vol. III (1918), “the long established business of the A. F. Taylor Company”

was organized in 1880 and was incorporated in 1901 by A. F., Foster B. and Charles I. Taylor. The Taylors sold their interests about 1909 to George Reed, who had formerly been with the Scovill Manufacturing Company. He remained at the head of the business until 1908, when he sold out to W. D. Austin and C. W. Lyons, and in 1914 Mr. Austin purchased the interest of Mr. Lyons. The business was first located on Grand street and thence removed to No. 43 Center street, where the company occupies a building, which has a frontage of twenty-three feet and a depth of one hundred and ten feet. They handle a full line of wall paper, window shades and awnings and in addition do interior decorating in all its branches, taking large contracts for work of this character and employing fifty people in the busy season. The business has reached extensive proportions and has become one of the profitable industries of the city.

Joseph Dwight Chaffee House (1889)

In 1889, Joseph Dwight Chaffee bought what was considered to be the most desirable lot in Willimantic and built an impressive Queen Anne house on the property. As stated in The Chaffee Genealogy (1909), Joseph Dwight Chaffee

was born in Mansfield, Conn., August 9, 1846, and married there, September 12, 1867, Martha W., daughter of George P. Armstrong of that place. Mr. Chaffee has served in the Connecticut Legislature as Representative and also as Senator from the Twenty-Fourth District. He has been associated with his father in the business of manufacture of silk under the firm name of O. S. Chaffee & Son, later called the Natchaug Silk Company of Willimantic, Conn. In 1883 he lived in Mansfield, and in 1894 in Willimantic.

He was known as Colonel Chaffee, after serving on Governor Phineas Lounsbury‘s staff from 1887 until 1889. In 1895, a financial scandal led to the liquidation of the Natchaug Silk Company and the arrest and trial of J. D. Chaffee for fraud (the company had been capitalized in a fraudulent manner by the First National Bank of Willimantic, a fact discovered when the bank’s cashier committed suicide and the bank was investigated). Chaffee later operated, with his son, another manufacturing company, known for its Natchaug Silk Braided Fish Lines. He later llived in the factory’s basement, after the company closed in 1927, until his death in 1938 at the age of 92. His former house on Summit Street in Willimantic was restored in the late-1990s.

Tunxis Hose Fire House (1893)

In 1893, the citizens of Unionville petitioned the state legislature to create a fire district for their community. The founding of the Unionville Fire District led to the creation of the Tunxis Hose Company and the construction of a Queen Anne-style fire house, begun in 1893 and completed in the following year. Located at the corner of Lovely Street and Farmington Avenue in Unionville, the Tunxis Hose Fire House was in use until a new building was constructed in 1960-1961. The old building, next used by the Town of Farmington as a storage facility for its files, has recently been restored with assistance from architect Tim Eagles.