A good example of the American Foursquare style is the house just east of the Market on Bantam Road in the Bantam section of Litchfield (its official address is 15 Tulip Drive). It was built in 1915 to serve as the parsonage of the Bantam Methodist Church. The church sold the property to the Bantam Lumber Company in 1973. The house was likely a mail order precut kit house produced by The Aladdin Company.
The William T. Tibbals House, at 11 Old Middletown Road in the Cobalt section of the town of East Hampton, has an unusual shape that some have classified as an octagon but seems closer to an oval and is said to be known as “the round house.” The roof may have had an octagon shape at one time, but today it seems to have the sides of a dodecagon, or 12-sided polygon. The house was built in 1857, which was during the peak of the fad in construction of octagon houses, and it has the stucco exterior and bracketed roof typical of octagon house construction, so perhaps we could consider it a relative of the octagon houses. It was built for William Thadeus Tibbals, operated an oakum works (used for caulking wooden ships) on Cobalt Stream that had been started by his father, Thadeus Tibbals, in 1828. After William’s death, his widow lived in the house and his son, Irvin Tibbals, who continued the oakum business with William’s brothers.
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Simeon Calhoun built two octagon houses in the town of Washington during the Civil War period. One was erected for Treat Nettleton on Nettleton Hollow Road and the other (pictured above) was built on at 142 Judea Cemetery Road in about 1866. The house was purchased by the Hollister family in 1881. They gave their name to the farm on the property called Holliecroft. Harold B. Anson (brother of James A. Anson), who had a painting company, bought the house in 1941. The Solley family bought the house from Anson in 1950. They operated Holliecroft as a dairy farm until 1960 and then focused on growing crops. The house was owned by Nancy F. Solley for many years
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Daniel Nettleton (1766-1829) and his wife Eunice Baldwin Nettleton came from Milford in about 1789 and settled in the town of Washington in an area that came to be called Nettleton Hollow. Across from the original Nettleton homestead, their son Samuel (1791-1852) built the house at 230 Nettleton Hollow Road in in 1814. He moved into the new house while his parents and his brother, Lyman Nettleton, remained in the old homestead, which stood until it was taken down in 1867 by Samuel’s nephew, Treat Nettleton, who moved into an octagon house built for him nearby. The Samuel Nettleton House remained in the family for well over a century and a half.
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In 1776, Martin North moved from Danbury to Winchester Center and built a saltbox house at what is now 102 Newfield Road. In 1941, new owners jacked up the original saltbox roof in order to add a bathroom and two full bedrooms to the rear of the second floor. There is a rear ell that now has the garage.
Just south of the Mill Pond, at 25 Main Street in the Ivoryton section of Essex, is a house built in 1809 by Daniel Griswold (1780-1870). In 1801 he had married Fanny Babcock (1779-1859). After her death in 1859, Daniel, who was then 79 years old, married Fanny Spencer. Daniel’s son William inherited the house. He would supply land for the new business enterprise of Comstock & Griswold, started in 1834 by his brother Edwin Griswold and Samuel M. Comstock, that would soon start producing ivory combs, launching the ivory industry in Ivoryton.
The house at 259 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was built sometime before 1800 (an chestnut beam in the attic is inscribed with the date 1789). It was the home of Jesse Barber, a cobbler who had a shop north of his house and also a tannery. He would fix the shoes of the children who walked by his home on their way to school. For many years the house’s residents got their water from a spring on the hill to the east which traveled through a system of split and grooved logs laid end-to-end. This was later replaced by a lead pipe that had to be kept unfrozen in the winter to prevent clogging. New owners, Dennis and Wanda Mahoney, replaced this system with an artesian well in 1953. They also extensively restored the house and totally rebuilt the rear ell. An earlier owner, Ambrose Norman, had kept riding horses, but gave up the house to a grain merchant from Granby to satisfy an unpaid feed bill.
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