Abiel Canfield (1753-1812) served in the Revolutionary War. He married Mary Barlow of Statford in (1754-1840) in 1779. In the back yard of his 1784 house at 83 West Street in Seymour, Canfield had a shop where he manufactured brass and pewter buttons, buckles, and sleigh bells.
The summer “cottage” at 28 Fenwick Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook was built in 1887 for Mary Brace Collins, who lived at a now demolished house at 1010 Asylum Avenue in Hartford. Her father was Thomas K. Brace, first president of the Aetna Fire Insurance Company, and her husband was Atwood Collins, who became president of the Security Trust Company in 1896. The company later merged with the the Hartford-Aetna National Bank in 1927 to form the Hartford National Bank and Trust Company. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 84-87.
In 1759 Jonathan Hale, Jr. (1696-1772) of Glastonbury deeded one half of a brick house to his son, Theodore Hale (1735-1807), who acquired the other half in 1762. Built around 1745, the gambrel-roofed Hale House (1715 Main Street in Glastonbury) remained in the Hale family until 1810. It was owned for a time by Rev. Prince Hawes, pastor of the First Church of Christ. William H. Turner (1788-1872) bought the house in 1828 and it remained in his family until 1912. Turner, who served in the War of 1812, owned a coasting vessel, which operated from the Connecticut river to various Atlantic ports. He was also involved in shipbuilding and politics, serving in the state legislature and as town selectman.
The house at 500 South Brooksvale Road in Cheshire combines elements of the Colonial Revival and Craftsman styles. Known as Brookside, it was built in 1898 as a summer cottage for Peter Palmer of Brooklyn.
The house at 108 Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire was built in the 1880s by James Gardner Clark. It was sold to James M. Speake in 1905 and then to Susan Hotchkiss in 1909. The house was used to board students of Cheshire Academy in the 1940s and 1950s.
The two identical houses at 22-24 and 26-28 Addison Road in Glastonbury were built c. 1920 as mill worker tenements by the Glastenbury Knitting Company. The company, which manufactured underwear, used an older spelling of the town’s name. These tenement houses were built in the then-popular Dutch Colonial style, featuring gambrel roofs. The mill eventually sold off the houses in the 1930s.
The rear ell of the house at 107 Main Street in Farmington dates to around 1685. It was built by John Wadsworth, Jr. (1662-1718), nephew of the Joseph Wadsworth (1647-1729) who had hidden the Royal Charter in the Charter Oak. The house remained in the Wadsworth family, eventually passing to John, Jr.’s youngest son, Rev. Daniel Wadsworth (1704-1747), pastor of the First Church of Christ in Hartford (Center Church). In 1771, Asahel Wadsworth (1743-1817) purchased the property from his cousins, the daughters of Daniel Wadsworth. He hired the architect/builder Judah Woodruff to construct the front portion of the house, which was completed between 1776 and 1781. The columned front porch was added much later. During the Revolutionary War, Asahel Wadsworth was appointed to correspond with other towns about “Colonial matters” and transact matters related to the Continental Congress. The Wadsworth farm ceased operation until the 1970s but the house has remained in the Wadsworth family for nine generations.
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