Austin F. Williams Carriage House (1841)

Austin F. Williams Carriage House

Austin F. Williams (1805-1885), a leading abolitionist in Farmington, was a member of the defense committee that worked to secure the freedom for the Amistad captives in 1841. Before returning home to Africa, the Mendi captives stayed in Farmington (March through November, 1841) while funds were raised for their return journey. Williams constructed a building on his property where the male members of the group lived. The building was later used by Williams as a carriage house. The picture below shows the west side of the carriage house-the section visible from Main Street-which was not added until after the Mendi departed from Farmington.

Catherine R. Root House (1870)

105 High Street, Bristol

The Italianate house at 105 High Street in Bristol was the home of Catharine R. Root. A school teacher in her youth, Catherine Roberts married Joel Henry Root in 1852. According to Bristol, Connecticut: “In the Olden Time New Cambridge” (1907), in 1859 Mr. and Mrs. Root moved into their house on High Street “where they have lived ever since and which was one of the very first houses to be built on that street.” This is probably the house 105 High Street, which is listed in the Federal Hill Historic District nomination as the “Catharine R. Root House” built c. 1870. Joel H. Root (died 1885) was a successful industrialist, who built a factory on Root’s Island that produced piano hardware and brass butt hinges. His son, Charles J. Root (1858-1907), continued the business and engaged in others, including real estate. On August 20, 1907, a car accident took the lives of Charles J. Root and his mother Catharine R. Root. As described in the Bristol Press (and reprinted in the 1907 history quoted above):

No happier party, comprising Charles Root, his mother, Catherine R. Root [who was eighty years old at the time], Miss Mary P. Root [his sister], Miss Candace Roberts [his aunt] and Miss Catherine Root, a fourteen years old niece [daughter of Theodore Root], left Bristol last Sunday, Aug. 18, 1907, and not many people enjoyed automobile riding so much as these people.
[. . .]

The party left here soon after nine o’clock Sunday morning. Mr. Root and Miss Roberts occupied the front seat of the big Stanley steam touring car. The other three were on the rear seat. The route led through Torrington and Norfolk which was reached about noon. From there the route was to Ashley Falls in Massachusetts. Near the Ashley Falls station the fine, hard highway runs parallel with the railroad tracks for perhaps a mile and is only a few feet distant. While the Root automobile was speeding along this road an overdue express train came in sight at terrific speed. The highway crosses the track at an abrupt angle. Express train and auto reached the fatal crossing almost at the same moment. Just how it happened can never be known but the automobile struck the train, probably the baggage car, a glancing blow and was instantaneously and completely wrecked. The occupants were hurled out with awful force, apparently striking their heads against the train, and were then carried some distance. All were frightfully mangled. Mr. Root and Miss Roberts were killed instantly. Mrs. Root had her skull fractured and died while being taken to Great Barrington. Miss Root had her skull fractured and her right shoulder crushed. She was removed to the House of Mercy in Pittsfield.

The only one to escape was Miss Catherine Root, and the manner in which she came through the crash is little short of miraculous. She was buried beneath the wreckage of the machine which for some unaccountable reason did not take fire. She was taken to the home of a friend in Great Barrington. She was dazed but appeared not to be seriously hurt, and was brought to the home of her parents, here, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Root, on Monday.

Unfortunately, the young Miss Catherine Root died less than a year-and-a-half later, at Miss C. E. Mason’s School, The Castle, in Tarrytown, New York. As related in the Utica Herald-Dispatch on January 6, 1909:

While apparently only slightly injured at the time of the incident, Miss Root had suffered with convulsions since that time. Recently her health had been improving and she returned Monday from spending the holidays at her home and seemed in better health than ever.

Yesterday Miss Root had an attack and fell to the floor, striking her head on the edge of a box in her room. A trained nurse who stays at the school hurried to her assistance and Dr. Coulant, who lives Just outside the school grounds, was called in, but the young lady died of a hemorrhage of the brain before he arrived.

