It is not known who built the house at 125 East Main Street in Clinton. Dating to around 1787, the house was in the Burnham family from the 1860s. Perhaps it was around that time that it acquired its later Gothic Revival decorative features.
Captain Job Camp built a house on Main Street in Durham in the eighteenth century, which later passed to his son, Manoah Camp and then to his grandson, Elizur Camp, both of whom were shoemakers. In 1861, this original house was given by Elizur Camp to his daughter, Susan E. Camp, who had married Francis Hubbard in 1857. They replaced the old house with a new one in 1862. Francis Hubbard was an owner of the Merriam Manufacturing Company. The house remained in the Hubbard family until it was sold to Frederick Brewster, a wealthy New Haven businessman who owned Brookfield Farm in Durham. Concerned about the fact that Durham did not have a resident physician, he rented the house to a series of doctors from 1928 to 1941.
In the early hours of September 6, 1781, Rufus Avery, on watch duty at Fort Griswold, was the first soldier to observe an approaching British fleet. This force, led by Brigadier General Benedict Arnold and Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre, eventually stormed the Fort in what became known as the Battle of Groton Heights. Capt. Avery later lived in a house at 142 Thames Street in Groton, built for him in 1787 by Henry Mason, another former defender of Fort Griswold. Around 1800, Rufus Avery had a second house constructed next door for his two sons. That home is now known as the Avery-Copp House.
One of a number of Terry family houses in Simsbury is the Timothy Terry House at 90 Terry’s Plain Road. The house was built c. 1776-1778 by builder Job Case. The Greek Revival doorway, cornice and attic windows were added around 1840. The house has an ell that is said to have been used as a blacksmith shop in the nineteenth century.
The Avery-Copp House, at 154 Thames Street in Groton, was built around 1800 by Rufus Avery for his two sons and their families. It was later owned by a cousin, Latham Avery, and then was inherited by his daughter, Mary Jane Avery Ramsdell. The house was Victorianized in the Italianate style around 1870. It passed to Ramsdell’s niece, Betsey Avery Copp and her husband, Belton Copp, in 1895. Their son, Joe Copp, kept the house virtually unchanged after his parents died, preserving it as it had been before 1930. After his death in 1991, at the age of 101, his nieces and nephews sought to make the house a museum. After a period of ownership by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, during which restoration work began on the house, it became an independant museum and opened to the public for tours in 2006.
The Henry Magill House, at 390 Palisado Avenue in Windsor, is a brick French Second Empire style residence, built for Henry Magill, a farmer, in 1861.
The Crosley F. Fitton House, built around 1865, is at the corner of Elm and Prospect Streets in Rockville, Vernon. Crosley Fitton, born in England, was brought to the United States at the age of three. As described in Illustrated Popular Biography of Connecticut (1891), he
became a woolen manufacturer, as was his father before him. Twenty-six years ago he came to Rockville, and for twenty-four years he has been the agent of the Rock Manufacturing Company, being the oldest in continuous service of all who have held official connection with the manufacturing establishments of Rockville. As a woolen manufacturer he ranks among the most able in New England, and during his connection with the Rock Company it has enjoyed continued success and prosperity under his management. The mills have been enlarged, the most improved machinery obtained, the force increased, and woolen goods manufactured equal to any produced in the country. Mr. Fitton [d. 1891] was always a hard worker, and often the first man at the mill in the morning and the last to leave at night.
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