Bushnell Farm (1678)

Bushnell Farm, Old Saybrook

One of the five oldest houses in Connecticut is the Bushnell Farm house at 1445 Boston Post Road in Old Saybrook. It began as a two room, one story, thatch roofed post and beam house built by the Elder Joshua Bushnell. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Elisha Bushnell House and J. Frederick Kelly, in his classic Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut (1924), calls it the Older Bushnell House. The house was expanded over the two centuries that the Bushnell family owned it. The property has a number of outbuildings, including an early eighteenth-century barn, a loom house (the Bushnells were both farmers and weavers) and a building referred to as the slave house. Maintained as a private residence in an excellent state of preservation, the property is often opened to schools, historical societies and the Connecticut River Museum Summer Camp.

Rev. Nathan Fenn House (1780)

Rev. Nathan Fenn House

The house at 883 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was built by Reverend Nathan Fenn (1749-1799), first minister of the Worthington parish, around the time of his ordination in 1780. As related by Catharine Melinda North in her History of Berlin (1916):

Jesse Eddy, who succeeded Mr. Fenn as owner of the property, had a large tin shop that stretched across the south yard, where many men were employed.

This shop was burned and rebuilt. Mr. Eddy was assisted in his business by his sons, George and Frederic.

One Sunday, a warm day in summer, George went with a companion to East Berlin and went in bathing at the factory pond. The water was unusually high, after a heavy rain, and George was drawn by an undercurrent over the dam and was drowned. Fifty men turned out to search for his body but it was not until after the water subsided that it was found caught in a tree.

Mr. James B. Carpenter purchased the Eddy shop and moved it down west of Deacon North’s store, where it forms the residence part of Mr. Damon’s place.
Nathaniel James married the daughter of Jesse Eddy, and, after that, the family used the house as a summer residence only, while their winters were spent in New York City.

Afterwards, the Rev. Seth Bliss owned the property for several years. It is now the residence of Charles S. Webster.

G. W. Miller Mill House (1850)

Mill House, Baileyville

In the nineteenth century the area of Baileyville in Middlefield was an active industrial district. The building at 93 Baileyville Road was probably constructed around 1850 as an outbuilding for one of the mills along Ellen Doyle Brook. In 1876 it was converted into a residence by George W. Miller to house an employee of his phosphate mill. In 1921 it was purchased by the Lyman Gun Sight Corporation to house factory workers and their families.

Jacob Wilson Tavern (1735)

Jacob Wilson Tavern

At the northwest corner of the Boston Turnpike at 21 Bread & Milk Street in Coventry is a house built circa 1735 by John Wilson (1702-1773). After his death in 1773, the house passed to his son William (1729-1819), who married Sarah Rust, and his grandson Jacob (1749-1826), who married Hannah Dimmock in 1771. Jacob Wilson operated a tavern at the house from 1773 until 1817, when he sold the property to Joshua Frink.

Orlando Bolles House (1847)

22 Hurlbutt Rd., Gales Ferry, Ledyard

The house at 22 Hurlbutt Road in Gales Ferry was built by Orlando Bolles (1807-1895), a whaling captain. He had purchased the land on which the house stands in 1844, before setting out on a two-year journey on the whaling schooner Exile. After his return he built the house in 1847, but sold it just three years later to William Fitch of Montville, a relative of his wife, Ellen Fitch. In 1856, the house was acquired by Bolles’ daughter, Harriet, and her husband, Charles L. Crandall. After her husband’s death in 1875, Harriet and her sister, Annie Bolles Pierce, spent their summers at the house in Gales Ferry and their winters in New York. After Harriet’s death in 1926 the house passed to her sister, who died in 1941. She willed the house to the New England Southern Conference of the Methodist Church, which then sold it to Courtland Colver, Sunday School Superintendent.

Dr. Joseph W. Alsop III Cottage (1880)

21 Pettipaug Ave

The summer cottage at 21 Pettipaug Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook was built c. 1880 for Dr. Joseph Wright Alsop III (1838-1891). The Alsops were a prominent family in Middletown: His grandfather, Captain Joseph Wright Alsop I (1772-1844), and his father, Joseph Wright Alsop II (1804-1878), were wealthy merchants; his son, Joseph Wright Alsop IV (1876-1953), married a niece of Theodore Roosevelt and was a politician and farmer in Avon; and his grandson, Joseph Wright Alsop V (1910-1989), was a journalist and top insider in Washington, DC politics. In later life Dr. Joseph W. Alsop III, a democrat, served in the state Senate and was involved in the political deadlock over the gubernatorial election of 1891. After giving an impassioned speech he collapsed at the rostrum and died of a heart attack. The cottage passed from the Alsop estate in 1903 and was acquired by Morgan B. Brainard of Hartford, whose former Fenwick cottage had been destroyed in the Hurricane of 1938. It was acquired in 1959 by his niece, Lucy Brainard Smith. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 122-128. (more…)