Richard Brown House (1850)

224 Cornwall Ave., Cheshire

In the nineteenth century, Cheshire became famous for its barite mines. Barite was discovered in Cheshire around 1840 and mining activity continued until 1878. Many miners from Cornwall in England settled in Cheshire to work in the mines. One such miner was Richard Brown, who rented the house at 224 Cornwall Avenue. It was built in the 1850s as an investment property by Edward A. Cornwall, a prominent citizen of Cheshire. Cornwall sold many other parcels of land from the Cornwall Farm, which went back in his family to the 1790s. Richard Brown later purchased the house with a mortgage held by Cornwall. The house was a twin of the residence next door at 214 Cornwall Avenue, which was also a rental property erected by Cornwall. The house at 224 Cornwall has a later Victorian front porch. The large dormer on the west side of the house was added in the late 1970s. (pdf source)

Eolia (1906)

Eolia

Harkness Memorial State Park, located on Long Island Sound in Waterford, was once the estate of Edward Harkness (1874-1940) and his wife Mary Harkness. Harkness, one of the richest men in America, inherited great wealth from his father, Stephen V. Harkness, who had been a silent partner of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Corporation. Used by Harkness as a summer estate, it was called Eolia, named for the island home of Aeolus, Greek God of the winds. The mansion, designed by Lord & Hewlett of New York, was built in 1906 for Jessie and William Taylor, Mary Harkness’s sister and brother-in-law, who sold it the following year. Edward and Mary Harkness then hired their favorite architect James Gamble Rogers to do interior renovations and add a pergola to the property. The estate’s gardens were designed by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. Mary Harkness left the estate to the State of Connecticut in 1950. The mansion and grounds were restored in the 1990s by lead architect Roger Clarke, with contributions by architect Peter Clarke and consultant on historic gardens Rob Camp Fuoco. Today Eolia is a popular location for weddings (pdf about weddings). (more…)

Walter Gwatkin House (1905)

Walter Gwatkin House

There is some uncertainty about the date and exact address of the Walter Gwatkin House on Worthington Ridge in Berlin. The nomination form for the Worthington Ridge Historic District lists it as no. 1008 and gives the date as c. 1905. A walking tour booklet (doc) for the District gives the address as 1006 and the date as c. 1861, noting that the porch dates to the early 1900s. Walter Gwatkin (1856-1921) was a prosperous butcher, farmer and landowner. Catharine M. North, in her History of Berlin (1915), makes note of the house that existed before the current one:

In 1817 Horace Steele, Elishama Brandegee’s next door neighbor on the south, was engaged in the business of bookbinding. Afterwards he made bandboxes, which he carried to Hartford to sell to the milliners.

Mr. Steele’s children were Eliza (mother of the Rev. Andrew T. Pratt, missionary in Turkey), Caroline (Mrs. Joseph Booth), Mary, Jane, Lucy Ann (Mrs. Lorenzo Lamb), and William.

Their home, a large colonial house set well back from the street, was, in its day, socially a center of attraction, filled as it was with bright, merry young people. The old house was torn down by William Steele and the house which he built on its site is now owned by Walter Gwatkin.

Nathaniel Eliot House (1755)

Nathaniel Eliot House

The Nathaniel Eliot House, built in 1755, is located at 103 Whitfield Street in Guilford. Nathaniel Eliot was a farmer. He married Beulah, daughter of Joseph Parmelee, in 1754. Their daughter, Mary, married Israel Halleck, a tailor from Duchess County, New York. Their son was Fitz-Greene Halleck, the prominent nineteenth-century poet. As related in an obituary of the poet that appeared in Putnam’s Magazine (Vol. I, No. 2, February, 1868):

His father, Israel Halleck, who followed the calling of a tailor, was an emigrant from Dutchess County, New York. He died at Guilford in 1830, at the age of eighty-four; and is remembered in the village as a man fond of books, a great reader, of extraordinary memory, full of wit and anecdote, and of most courteous manners. The poet’s mother, Mary, daughter of Nathaniel Eliot, of Guilford, a lady of irreproachable worth, was a descendant of the Rev. John Eliot, the venerable “Apostle of the Indians.” She was married in her thirtieth year, and died in 1819, at the age of fifty-seven.