At 8 Dust House Road in Hazardville is a small brick building constructed in 1850. It is a rare survivor among the 125 buildings built by the Hazard Powder Company, which produced gunpowder and explosives in Enfield from 1835 to 1913.
The house at 392 Saybrook Road in Higganum (in the Town of Haddam) has a sign that reads “Geo. W. Smith c. 1815.” There was a George W. Smith who represented Haddam in the legislature in the 1820s.
The building at 31 Chaplin Street in Chaplin is an interesting composite structure, made up of what were once three separate buildings. They were brought together to form the current house in 1936. The earliest section was a mercantile store, erected between 1830 and 1832 by Edward Eaton. The next section was a tin shop, erected in the 1840s. It was operated by Alexander Dorrance, who most likely used the store building as his residence. The largest part of the current building was built as a school house, c. 1850. When these three buildings were joined, the school section was raised to be two stories, thus giving the completed structure a classic saltbox profile. The building is described under the heading “Rindge-Dorrance Tin Shop, c. 1840” on p. 15 of the pamphlet Historic Homes of Chaplin Village, by Johanne Philbrick. It is listed in the Chaplin Historic District as “Eaton’s Store” with a date of 1850.
Edward Perkins (1743-1787) built a house at what is now 6 Grant Road in Bethany, which was sold by his son, Israel Perkins (1767-1846) in 1835 to Dr. Chauncey B. Foote of Hamden. Israel Perkins is described in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Volume 17 (1863):
Israel Perkins designed to pursue professional life and had expected to commence a course of study the year that his father died. Being left by this event at the head of the family, he was compelled to forego this purpose and remain at home on the farm. He lived in the house which his father built, on the turnpike from Litchfield, near the school-house. From 1793 to 1795, he lived at Hamden Plain. When he was 28 he became quite deaf, and continued so through life. He was well known in that part of the country, as selectman of the town, settler of estates, guardian of children, &c., &c.; and was so skilled in the law that he was familiarly called “the old lawyer.”
Dr. Foote removed the original Perkins House and built a new one just in front of where it had stood. The book Bethany’s Old Houses and Community Buildings (1972), by Alice Bice Bunton, however, refers to the current structure under the heading of “The Israel Perkins House.” In 1838, Dr. Foote sold the house to Major Lounsbury (died 1863) and it remained in the Lounsbury family until 1912.
The house at 174-176 Seabright Avenue in the Black Rock section of Bridgeport has a sign that names it “Seabright Cottage.” The Bridgeport assesor’s field card gives it a date of 1877. The building is listed in the Black Rock Historic District as one of two “William Nichols Tenament Houses” built in 1894 (the other being at 181 Brewster Street). They were located next to Nichol’s businesses: the Nichols Hotel and the General Store.
The museum building known as the John Dodd Hat Shop is located on the grounds of the Danbury Historical Society. It was not actually a hat shop, but was built in 1790 by lawyer John Dodd as his law office. The Historical Society acquired the building in 1957 and moved it from its original location on lower Main Street to its current address to house its hat shop exhibit. A variety of hats are on display, as well as hatting machines and other historical artifacts relating to the hatting industry in Danbury, which was known as the “Hat City of the World.”
Ransom Hudson (1810-1871) was a farmer and shoemaker in Oxford who also served as postmaster and Justice of the Peace. He built the house at 434 Oxford Road in Oxford for his mother, Mary Clark.
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