Rose Hill (1852)

Rose Hill is a Gothic Revival house at 63 Prospect Street in Waterbury and was home to three of the city’s most prominent manufacturing families. Designed by Henry Austin of New Haven, it was built in 1852 in the “cottage style” popularized by A.J. Downing in such books as The Architecture of Country Houses. It was constructed near the base of a hill that would soon be developed as a neighborhood filled with many other Victorian-era houses. Rose Hill was built for Wlliam H. Scovill, who lived in the house for only six months before his death. The house was then vacant for a decade, until in 1863 it became home to the successful businessman Joseph Chauncey Welton and his wife, Jane Porter Welton. The couple loved to entertain and the house became a center of Waterbury society. Their daughter, Caroline Josephine Welton, was known for her fondness for her black stallion Knight, although the horse had kicked her father in the head and killed him. She never married and after her death in a blizzard on Longs Peak in Colorado in 1884 she left money for a bronze statue of Knight to be placed on a memorial fountain on Waterbury Green. Her relatives contested her will, which also gave $100,000 to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, on the grounds that she was insane, but they failed to stop the bequest. The statue was carved by Karl Gerhardt, whose trip to study in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1881 was financed by Mark Twain. The Rose Hill estate was next purchased by Augustus Sabin Chase. He added porches to the first and second floors. Today the mansion is home to Stepping Stone, the local program of the North American Family Institute (NAFI). It is currently a 22 bed secured residential facility with a treatment program serving delinquent girls committed to the Department of Children and Families. Plans to expand the facility a decade ago met with local resistance.

William Albertson House (1845)

In 1845-1846, a Greek Revival flushboard-sided house was built at the corner of Hempstead and Granite Streets in New London for William Albertson, who owned a successful cotton gin manufactory. The house was located on the spot where the New London plantation’s first house of worship, a large barn, had stood in the seventeenth century. In the later nineteenth century, a cast iron front porch and Italianate bay windows and cupola were added to the Albertson House. In 1973, the house was moved to the corner of Channing and Vauxhall Street to make way for the construction of Saint Sophia Church.

Bishop-Woodward House (1790)

The Bishop-Woodward House, at 205 Center Street in Wolcott was built in 1790 for Bnai Bishop, who ran an adjacent store. Bishop also accommodated travelers in his house and there was a stable to the rear. It was later the home of Reverend Israel B. Woodward (1767-1810), the second minister of Wolcott‘s Congregational Church, who also ran a school in the house for young men training for the ministry. According to John Warner Barber in his Connecticut Historical Collections, Rev. Woodward,

though somewhat eccentric in some parts of his conduct, was a person of superior intelligence and esteemed by his parishioners. A thanksgiving sermon of his is recollected, in which he compared the state of Connecticut to the land of Canaan. In one respect, he mentioned, there was a striking similarity; the land of Canaan was rocky, this was very much the case with Connecticut, at least with that part of it in which Wolcott was situated.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the house was home to Adelbert Woods, Wolcott’s last postmaster.

William Bouton House (1838)

Between 1838 and 1843, David Smith, a housewright from Greenfield Hill, built eight (mostly multi-family) houses along a street he had just opened up: Smith’s Lane (now Calderwood Court) in Black Rock, Bridgeport. This planned development also included a carriage factory and a school. The houses were transitional between the Federal and Greek Revival styles. The first of the houses to be built, in 1838, was the the William Bouton House at 4 (aka 25) Calderwood Court. The front porch is a twentieth-century addition.

Treadwell (or Pettibone) House (1810)

The Treadwell House (also known as the Pettibone House) faces the triangular Burlington Green, between Spielman Highway and the George Washington Turnpike. The position taken in the house’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 is that it was built between 1805 and 1816 by John P. Treadwell, who was the 21st governor of Connecticut from 1809 to 1811. The Burlington Historical Society has argued that it was built by Abraham Pettibone, not Treadwell, and should be known as the Pettibone House. The main facade of the house faces south, while the elaborate doorway on the west side is actually not an entrance at all, but is a false door. It is either an original feature of the house or was built quite early in the house’s existence. In its long history, the house has been owned by two ministers (Erastus Clapp and Erastus Scranton) and two town clerks (John A. Reeve and then his son, Arthur J. Reeve). In 1970, the house was bought by the town for use as town offices. Since 1980, it has been used as a branch banking office.

Orrin Todd House (1815)

The house at 3369 Whitney Avenue in Hamden was built around 1815 by Orrin Todd, the son of local builder Simeon Todd. The house was originally located on the opposite side of the road, until the Farmington Canal was laid out to pass through Todd’s land. He sold his property to the Farmington Canal Company and moved to Ohio. The house was then moved to its current site by Butler Sackett, a businessman who also purchased and moved other houses along the canal route. In the later nineteenth century, a general store was attached to the house.