The Charles E. Mitchell House (1880)

Charles Elliott Mitchell (1837-1911), a lawyer originally from Bristol, practiced law in New Britain, forming a partnership with Frank L. Hungerford in 1869. The partners wrote the charter when New Britain became a city in 1870 and Mitchell was also appointed the first city attorney. He represented New Britain in the General Assembly in 1880-1881, around the time his surviving residence in the city, a Queen Anne-style house at 15 Hillside Place, was constructed. While in the Assembly, as explained in David N. Camp’s History of New Britain (1889), he was “a member of the commission to consider and report upon the necessity of a new normal school building, and was largely instrumental in securing a favorable report and the appropriation necessary for its erection.” The building is located next to his house on Hillside Place. Mitchell came to specialize in patent law and served under President Benjamin Harrison as United States Patent Attorney, in 1889-1891. He retired from the law and returned to New Britain in 1902, where he served as president of the Stanley Rule & Level Manufacturing Company. In 1905, he had a new house built at 54 Russell Street, a Colonial Revival home, designed by Charles Rich of New York, where he lived until his death in 1911. This house became the home of Mark J. Lacey, the president of several manufacturing companies, in 1930. The Russell Street house was demolished for the construction of a highway in 1972.

The Edward Wilson House (1910)

The Arts and Crafts or American Craftsman style of house was popular at the start of the twentieth century. The house at 168 Buckingham Street in Waterbury, built around 1910, displays a number of Arts and Crafts features, including wide bracketed eaves, a low pitched front gable roof, and the use of mixed materials, in this case represented by the different exterior siding seen on each floor. The house may have been built by the Tracy Brothers construction company of Waterbury, because it was built for Edward Ely Wilson, a vice-president at the firm. According to Volume III of History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley (1918), Wilson came to Waterbury in 1888 and “and became foreman of the shop of the Tracy Brothers Company. His ability won him immediate advancement and led to his admission to a partnership. Upon the incorporation of the business he was chosen vice president and so continues. […] He is today an officer in one of the foremost contracting firms of the city with a patronage that makes its business one of large volume and importance.”

The George Grannis House (1864)

The house of George Grannis, a photographer, was built sometime around 1864 on Church Street in Waterbury. In the 1870s, the house came to be owned by the Burrall family, being occupied in the early twentieth century by the sisters, Mary and Lucy Burrall, and their lifelong friend, Miss Edith Morton Chase. The daughter of Henry Sabin Chase, first president of the Chase Brass and Copper Company, Edith Chase was a neighbor of the Burrall sisters, who became her companions when she later made the Grand Tour of Europe. In 1917, Chase’s father gave her land in Litchfield, now Topsmead State Forest, where she built a country house. Chase and the Burralls then lived together, dividing their time between summers in Litchfield and winters in Waterbury.

The Amasa Preston House (1828)

At 152 Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire is an 1828 house, built by Amasa Preston. A settler from Wallingford, Preston was on the building committee for the Methodist Church, constructed in 1834. The house had two rooms added to the rear in 1910. Owned by the Preston and Trithall family, the house was the childhood home of architect Alice Washburn. A former high school principal in the 1890s, in 1919 Washburn began designing Colonial Revival houses in Cheshire and surrounding communities. She continued until the Great Depression forced her retirement in 1933. Around 1920, she renovated the Preston House in the Colonial Revival style, creating a beautiful front entry featuring a semicircular fan above the door. Today, the Connecticut chapter of the American Institute of Architects sponsors the annual Alice Washburn Awards for excellence in traditional house design. (more…)

Jonathan Dickerman II House (1792)

In 1792, Jonathan Dickerman II built a farmhouse in Hamden, south of the Sleeping Giant, also known as Mount Carmel. Originally located on the north side of Mount Carmel Avenue, the house was acquired by the state in 1924, serving for a time as a ranger station when the Sleeping Giant State Park was being created. In 1961, when the Avenue was being straightened, the state gave the Dickerman House to the town and, the following year, it was moved across the street to its current location by the Hamden Historical Society. A historic cider mill barn was moved to the property in 1992 and an outhouse in 2002.

Gleason-Harger House (1784)

The Gleason-Harger House, on the Albany Turnpike in Canton, was built around 1784 by Chauncey Gleason, who was involved in the East and West Indies trade, first with Elijah Cowles & Co. of Farmingtion and later in partnership with Matthew Ives, of Westfield, Mass. Around 1835, the house was acquired by John Wesley Harger, a Deacon of the Canton Baptist Church, who replaced the original gambrel roof. The house was also most likely altered around the same time to its current Greek Revival appearance. The house remained in his family well into the twentieth century and is now used as offices.