The Stiles Curtis House is located at 3 Park Street across from the Green in Norwalk. It was built in 1832 and updated in 1869 (the Nomination for the Norwalk Green Historic District lists a date of 1853). A merchant, Stiles Curtis (1805-1882) was a Warden of the Borough of Norwalk (1845-1853) and President of the Bank of Norwalk (1875-1892).
At 2 Riverside Place at Gales Ferry on the Thames River in Ledyard is a gambrel-roofed house built c. 1796 that is now connected to a much larger addition. The building is owned and operated by the Yale heavyweight crew team and is used to prepare for the nation’s oldest intercollegiate sporting event, the Harvard-Yale Regatta, known as The Race. Yale’s complex at Gales Ferry includes a boathouse. The 1796 house was built by Thomas Geer, who sold it to Capt. Alexander Allyn in 1799. It passed to his daughter Sarah, who married Norman B. Brown, Gales Ferry postmaster. It remained in the family until 1904. It was then acquired by George St. John Sheffield, a great benefactor of Yale rowing (and the son of Joseph Earl Sheffield), and the University purchased the property in 1907.
The summer cottage at 9 Pettipaug Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook has been described as a gem that is “particularly illustrative of shingle style architecture” (by Christopher Little in “A Summer Place,” Places, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1984). It was built in 1905 by Lucius B. Barbour (1878-1934) of Hartford (whose 1865 house on Washington Street still survives). Their daughter Alice was a childhood friend of Katharine Hepburn. In 1953, after the death of Barbour’s widow Charlotte Cordelia Hilliard Barbour, the cottage was sold to Richard F. Cooper and in 1961 it was sold again to Oliver Jensen (1914-2005), a co-founder of American Heritage Magazine. He was also one of the founders and the chief visionary for the 1971 revival of the Connecticut Valley Railroad (today part of the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat attraction). You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 110-114.
The house at 51 Main Street in Essex was built in 1803 by Thomas Millard, a shipcarver and housewright, and was the home of Felix Starkey from 1805 to 1856. Felix Starkey (1777-1856) was a merchant and the brother of Timothy Starkey. He married Esther Hayden. (The sign on the house reads “Timothy Starkey 1720”).
The John Rose House at 48 Bradley Street. in Branford was built c. 1747. The house was later altered in the Federal period. By 1897 the house was owned by John Buckley, who worked at Malleable Iron Fittings (MIF), which by 1915 was the largest employer in Branford.
James A. Farell (1863-1941), who was president of U.S. Steel from 1911-1932, built a Tudor Revival mansion in Norwalk in 1911. Designed by Edward Moeller, the original half-timbered building building burned down in 1913 and a new mansion, designed by Tracy Walker and Leroy Ward, was constructed to replace it. A granite structure, the mansion was modeled on Elizabethan country homes, the architects having been sent to England at Farell’s expense to do research for the building. Called Rock Ledge, it was used as a summer home by Farell. The mansion’s later owners included the Sperry Rand Corporation, which developed the UNIVAC business computer on the property, and Hewitt Associates. Located at 40 Highland Avenue in Rowayton, The mansion is now owned by Graham Capital Management LP and is known as the Rock Ledge Financial Center.
The house at 15 High Street in Suffield on the Green is an example of an eighteenth-century Cape Cod with very modern and large dormer windows. Known as the James Hall House, it was built in 1786.
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