The brick house at 581 Main Street in Somers was built sometime before 1840. It was first home to Oren Clark and his sons, Ebenezer and Jonathan. The Clarks ran a store next to the house. After 1844, it was the home of Nehemiah Beach Beardsley, who was born January 20, 1780 in Stratford and died February 28 1868 in Somers. In 1805 he married Achsah Morgan (1774-1868), widow of Samuel Dwight Chapin.
William Bulkley, a storekeeper, built the house at 824 Harbor Road in Southport in Fairfield before 1766. Having been spared during the burning of Fairfield by the British in 1779 because Bulkley’s wife had provided hospitality to British troops, it is today the oldest house still standing on Southport Harbor. A colonial three-quarter house, it was remodeled in the Federal period with a fan window in the attic gable and a cornice with triglyph ornamentation. The changes may have been made by David Banks after he purchased the house in 1816. Wakeman B. Meeker bought the house in 1832. Together with his partner, Simon Sherwood, Meeker organized the merchant shipping firm of Meeker & Sherwood, which constructed a wharf and three warehouses across from the house. In the 1850s Meeker built a new house just north of the Bulkley House.
The saltbox house at 450 Harbor Road in Southport in Fairfield was originally built in 1715 by Samuel Bradley in East Haven. Occupied by his descendants until 1945, in 1945-1948 it was moved and reconstructed at its current address.
At 3171 Bronson Road in the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield is a gambrel-roofed house built in 1757 by Rev. Seth Pomeroy. The son of Seth Pomeroy, a gunsmith and soldier from Northampton, Mass., who would serve in the Revolutionary War, Rev. Pomeroy, a graduate of Yale, served as the minister of the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church from 1757 until his death at the age of 37 in 1770. After Rev. Pomeroy died, the house was owned by Captain David Hubbell who used it as a store until it was purchased by Reverend William Belden, who served as pastor of the Greenfield Hill Church from 1812 to 1821. At one point the house served as an insurance office.
The building at 138 Bank Street in New London was erected in 1840 as residence and has since been significantly remodeled for retail businesses. The Greek Revival-style house was built by Franklin Smith, a whaling captain. As related by Frances Manwaring Caulkins in the History of New London (1860), Capt. Franklin Smith
made the most successful series of voyages, to be found in the whaling annals of the port, and probably of the world! In seven voyages to the South Atlantic, in the employ of N. and W. W. Billings, and accomplished in seven successive years, from 1831 to 1837, inclusive—one in the Flora, one in the Julius Cesar, and five in the Tuscarora-—-he brought home 16,154 barrels of whale, 1,147 of sperm. This may be regarded as a brilliant exhibition of combined good fortune and skill. Two subsequent voyages made by him in the Chelsea, were also crowned with signal success. These nine voyages were accomplished between June, 1830, and August, 1841.
Capt. Smith was accompanied by his wife on four four of his voyages and his only daughter was named Chelsea after the ship on which she was born while at sea. In 1842 Smith became a partner in the whaling firm of Perkins & Smith.
Thomas Fitch (1696-1774), a lawyer, was Governor of the Colony of Connecticut from 1754 to 1766. His house, built around 1740, once stood on Earls Hill on the east side of East Avenue in Norwalk. The house was partially burned in the British raid on Norwalk on July 11-12, 1779. Fitch descendants occupied the reconstructed house until 1945. The section of the house that had survived the British raid (part of the house’s kitchen wing) was moved to Mill Hill in 1956 when the rest of the building was demolished to make way for the construction of the Connecticut Turnpike (now I-95). In 1971 the building was restored as a museum to resemble a law office such as one that Governor Fitch might have used in the eighteenth century. The foundations and chimney of the Law Office were constructed using stones from the cellar walls of the original Fitch House. The Law Office is one of three buildings at Mill Hill Historic Park maintained by the Norwalk Historical Society and the Norwalk-Village Green Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The Isaac C. Lewis Cottage (although it’s much bigger than what people think of as a cottage!) is located at 255 Thimble Island Road in the Stony Creek section of Branford. It is an impressive eclectic Victorian house with an outstanding variety of detail that features elements of the Gothic Revival, Second Empire, Eastlake, and Stick styles. It was built as a seaside cottage for Isaac Chauncey Lewis (1812-1893), president of the Meriden Britannia Company and one of Connecticut’s leading industrialists. The cottage was designed by the architect Henry Martin Jones (1828-1908), who had also designed Lewis’s much larger house in Meriden. The cottage was shifted about a hundred feet east, from one side of its lot to the other, in 1917. (more…)
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