34 First Avenue, Waterbury (1875)

The house at 34 First Avenue in Waterbury is a Queen Anne-style house with an octagonal turret, built around 1875. The family of Richard Tennant, an immigrant from Scotland, occupied the house from the end of the nineteenth century until 1950. According to the Commemorative Biographical Record of New Haven County, Connecticut (1902):

Richard Tennant spent his boyhood and youth on the Scottish homestead, and availed himself of the opportunities of education presented by the local schools. After attaining his majority he went to Glasgow and served three years as an apprentice to the machinist’s trade, at the Neilson Locomotive Works. Howden & Co., marine engineers, had the young man in their employ for two years, and he was then with the London-Glasgow Engineering Co. one year. By this time Mr. Tennant had become an experienced and thoroughly efficient machinist, and his services were in demand. King & Co., a celebrated engineering house, counted him among their ablest employes. Only the desire to come to this country, where many of his compatriots had already reaped a rich reward for their courage and enterprise, induced him to break away from this firm. In 1871 Mr. Tennant came to the United States, and located in Paterson, N. J., where he was in the employ of the Rogers Locomotive Works until the close of the year 1873, and in the following spring he came to Connecticut, working for three months in Ansonia, and then for a year in Seymour, with the Swan Bit Co. Mr. Tennant then returned to Ansonia and engaged with Wallace & Sons until January, 1888, in which month he came to Waterbury to take a position with the Scovill Manufacturnig Co., where he is still at work. For a year Mr. Tennant was master mechanic for the Aluminum Brass & Bronze Co., at Bridgeport, and with that exception has been with the Scovill Co. since coming to Waterbury.

Lavinia L. Parmly House (1890)

The Parmly House, in the Marina Park district of Bridgeport, was originally built in 1890 by Lavinia L. Parmly, a wealthy New York widow. She used it as a summer home and, upon her death in 1894, bequeathed it to her grandson, Parmly S. Clapp, as a wedding present. He later became a New York City stockbroker. The house was later purchased by Allen W. Paige, whose widow, Elizabeth, donated it to the University of Bridgeport in 1950. Named Cortright Hall, in honor of E. Everett Cortright, first president of the Junior College of Connecticut (now the University of Bridgeport). Used at first as administrative offices, Cortright Hall now houses the Department of Public Relations.

The Harriet M. Brainerd House (1886)

Edward M. Simpson, who lived in Middle Haddam at Knowles Landing, was a steamboat captain and pilot on the Connecticut River in the mid-nineteenth century. His daughter, Harriet M. Brainerd, was married to Edward R. Brainerd, a marble dealer in Chicago. The couple built a summer house near her father’s home in Middle Haddam in 1886. At the time, Knowles Landing was a destination for tourists and steamboats would dock at the landing. Harriet Brainerd built a Steamboat Dock House in the early 1890s to replace an earlier structure, built in the 1860s. Later used as a residence, this boat house burned down in the 1980s, but the Queen Anne-style Harriet M. Brainerd House (pdf) survives, displaying Victorian-era features, like the decorative stickwork on the front veranda. (more…)

The Charles E. Mitchell House (1880)

Charles Elliott Mitchell (1837-1911), a lawyer originally from Bristol, practiced law in New Britain, forming a partnership with Frank L. Hungerford in 1869. The partners wrote the charter when New Britain became a city in 1870 and Mitchell was also appointed the first city attorney. He represented New Britain in the General Assembly in 1880-1881, around the time his surviving residence in the city, a Queen Anne-style house at 15 Hillside Place, was constructed. While in the Assembly, as explained in David N. Camp’s History of New Britain (1889), he was “a member of the commission to consider and report upon the necessity of a new normal school building, and was largely instrumental in securing a favorable report and the appropriation necessary for its erection.” The building is located next to his house on Hillside Place. Mitchell came to specialize in patent law and served under President Benjamin Harrison as United States Patent Attorney, in 1889-1891. He retired from the law and returned to New Britain in 1902, where he served as president of the Stanley Rule & Level Manufacturing Company. In 1905, he had a new house built at 54 Russell Street, a Colonial Revival home, designed by Charles Rich of New York, where he lived until his death in 1911. This house became the home of Mark J. Lacey, the president of several manufacturing companies, in 1930. The Russell Street house was demolished for the construction of a highway in 1972.

First Church Parsonage, Farmington (1875)

The Queen Anne style house at 96 Main Street in Farmington was built in 1875 as the Parsonage of the First Congregational Church. The stone store, built by Maj. Timothy Cowles, originally occupied the site, but was destroyed by fire on July 21, 1864. William Gay, a merchant who owned several parcels of real estate in Farmington, bought the lot in 1871 and sold it to the First Ecclesiastical Society.

Sloper-Wesoly House (1887)

The Sloper-Wesoly House, on Grove Hill in New Britain, is a Queen Anne-style residence, built in 1887. Designed by George Dutton Rand, the house was built for Andrew Jackson Sloper, an industrialist and third president of the New Britain National Bank. His son, William Thomson Sloper, who grew up in the house and was a survivor of the Titanic, wrote a biography of his father, The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson Sloper, 1849-1933 (1949), which contains many anecdotes of nineteenth-century New Britain. The house was later owned by Dr. Andrew Wesoly, who served as an army captain in the Second World War and who, as a physician and Polish speaker, treated many of New Britain’s Polish residents. After his death, his daughters donated the house to the Polish American Foundation of Connecticut. The building is now the Sloper-Wesoly Immigrant Heritage and Cultural Center.