Dating to around 1800, the building at the corner of Bank and Pearl Streets in New London was part of the business operations of Jonathan Starr‘s family. Starr, who lived across the street, operated the Chester & Starr lumberyard and a grocery store at the site. According to the New London Heritage Trail plaque at the site: “Coffins and groceries both sold here.” The building now houses a restaurant and bar.
Built around 1830, the house at 27 Park Avenue in Windsor is one of many examples in the town of early nineteenth-century brick construction. The earliest known owner of the house was Clarissa Loomis, who sold it to Daniel Payne, a farmer, in 1855.
Powder Hollow, in the Hazardville section of Enfield, was once the site of the Hazard Powder Company, which flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. The company furnished an estimated 40% of all the gunpowder used during the Civil War. Surviving friom the company’s original complex of buildings is a barn built around 1845. Constructed as a horse barn, it was converted by Ralph Sweet for Square Dancing in 1959. The Powder Mill Barn (also known as the Powder Hollow Barn) is also a popular rental hall for weddings, auctions and other events.
The former Wassuc schoolhouse, at 184 Wassuc Road in Glastonbury was built around 1840 to serve students in the east part of town. The building has since been converted into a residence and has a later wing addition.
The oldest parts of the Plume & Atwood Manufacturing Company‘s factory in Thomaston date to 1853. In that year, clockmaker Seth Thomas, who was unhappy buying brass for his clocks from companies in Waterbury, built his own brass mill on the Naugatuck River. In 1869 a new company was organized, Holmes, Booth & Atwood, which purchased the factory with the agreement that they would continue to supply brass for Seth Thomas clocks. The founders of the company had left the Waterbury firm of Holmes, Booth & Haydens and Hiram W. Hayden sued them over the fact that their new company’s name resembled the existing company’s name too closely. In 1871, the new group took the name Plume & Atwood–David Scott Plume was the company’s treasurer. The factory buildings were severely damaged in the 1955 flood. Since the late 1950s, other companies have utilized the old factory. (more…)
In 1843, around the time he married his cousin Caroline Coe, Andrew Coe purchased land from the estate of his father, Bela Coe, and built the house at 458 Main Street in Middlefield soon thereafter. Andrew Coe ground and burned bone for sugar refining at a grist mill on the Beseck River. When he died in 1854, his nephew Russell Coe bought the mill and inherited the house. In 1856 he sold the house to Albert Skinner, who had a wood turning shop on the Beseck River. The house once had a wing with a post office that burned in 1934. A wing with a pharmacy replaced it in 1936.
The building at 349 Main Street in Cromwell was built in 1853 as a Baptist church and later served as an American Legion Hall. The church was organized in 1802. According to Rev. Myron Samuel Dudley’s History of Cromwell (1880):
In 1803 the church built a plain frame edifice Meeting-House on the West Green, and held their public meetings there until 1833, when the house was moved to the central part of the village and placed on a lot nearly opposite the present site of the Post Office. Worship continued in this house until Nov. 3, 1853, on which day a new house of worship, located a little North of the old one, built during the pastorate of the Rev. C. W. Potter and largely through his instrumentality, was dedicated. This latter edifice was remodeled, somewhat, internally in 1872, and is the house of worship of the church at the present time.
The church disbanded in 1936 and the building’s steeple was removed.
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