The Meriden Britannia Company was established in 1852. It produced the durable Britannia ware, which by the 1850s had replaced pewter in most American homes. Isaac C. Lewis was president of the company for fourteen years and served as mayor of Meriden from 1870 to 1872. Lewis built a mansion at 189 East Main Street in 1868. In 1950, the house was purchased by the Polish League of American Veterans and was used as a funeral home from 1998 to 2006. The house has since been vacant.
One of the older houses in Bristol is the William Jerome House, at 367 Jerome Avenue. William Jerome I and his wife, Elizabeth Hart Jerome, purchased land adjacent to the house in 1741 and then the house itself the following year from Caleb Palmer, who had just built it.
The Squire Timothy Dutton House, at 1 West Main Street in Hebron, was built in 1790 and has a later, flat roofed entrance portico, added around 1910. The Missionary Society of Connecticut was formed in the house in 1798. The house is also known as the Caroline Kellogg House, after an early librarian at Hebron’s Douglas Library. For almost two centuries, the general store, once owned by Charles Post, who served as postmaster from 1853 to 1861, stood next to the Kellogg House, but was later removed.
As related in Frederick John Kinsbury’s A Narrative and Documentary History of St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church (formerly St. James) of Waterbury, Connecticut (1907): “In 1884 John C. Booth and Mrs. Olive M. Elton presented to the parish the lot at the corner of Church and West Main streets, and a rectory was erected thereon, which was completed in the spring of 1886 at a cost of about $16,000.” The Queen Anne-style building, at 21 Church Street, features a Romanesque Revival archway on the front porch. In the 1970s, this former minister’s residence was converted into an office building.
At 353 Main Street in Cromwell, between the First Congregational Church and the former Baptist Church building, is an Italianate house built around 1853. It was constructed for Rev. C.W. Potter, pastor of the Baptist Church, who had acquired the land to build the church and then built his own house next door. Rev. Potter sold the house when he left Cromwell in 1855.
Located at 31 Great Ring Road in Monroe, the Eliot Beardsley Homestead is colonial saltbox house, built around 1760. In 1993, it was purchased from the Town of Monroe by the Monroe Historical Society, which has been restoring the house as a living history museum and research library.
At 261 Broad Street in Windsor is the house built by John E. Luddy in 1921. Luddy, manager of the Connecticut Leaf Tobacco Association, was the founder of the Windsor Company, a textile manufacturer which produced shade cloth. This gauze-like cloth was used to protect the growing shade tobacco from the sun. Luddy also set up a trust fund to support the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society. Luddy’s house and carriage house were sold to the Town of Windsor in 1964 and today the Luddy House is home to the Windsor Chamber of Commerce.
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