The house at 1939 Stanley Street (at the corner of Barbour Street) in New Britain was built around 1750. The original owner of the house was George Francis. A later owner (in the mid-twentieth century) was a Mrs. Barbour, so a sign on the house calls it the “Francis Barbour House.” The house has additions dating to 1876. The original entrance to the house faces Barbour Street, but the main entrance is now on the north side.
The house at 211 Washington Street in Forestville in Bristol was built in 1845. It later became the home of Mark F. Spelman, a farmer who purchased the farm on Washington Street, at the head of what is now Central Street, in 1873. The family had earlier lived in Granville, Massachusetts. Spellman’s daughter, Lila Adah Spelman (1866-1945), was born in Granville. She completed her elementary school education in Forestville, but then, because there was no high school in Bristol, she commuted daily by train from Forestville to the Hartford Public High School. She graduated in 1885, taught school in Southington and married William H. Rowe in 1889.
It is not known who built the house at 539 Hopewell Road in Glastonbury. While in some ways resembling a traditional center-chimney house, it has a less traditional arrangement of windows suggesting a later date. The front roof dormer is a twentieth-century addition. The property was owned in the 1840s and 1850s by Henry Dayton, a farmer who may have been attempting to capitalize on nearby industrial development. The house was later, in fact, owned by a general store that was linked to the textile mills. (more…)
The Allyn Smith House, at 168 Broad Street in Wethersfield, was built in 1790 on what had been the homesite of Abraham Finch in 1634. Abraham Finch (d. 1638) was one of the ten adventurers who first settled Wethersfield.
The house at 895 Saybrook Road in Haddam was built by the brothers Nehemiah and John Brainerd to serve as a social hall called Brainerd Hall. The brothers owned a granite quarry that they opened in 1792. Brainerd Hall was constructed soon after the brothers’ uncle Hezekiah Brainerd and his wife Elizabeth acquired the land from Elizabeth’s father, John Wells, in 1794. After John Brainerd’s death in 1841, the hall housed students at the nearby Brainerd Academy, a school established by the Brainerd brothers.. After 1857, Erastus G. Dickinson operated the Golden Bull Tavern in the building. It remained in the Dickinson family until 1964.
The section of Middlefield called Baileyville was named for the family which first settled the area in the late eighteenth century. A later member of that family was Alfred M. Bailey (1822-1885), who contributed to Middlefield’s industrial development in the nineteenth century. He established a button factory along Ellen Doyle Brook with Andrew Coe in the 1840s. He also constructed the Lake Beseck Dam, one of the earliest arch-gravity type dams ever built. Completed in 1848, the dam provided a regular water supply for the mills downstream all year long. Raised in 1852 and in 1870, each time by five feet, the dam was rebuilt in 1938. Bailey’s house, at 148 Baileyville Road, was built around 1853. It has a later Queen Anne/Italianate addition and side porch.
The Josephine Bingham House, at 22 North Road in Windham Center, is an Italianate T-shaped residence with a gable roof. Built in 1860, it was the residence of Miss Josephine Waldo Bingham (born 1846), who lived with her father, Waldo Bingham, and her step-mother, Elizabeth H. Bingham and continued to reside in the house after their deaths. She furnished wallpaper to St. Paul’s Church in 1888 and was an alternate Lady Manager of Connecticut for the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893.
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