The Captain James Cornish House is a colonial saltbox structure at 26 East Weatogue Street in Simsbury. The house has an original barn, also constructed in 1720. The property has recently undergone some remodeling and the construction of an extensive rear addition.
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Built around 1800, the Edmund J. Thompson, Jr. House is at 99 South Main Street in East Granby. The house has a finely-detailed Palladian window over the entrance and a later colonnaded Greek Revival portico on the south side, added around 1840. During the Revolutionary War, Edmund (or Edward) J. Thompson, Jr. served in the Connecticut Continental Line from 1779 to 1780. He later left East Granby and settled in Lowville, New York.
The building at 160 South Street in Litchfield was built in 1799 as a house by Elijah Wadsworth. In 1814, it was purchased by Oliver Wolcott, Jr. The house was just across the street from the former home of his father, Oliver Wolcott, Sr., later occupied by his brother. Oliver, Sr. was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Governor of Connecticut from 1796 to 1797. Oliver, Jr., who attended Yale and Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School, served as Secretary of the Treasury under Washington and Adams, from 1795 to 1800, and as Governor of Connecticut, from 1817 to 1827. Wolcott added the two-story south wing to the Wadsworth House a few years after purchasing it. The house was given to the Litchfield Historical Society in 1963. The Society and the town library at that time shared the Noyes Memorial Building on the Green. The Society gave the Wolcott House to the library as its new home, in return for retaining the Noyes Building. The library hired Eliot Noyes and Associates of New Canaan to design a new modern wing at the rear of the Wolcott House, which began construction in 1965. The following year, the library moved into its new home and took the name Oliver Wolcott Library in honor of both Oliver Wolcott, Sr. and Oliver Wolcott, Jr.
In addition to Maxwell Court, architect Charles A. Platt designed another mansion in Rockville for a member of the Maxwell family. At 31 Union Street is the William and Alice K. Maxwell House, known as Kellogg Lawn. The house was built in 1905-1906 for Francis and William Maxwell‘s mother, Harriet K. Maxwell, widow of George Maxwell. It was built in the center of Rockville, on a site where the house of Harriet’s father, George Kellogg, had once stood. Kellogg was one of Rockville’s pioneering industrialists. Today, the mansion is part of Rockwell General Hospital, serving as an entryway to the hospital.
The Francis T. Maxwell House, at 9 North Park Street in Rockville, Vernon, is a Colonial/Classical Revival mansion, built in 1902-1904. Maxwell was a part-owner of the Hockanum Mills Company. His mansion, known as Maxwell Court, was designed by Charles Adams Platt, who was renouned as an architect and as one of America’s most influential landscape designers. Platt’s design for Maxwell Court, his first large scale project, integrates the mansion and the surrounding landscape. The house is located on a hill above the city of Rockville, near the mills but with broad views to the south and west. With its architecture, gardens and landscape, influenced by the Villa Gamberaia near Florence, the Maxwell estate was influential in the American country house movement. Maxwell Court was featured in such contemporary publications as The Country House, a Practical Manual of the Planning and Construction of the American Country Home and its Surroundings (1906), by Charles Edward Hooper and House & Garden, Vol. IV, No. 4 (October 1903)–an article whose images were reproduced in American Country Homes and their Gardens (John Cordis Baker, ed. 1906). The plan of an estate, clearly modeled on Maxwell Court, appeared in Henry Vincent Hubbard and Theodora Kimball’s An Introduction of the Study of Landscape Design (orig. pub. 1917), the principle textbook for landscape architecture courses in the United States in the early twentieth century. Today, Maxwell Court is the Rockville Elks Lodge #1359. (more…)
Pinehurst is an Italianate villa at 154 Washington Street in Norwich. Described as “one of the most picturesque places in Norwich,” it was built around 1860 for Joshua Newton Perkins. According to A Modern History of New London County, Vol. II (1922):
A New York architect, Mr. Gervase Wheeler, and his associate, William T. Hallett, erected the brick house where it now stands. The house was large and commodious, and its position afforded a fine view of the valley and cove. It resembled the Italian villas on the shores of the lakes. A photograph taken in 1866 shows the simplicity and beauty of the plan; the “Newton Perkins Place” was one of the show places of the city.
Mr. Perkins was one of the prominent men of Norwich, active in the advancement of its educational and industrial interests. After a period of some twenty years, business affairs took him to New York, and the house passed into the possession of Robert Bayard of New York. The Bayards did not occupy the house, which was in charge of a caretaker till it was purchased by Mrs. Edward Gibbs, who made many alterations and additions, among them the wide verandas; the “Newton Perkins Place” was merged into “Pinehurst,” its present name.
[…] By an odd coincidence, New York again proved a magnet, and the Gibbs family went to that city to reside. The house again was uninhabited, till 1904, when Frank Allyn Roath, a descendant of Robert Allyn, one of the original proprietors of Norwich, became the owner; Mr. Roath enjoyed his beautiful home but a few short years. He left it to his wife, Gertrude Hakes Roath, who is much interested in horticulture, and a true lover of nature. Under her supervision the grounds show the effects of the renewed care, and many wild flowers are finding homes in congenial soil.
On the verandas of Pinehurst, author Paul Leicester Ford worked on his novel, The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him (1894). Pinehurst was designed to resemble the homes of rural Italy, which have rambling wings added to over generations. Today, the house is the Pinehurst Apartments.
At 15 Liberty Street in Clinton is a Federal/Greek Revival house. The National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Clinton Village Historic District estimates its date as c.1830. The historic marker, currently on the house, bears the date 1799 and describes it as the homestead of John Rossetter 3rd and Elizabeth Buell. Interestingly, just down the street, at 3 Liberty Street, is the 1734 home of John Rossetter, which passed into the Buell family around 1800.
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