The Federal-style house at 194 North Main Street in Southbury once served as the Congregational Church‘s parsonage. It is believed to have been built by Harry Brown, a drover, in 1805. The house is nearly identical to the Timothy Hinman House, across the street at 185 North Main Street.
About 1659, Deacon George Clark began construction of the first house in Milford to be built outside the early settlement’s protective stockade. The building, known as the Stockade House, was expanded over time into a saltbox structure. It is also called the “Nathan Clark Stockade House,” named for a grandson of George Clark. This original house was dismantled in 1780 by Michael Peck, a builder, and David Camp, his assistant. They constructed a new house, using building materials salvaged from the one they took down. In the twentieth century, the house served as a rooming house, tea room and Milford’s first public hospital. In 1974, the Clark-Stockade House was moved from Bridgeport Avenue to become part of Wharf Lane, the Milford Historical Society’s complex of colonial houses.
The house at 3217 Whitney Avenue in Hamden was built around 1770 by Jonathan Dickerman (1719-1795), father of the Jonathan Dickerman who built the 1792 farmhouse now at 105 Mt. Carmel Avenue. The elder Jonathan Dickerman settled in what is now Hamden in 1743. During the Revolution, he served on New Haven’s Committee of Inspection. The house was next owned by his son, Amos Dickerman and then by Amos’ son Ezra (1800-1860). Three years after Ezra’s death, the house was sold by his heirs. Today, the house has modern siding and has recently lost its original central chimney.
Capt. Elisha White was born in Windsor in 1706. As recorded in the Memorials of Elder John White (1760), by Allyn S. Kellogg, “He settled early in Bolton, but removed to East Guilford, (now Madison,) Conn., about 1744, and thence to the adjoining town of Killingworth, about 1749. He lived in that part of Killingworth which is now Clinton, and was for a while engaged in mercantile business. He died there, probably about the year 1778.” In 1750 he purchased the land in Clinton on which he soon built a house, constructed of brick thought to have been brought from England by ship as ballast. Known as “Old Brick,” the house is now a museum, owned by the Clinton Historical Society.
In 1794, Giles Pettibone, Jr., son of Col. Giles Pettibone and grandson of Jonathan Pettibone of Simsbury, built a tavern on the Green in Norfolk. After Giles Pettibone died in 1811, according to The Norfolk Village Green (1917), by Frederic S. Dennis,
His son Jonathan Humphrey Pettibone, who died in 1832, succeeded his father as Tavern keeper. This Tavern a little later was kept by John A. Shepard […] This Tavern was known as Shepard’s Tavern and during the stage coach era was a place of great activity. Here the stages stopped to change horses en route between Hartford and Albany and between Winsted and Canaan. This Tavern was in late years rebuilt for a private residence by Mr. Frederick M. Shepard, the son of Capt. John A. Shepard, and was occupied by him and his family as a summer residence. […] An interesting fact connected with the old Tavern is that seven generations of the Shepard family have lived in it.
The Tavern is now covered with aluminum siding, but the central doorway surround is the original wood.
Built around 1850, the Italianate-style house at 62 Union Street in Rockville (Vernon) was originally owned by Israel Kellogg. In 1881, it was sold to George Maxwell, who sold it to what is now Rockville Union Congregational Church. It served the church as a parsonage from 1885 to 1945.
The house of Dr. Frederick Gilnack, at 19 Elm Street in Rockville (Vernon), constructed in 1890, is a quite late example of a Second Empire house. The mansard roof had been popular some decades before, but the house’s Eastlake style ornamentation places the it stylistically in the later nineteenth century. Dr. Gilnack was born in Saxony in Germany in 1844. His family came to America when he was ten and settled in Glastonbury. He was honored by Dr. Eli P. Flint in Proceedings of the Connecticut State Medical Society (1917), who gave an account of his life:
He was graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the School of Medicine of Columbia University, New York, March 14, 1867, and only three months later, in June, he located in Rockville, Connecticut, for the practice of his profession, which he continued there successfully, for forty-five years, until failing health obliged him to give it up.
He was especially successful as an obstetrician, and the loss of sleep and other exacting requirements which that class of practice necessitates, so lowered his vitality mentally and physically that he became unable to perform the duties of his profession for fiveyears, until an attack of epidemic influenza proved quickly fatal [in 1917].
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