Built around 1832, the Catherine and Dency Parsons House, on Main Street in Durham, was built for two sisters around 1832. After 1868, the house was owned by the Parmelee family into the early twentieth century. The Greek Revival house has a shed-roofed porch along the front facade, added later. At one time the house had a stuccoed exterior.
The Colin M. Ingersoll House is a grand Chateauesque mansion on Whitney Avenue in New Haven. Designed by Joseph W. Northrop of Bridgeport, it strongly stands out, with its bold colors, tall hip roof, prominent tower and French medieval decoration, including fleurs de lis. The house was built for Colin M. Ingersoll, Jr., chief engineer of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. He was the son of Colin Macrae Ingersoll (1819-1903), who served in the U.S. House of Representatives. The house is now used for offices.
Deepwood Drive, off Whitney Avenue in Hamden and adjacent to the town’s border with New Haven, was developed in the 1920s on on an old estate. Known architecturally for its many modern houses, the street also has older-style homes and was landscaped to have a rural appearance. Many of the homes are oriented away from the street, often obscuring them from the road. One such house, at 50 Deepwood Drive, was built in 1929 by Thornton Wilder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist. Built as home for himself, his parents and sisters with the royalties from his famous novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Wilder referred to it as “the house the bridge built.” Wilder had a view of New Haven and East Rock from his English style country home, which sits on the edge of a promontory. He shared the house with his sister, Isabel, until he died in 1975. Thornton Wilder furniture and memorabilia from the house’s study are on display at the Miller Memorial Central Library in Hamden.
The Harmon Hamlin House, on Dowd Avenue in Canton, was built in 1809. For many years it was known as the Biglow House after a tin peddler who lived there. The house has Greek Revival features, probably added in the mid-nineteenth century, including a wide cornice, pedimanted side gable and a doorway with pillasters, sidelights and a Greek entablature.
Charles H. Bell was a merchant in Portland who continued the business started by his father, Edwin Bell. In 1867, the elder Bell had purchased Samuel Hall’s store on Main Street and Charles Bell would vastly enlarge the building, adding a third floor to the original two-stories. The style of the new third floor resembled the Queen Anne with stick elements of Bell’s own house, built on Main Street in 1883, which perhaps utilized the same materials. Bell’s store sold groceries, flour, hay, grain, seeds and light agricultural implements. Bell also partnered with John Anderson in a firm to manufacture a new kind of lead pipe coupling, patented by Anderson in 1895. (see Portland in 1896 pdf file, p.6)
New Haven has a number of examples (pdf) of row houses. The connected row of Second Empire houses at 545-551 Orange Street are far more lavishly ornamented than the Middletown row houses I posted yesterday. These Orange Street houses were built in 1869-1871 by the builder Nelson Newgeon.
Urban-style row houses are not so common in Connecticut, but a notable example can be found at 71-83 Crescent Street in Middletown. These Mansard-roofed houses were built in 1866-1867 by Julius Hotchkiss, an entrepreneur and politician, who had been mayor of Waterbury and began serving in the United States House of Representatives the year the original houses were completed. The house at #71 was built in 1895 by his daughter, M. Amelia Vinal, who had married the lawyer, Charles Green Rich Vinal.
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