Abijah Catlin II House (1760)

Abijah Catlin II (1747-1813) built the house at 1 Harmony Hill Road in Harwinton c. 1760-1765. Land in the area had been granted to his father, Abijah Catlin I (1715-1778) in 1739, soon after the Town of Harwinton was formed in 1737. In addition to the house, which he operated as an inn, Catlin also built a store just to the west on the same property. Guests at the inn included General George Washington, General Henry Knox, and the Marquis de Lafayette, who stopped there on their way back to West Pont after meeting with General Rochambeau in Hartford in September, 1780. The house is at the intersection of Burlington and Harmony Hill Roads, a crossroads that became known as Catlin’s Corners.

Justin Smith House (1710)

At 54 Lyme Street in Old Lyme is a three-quarter cape with a gambrel roof, called the Justin Smith House, which was built in 1710. In recent years, the house was saved from demolition and completely restored by its current owners, Brad and Gerri Sweet, who discovered that some of the wood rafters had come from an even earlier building. The house had many owners over the years. Samuel Mather sold it to Nathan Tinker in 1784, who himself sold it in 1790. It was then own successively by three brothers, Joseph, Charles and Simon Smith. After World War One, the house was the residence of Matilda Brown, an artist who was part of the Old Lyme art colony.

Knollwood (1923)

An excellent example of the Colonial Revival style of architecture is a house called Knowllwood, located at 80 Broadview Street and Woodland Street in Bristol. It was designed by Goodell & Root (another example of their work in Bristol is the Newell Jennings House at 4 Oakland Street) for Howard Seymour Peck (1874-1928) and his wife, Edna R. Peck (1877-1950), who continued to live in the house after her husband’s death. In 1912, the Pecks had an address of 14 Prospect Place in Bristol. Their son, Seymour Roe Peck, was a partner in the company, Peck & Barnard, that would build Knollwood in 1923. Howard S. Peck was the son of Miles Lewis Peck, president of the Bristol Savings Bank, and grandson of the bank’s founder, Josiah T. Peck. As related in the Decennial Record of the Class of 1896, Yale College (1907):

Peck has been taken into partnership with his father, since Sexennial, and their insurance agency is now run under the firm name of M. L. Peck & Son. He has been and still is a clerk in the Bristol Savings Bank, besides. “Took a trip to New York last fall,” he writes. “Was there three days. Stayed with one Dwight Rockwell. Did not see much of him. He was too busy making money. Took in a championship ball game between New York and the Athletics, also the Vanderbilt cup race. Dropped in the Yale Club and found Publius. He was sober. So was I.”

This concise staccato pervades Howard’s answers throughout. “Have you held political office?” “Close second.” “Have you done any teaching?” “One dog. Failure.” . . . “Please give your daughter’s date of birth.” “June 30, 1904. She is a peach.”

It is not clear whether Peck absents himself from class functions from a sense of caution or a wish to hoard. Or may it be, perhaps, a compassionate determination on his part no longer to invite a possibly fatal competition with his prowess?

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James Mulligan House (1893)


Today, Olmsted Street, near the central business district of East Hartford, is in a very built-up area, but over a century ago tobacco was still grown in the immediate vicinity. According to An Architectural History of East Hartford, Connecticut (1989), edited by Doris Darling Sherrow, page 195, when James Mulligan (1848-1920), a railroad engineer from Waterbury, purchased the land where the house at 107 Olmsted Street stands today in 1893 from Henry G. Beaumont, the latter (who is listed in the 1885 Hartford County Directory as a farmer) reserved the right to continue growing his tobacco crop on the property until September 15 of that year or until it was harvested, whichever came first. The house that Mulligan, an immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, erected and occupied until his death features a spindle rail porch with a starburst design at the front entryway.

Horace Hickok House (1845)

The house at 66 Greenwood Avenue in Bethel is transitional between the architectural styles of the Greek Revival (note the columns on the front porch) and the Italianate (note the rooftop cupola with curved windows). The house was erected c. 1845 (before 1851) by Horace Hickok, a hat manufacturer and descendant of Capt. Ebenezer Hickok, who had given land for the Bethel Congregational Church‘s meetinghouse and burial ground in the eighteenth century.

John Brainerd House (1776)

On December 5, 1776, Capt. John Brainerd (1754-1820) married Hannah Hubbard and soon after erected a house at what is now the corner of Saybrook Road and High Street in Higganum. John’s father, Jabez Brainerd (c. 1713-1778), once lived in a house that stood at the rear of the property. As related in The Genealogy of the Brainerd-Brainard Family in America, 1649-1908, Vol. II (1908), by Lucy Abigail Brainard,

[John Brainerd] was a militia man in the Revolutionary War, and possibly was at White Plains, N.Y. He joined the Regiment Apr. 7, and was disc. May 19, 1777. He was Sergeant in Lieut. Smith’s Company. He was spoken of as Colonel. He was justice of the peace from 1795 to 1804, inclusive. He lived opposite the Higganum Church, which was then a part of Haddam. He was a farmer.

John and Hannah (Hubbard) Brainerd had eleven children. She died in 1795. John married his second wife, Jane Spencer, in 1800. A later resident of the house, from 1839 to 1883, was Selden Usher (1806-1883), a manufacturer who operated an oakum factory on the Higganum River. The house remained in the Usher family until 1948. The property has a historic barn and a privy.

Andrew L. Benedict House (1845)

Now used as an attorney’s office, the house at 152 Greenwood Avenue in Bethel was built c. 1845. From at least 1851 until 1867, it was the home of Andrew L. Benedict (born 1822), a New York merchant who also lived in Bethel, where he was a deacon of the Congregational Church and served as Justice of the Peace, Postmaster and on the Board of Education. He married Ruth Newell Allen in 1847. Their daughter, Ursula E. Benedict, was a member of the D.A.R. The house remained in the Benedict family until 1912, afterwards serving as the Bethel Public Library until 1924. It was later owned by William Hanna and then his wife, Elaine Hanna. Their son, Richard Hanna, was a Danbury attorney.