The Charles E. Puffer House (1904)

Built around 1904, the house at 176 Buckingham Street in Waterbury is notable for its stuccoed exterior. It was the home of Charles E. Puffer, an insurance agent. As described in the History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, vol 3 (1918):

In 1901 he came to Waterbury, where he entered the employ of George E. Judd, a well known and successful insurance underwriter. He bent his energies toward acquainting himself with every phase of the business and as the years passed his value to his employer so increased that on the 1st of January, 1911, he was admitted to a partnership under the firm style of Judd & Puffer, an association that has since been maintained. He has a high reputation in insurance circles and incidentally has negotiated many important realty transfers and his opinions concerning property are largely accepted as authority.

Isaac Moss House (1785)

At 172 Old Tannery Road, across from the Monroe Center Green, is a house built in the 1780s by Isaac Moss. The building’s southwest wing was once a separate building and served as a general store and post office from the later eighteenth century through the 1940s, by which time a gas station, since removed, was located out front. The Moss-Clark General Store, which was run by Marshall Beach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was attached to the Moss House in 1896. The house has had some changes made to it over the years, including the addition and later removal of a large veranda and the removal of two large chimneys in the 1890s, torn out at the request of Mrs. Beach due to fears of a potential chimney fire.

Jones-Camp House (1780)

Between 1771 and 1783, John Jones built a house overlooking the town green of Durham. In 1783, he sold it to Samuel Camp, Jr. (Col. Samuel Camp), who left it to his son Ebenezer upon his death in 1810. Ebenezer later leased rooms of the house from his son Charles, who died in 1828. Upon Ebenezer’s death in 1830, he left the house to another son, Samuel C. Camp. The house’s gable addition with the current main entrance was built sometime in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1847, the house was sold to Horace Newton, a cloth-maker and farmer.

The Charles Butler House (1792)

In Historic Litchfield, 1721-1907 (1907), Alice T. Bulkeley writes:

The house now occupied by Mr. Elbert P. Roberts, one of Litchfield‘s real estate dealers, on the corner of North and East streets, was built in 1792 by Charles Butler, cashier of the Litchfield Bank. It was originally a story and a half gable-roofed house. In the early part of the nineteenth century [1813] it was bought by Frederick Deming, father of the present Mr. Frederick Deming of North street, who enlarged it and built on the east wing. When Mr. Deming moved to New York he sold the place to Oliver S. Weller, and the latter built the small building where the school now is, for a small store, where he sold dry and wet goods, chiefly the latter. After his death Mrs. Weller continued the business as long as she lived, when the house went to two nieces in Woodbury who are its present owners. On the death of these ladies the house will be the property of St. Michael’s Parish Church.

The Pillars (1850)

Built around 1850 by the Seymour family, the house on Chapman Street in Newington known as “The Pillars” combines Italianate and Greek Revival features. The house is distinguished by its strikingly large entrance portico with Tuscan columns. Substantial restorations to the building were completed in 1986 following damage from a fire. In 1901, Amy and James Archer were hired to look after the house’s resident, an elderly widower named John Seymour. After Seymour died in 1904, his heirs turned the building into a boarding house for the elderly, with the Archers staying on to provide care for the residents. The house was known as “Sister Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly.” In 1907, the heirs sold the house and the Archers moved to Windsor, where they established the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm. Between 1907 and 1917, there were 60 suspicious deaths in the Archer Home, as well as the deaths of Amy Archer’s first husband James and her second husband Michael Gilligan. Amy Archer-Gilligan, who had purchased large amounts of arsenic, was eventually found guilty of murder in a famous case which inspired the play and film, Arsenic and Old Lace. The Seymour House in Newington was later owned by Philip Brown, who ran the Newington Junction Post Office until 1944. Today the house is subdivided into apartments.

The Enos Brooks House (1732)

In 1705, Thomas Brooks, from Cheshire, England, settled in the area that would later become the town of Cheshire in Connecticut. In 1732-1733, his son Enos Brooks, built a saltbox house on what is now South Brooksvale Road. The house has remained in the same family ever since, with significant additions being made over the years. According to Old Historic Homes of Cheshire, Connecticut (1895), by Edwin R. Brown, Enos’s son, David Brooks, who resided in the house,

was a graduate of Yale College in the year 1765, was ordained to the work of the ministry, occasionally preached, but never was a settled pastor. He was a delegate to the State Convention held in Hartford in January, 1788, to ratify and adopt the Constitution of the United States. He was a soldier in the war of the Revolution. He entered first as a private and was afterwards promoted to the position of quartermaster of his regiment. He prepared and delivered, in Derby, Conn., in the year 1774, a discourse on the religion of the Revolution. This discourse was highly commended, and strongly influenced public opinion in favor of the cause of the struggling colonies.

Rev. Brooks’s son, also named David, enlarged the house in 1841 and his son, Samuel Hull Brooks, added an attic and gables. In 1925, John Van Buren Thayer built a two-story addition to the house. Through the efforts Brooks descendants and the Cheshire Land Trust, 48 acres of the farm land that once belonged to Thomas Brooks has been placed under a conservation restriction to preserve the rural and scenic character of the farm. It is known as the Brooksvale Farm Preserve.