Walter A. Ingraham House (1892)

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The house constructed in 1892 for Walter A. Ingraham, on Prospect Place in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Bristol, is a rare survival of a type of high-style Queen Anne house. It has a base of granite and was built of brick with elaborately ornamented terra cotta detailing. The corner tower also features a distinctive copper roof. In the year the house was built, Walter Ingraham succeeded his father, Edward Ingraham, as president of the E. Ingraham Clock Company. Walter Ingraham’s brother and neighbor, William S. Ingraham, served as the company’s treasurer and secretary and the houses of both brothers were heated through pipes linked to the Ingraham Company’s furnaces.

Park Terrace Houses (1895)

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This week, we will be looking at the architecture of George Keller. Born in Ireland, Keller came to the United States when he was ten. Taking up the study of architecture, he came to Hartford to design monuments for J.G. Batterson, producing many memorials for Cedar Hill Cemetery. He would later design the cemetery’s Northam Memorial Chapel in 1882. Keller utilized a Gothic style and resisted the Classical and Colonial Revivals.

Primarily associated with churches and public buildings, Keller also designed houses, so we begin this week with the row houses he designed along Park Terrace in Hartford (above). These houses present a simplified form of Keller’s “Modern Gothic” style. They also display similarities with Keller’s design for the (no longer extant) Hartford High School building of 1883. He also designed a similar group of houses along Columbia Street in 1888-1889. The Park Terrace houses had a special significance for Keller, because the last house on the row (24 Park Terrace, below) became his own home as the fee for planning the project.

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John Birge House (1880)

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John Birge was a state senator and president of N. L. Birge and Sons, a knitting mill, which had been founded by his father, Nathan L. Birge. His grandfather was John Birge, who had played an important role in Bristol’s clockmaking industry. Birge‘s house, on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol, was built around 1880. After his death, the house was purchased by William J. Tracy, who would found Tracy-Driscoll & Co. in 1920. Note the house in the upper-left of the historic image linked to above.