Houses - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Levi Deming House (1825)

The Federal-style house at 754 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was built around 1825. It was owned early on by Levi Deming, a farmer.

Amariah Storrs (1728-1806), a tavern-keeper, built the house at 526 Storrs Road in Mansfield around 1760. In 1761 there were several meetings “of the proprietors of the new incorporated Township of Lebanon in the Province of Newhampshire legally warned and Convened at the house of Amariah Storrs inholder in Mansfield.” [see the History of Lebanon, N.H., by Rev. Charles A. Downs (1908) and “Early History of Lebanon” (The Granite Monthly, Vol. II/XII, Nos. 3,4, March, April 1889).] Amariah Storrs sold the house to Rev. John Sherman, who only owned for six months, in 1798-1799. The house was later owned by two carpenters: Joseph Sollace bought it in 1815 and exchanged houses with Charles Arnold in 1845. The house has been much altered over the years.

1 Babcock Road, North Stonington (1830)

The Greek Revival house at 1 Babcock Road in North Stonington was built c. 1830-1840. There is a barn on the property (east of the house) that was used as a cider mill, a blacksmith shop, and then a paint shop by William J. Richmond.

William J. Clark House (1878)

At 34 Prospect Hill Road in the Stony Creek section of Branford is the William J. Clark House, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as “Stick Style House at Stony Creek.” Designed by Henry Austin, the house was built in 1878-1880 as the summer home of William Judson Clark of Southington. In 1854, with his two brothers, Clark had founded the Clark Brothers Company, which manufactured nuts, bolts, washers, screws and rivets. Clark lived in an 1860 house in Southington.

Elijah Loveland Tavern (1797)

At 944 Worthington Ridge in Berlin is the Elijah Loveland Tavern, built c. 1797. It operated as a tavern from 1797 to 1812 and had a ballroom on its north end. The place is described in Catharine Melinda North’s History of Berlin (1916):

The property opposite Galpin’s store, now the home of the Misses Julia, Sarah, and Hattie Roys, daughters of the late Franklin Roys, was long known as the Elijah Loveland place. The house was once used by Mr. Loveland as a hotel. According to George H. Sage, whose history of the “Inns of Berlin” was published in the Berlin News of May 30, 1895, Mr. Loveland received his taverner’s license in 1797, and discontinued the business in 1812. There was a large addition on the north side of the house, with a ballroom on the second floor, which was often a scene of festivity.

When Priest Goodrich was here, there was a revival in his church. It was before the chapel was built, and the extra meetings were held in Loveland’s ballroom. One cold night, when the place was crowded, the air became so close that suddenly every tallow candle went out, and all was in darkness. Mr. Goodrich, who feared that the people would attempt to go down the stairs and be injured, said in a commanding voice: “Keep still!” “Everybody keep still!” The people obeyed him and remained quietly in their seats until fresh air was admitted and the candles were again lighted.

Elijah Loveland died in 1826, at the age of eighty-one. His son George, who inherited the homestead, had five sons and three daughters: William, George, Elijah, John, Henry, Sarah, Lois, and Maria. Henry, who remained at home, remodeled the old house and tore down the north part, that in later days had been used as a tenement.

Mrs. C. B. Root, a tailoress, had for a time a shop in the lower rooms. The ballroom was used in the fifties by the Misses Pease and Stone, as a millinery and dressmaking establishment.

The bar of the tavern was in the south front room and the money was kept in a corner cupboard in the next room back. When this cupboard was removed, Mr. Loveland found beneath it handfuls of sixpences and ninepences, that had slipped through the cracks.

The building is now a private residence.

Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses (1848)

February is Black History Month! Starting in 1821, free blacks in Bridgeport settled in a neighborhood that would become known as Little Liberia. Only two houses of this nineteenth-century neighborhood survive today on their original foundations. They are also the oldest remaining houses in Connecticut built by free blacks, before the state completed its gradual abolition of slavery. Built in 1848-1849, they were the homes of sisters Mary (1815-1883) and Eliza (1805-1862) Freeman. Initially the sisters leased the houses out as rental properties while they continued to live and work in New York City. Mary’s house, 358-360 Main Street, built first, was either originally, or later added to to become, a two-family house. Eliza house, 352-354 Main Street, is a three-bay wide half-house with a side entrance that had a storefront extended from the facade from 1903 to 2013. A dormer window was added to the house around 1862. Eliza Freeman returned to Bridgeport around 1855, where she worked as a servant for a sea captain. Mary Freeman, who had worked as a hotel chef in New York, followed her sister to Bridgeport around 1861.

The buildings were occupied into the 1980s. By 2010, the houses were vacant and near collapse. The Mary & Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community was soon formed to raise funds to preserve and restore the houses as a museum. Non-historic elements of the houses were removed in 2012. (more…)

Cottage Green Cottages, Enfield (1848)

On Cottage Green in Enfield is a row of four small Gothic Cottages (46, 50, 54, 58 Cottage Green). Possibly designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, they are the survivors of a group of cottages that were erected for factory workers around the now built-over Cottage Green, which was once a grassy square with a fountain or well in the center. This is a less commonly found arrangement for worker tenements designed to appeal to skilled workers imported from abroad. They were built c. 1848 to house employees of the Enfield Manufacturing Company, a hosiery factory founded in 1845 by H. G. Thompson that failed in 1873, after which its property was purchased by the Hartford Carpet Company. A brochure entitled “Historic Enfield,” alternately claims that the houses were built c. 1830 for Scottish weavers employed at the Bigelow carpet mill. Actually, according to the nomination for the Bigelow-Hartford Carpet Mills Historic District, they were built for English-born workers and the earlier cottages, built by Thompson’s father Orrin Thompson for imported Scottish weavers, do not survive today. This type of housing recalls the “Potsdam” Cottages (featured on this last week!) built in 1859 by Samuel Colt in Hartford for imported German workers at his willow ware factory. Pictured above is the house at 50 Cottage Green in Enfield, which is presently more in need of work than its neighbors.