The house at 820 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was once attached to the neighboring house of hat-maker Joseph Booth, built c. 1800. It was moved to its current address sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. Booth is known to have operated a shop on the property, which later housed businesses that manufactured spectacles, jewelry, harnesses and cigars, but it is uncertain if the house at 820 Worthington Ridge was that shop.
At 12 Church Street in Roxbury is a house built circa 1790 for Judge Nathan Smith (1770-1835). According to Homes of Old Woodbury (1959), p. 250, the front section of the house was built sometime after the original rear section and the columns in front, like those of the Phineas Smith House in Roxbury, came from a church in New Haven that had burned in a fire. Nathan Smith and his brother Nathaniel both attended Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School. Nathan Smith was a lawyer and Whig politician. He served as Prosecuting Attorney for New Haven County from 1817 until his death and as United States Attorney for the district of Connecticut from 1828 to 1829. He was a delegate to the Connecticut state constitutional convention in 1818 and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Connecticut in 1825, losing to Oliver Wolcott. Smith served as a US Senator from 1833 to 1835, dying while in office in Washington, D.C., where President Andrew Jackson and his Cabinet attended his funeral in the Senate Chamber. There is a nineteenth-century barn on the Smith property in Roxbury, perhaps built by Smith’s nephew, Nathan R. Smith (b. 1811).
Before the Blackstone Memorial Library in Branford was erected in 1893, a house on the site that belonged to Lester J. Nichols was torn down to make way for the new building. Nichols, who was a director of the Malleable Iron Fittings Company, then built his new Georgian Revival house, designed by William H. Allen, at 730 Main Street. Lester Nichols was born in Middlebury in 1849. He is described in the second volume of A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County (1918):
Reared in New Haven, Lester J. Nichols was educated in the city schools until the age of seventeen years, when he went to Branford and secured employment with the Malleable Iron Fittings Company as shipping clerk. Later he became accountant and subsequently he represented the company on the road as traveling salesman, and in 1902 was chosen secretary, in which office he has since served. On joining the company in 1866 there were only sixty employes [sic], but at the present time there are over thirteen hundred. The business has steadily grown until it has now assumed extensive proportions and it ranks among the leading industrial concerns of New Haven county. Mr. Nichols is one of the five directors of the company and all of the men at its head are good reliable business men who command the confidence of those with whom they have dealings.
On the 8th of December, 1870, Mr. Nichols was married in Branford to Miss Alice E. Cook, a native of Branford [. . . .] Since starting out upon his business career he has been identified with but one concern and has labored untiringly for its interests with most excellent results. As the years have passed prosperity has come to him and he is now one of the substantial as well as one of the most highly esteemed citizens of Branford.
A less respectful lens on Nichols’ private life can be found in a piece entitled “Nichols ‘Niece’ Talk of Branford,” that appeared in the Bridgeport Herald of December 1, 1907.
In 1790 Andrew Fowler transferred ownership of a partially finished house in Guilford to his son, Jonathan Fowler, for five years’ service. The house was erected on an island next to the West River (current address 55 York Street). The property has a modern barn.
In 1837 Richard N. Watrous purchased land in Chester where by 1840 he had built the house that stands at 80 West Main Street. In 1842 the property was acquired by Luther Morse who established a livery business. In 1837 he married Abigail Watrous. The livery was continued into the twentieth century by their son Martin and his daughter Stella Morse Crook.
John Stewart and his son Henry L. Stewart were a storekeepers and shipbuilders in Middle Haddam. After John’s death in 1860, Henry erected a brick Gothic Revival house at 94 Moodus Road and turned to farming. the house took five years to build (1860-1865) because local builders were serving in the Civil War.
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