William and George Gould were prolific builders in Bridgeport who constructed the renouned George Hotel and St. Mary’s By The Sea Church (neither of which remains standing today). The brothers lived in a double house they built at 119–121 Seabright Avenue in Black Rock in 1875. George sold his north half to Hugo Keller in 1901 and William sold his south half to Joseph Smith about 1906.
The George Richardson House is a Queen Anne-style residence built in 1887 at 311 Barnum Avenue in East Bridgeport. The house’s architect was Henry A. Lambert. There appear to be two prominent George Richardsons associated with Bridgeport at this time. The house was built for George Richardson, originally a railroad engineer in Troy, NY. He became superintendent of the Consolidated Safety Valve Company, which he founded with his partner, Richard H. Ashcroft, in Boston in 1879. The company moved to Bridgeport six years later. Both men had earlier patented new safety valve designs in the 1860s. The house was later owned by George E. Nothnagle of the George E. Nothnagle & Son furniture store in Bridgeport. (more…)
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.
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