The house at 34 Evergreen Avenue in Hartford was built around 1900 and is attributed to the architect William H. Scoville, who designed many homes in Hartford’s West End. The house has a Queen-Anne form, with siding in the Shingle Style and Colonial Revival porches. This post is Historic Buildings of Connecticut‘s 100th entry for Hartford!
The Queen Anne-style house of Dr. Michael Gill, who was a prominent Hartford physician, is on the the West Hartford side of Prospect Avenue. It also features aspects of the shingle and Colonial revival styles. The house was the childhood home of the doctor’s son, Brendan Gill, who attended the Kingswood School nearby and became a well-known writer and contributer to New Yorker magazine. He was also a noted preservationist.
A Queen Anne style home, which also features elements of the Gothic Revival, Shingle and Colonial Revival styles, the Henry Dwight Bradburn House, on Prospect Avenue in Hartford, is an eclectic mix. The house dates to 1900, the year Bradburn retired as manager of the Nonotuck Paper Company of Holyoke, Mass. The house bears a strong resemblance to the W. F. Clark House in Springfield, Massachusetts.
This week we look at houses on Prospect Avenue, the border between Hartford and West Hartford. An eclectic mix of large houses were constructed here in the later nineteenth century. One of the earliest is that of Burdett Loomis, an inventor and manufacturer of gas plant machinery. A civic leader in Hartford, in 1873 he also opened a trotting horse park on New Park Avenue. This would later evolve into Charter Oak Park, which early in the twentieth century would feature Luna Park, a popular amusement park. In the late nineteenth century, Prospect Avenue was considered to be in the countryside, and around 1885, Loomis bought a c. 1845 Greek Revival farmhouse and transformed it into his country estate by adding a new Queen Anne-style section on the front.
The house built in 1899, on Summer Street in Bristol for Herbert J. Mills, is an example of how a historic home can suffer from later unsympathetic alterations. Mills, who was the president of the H.J. Mills Box Shop company, lived in a Queen Anne-style house that still stands. With the exception of the decoration of the front entry porch, the rest of the exterior has lost most of its original stick style decoration and roof brackets. The integrity of the house’s tower has also been compromised by an addition on the north side of the building.
Located on Center Street in Bristol, the William A. Kimball House of 1902 is a late example of a Queen Anne-style home. The tower’s projecting dormer is not a typical feature. Kimball was a purchasing agent for Albert F. Rockwell‘s New Departure Manufacturing Company.
