Dr. John Slade Ely was professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Yale Medical School from 1897 until his death in 1906 (when a memorial professorship was established in his honor). Dr. Ely lived in a Tudor-style house, designed by S. G. Taylor, on Trumbull Street in New Haven. When his widow, Grace T. Ely, died in 1960, she left the house as a non-profit arts center.
The Timothy Lester House, on Orange Street in New Haven, has been linked to the architect Henry Austin, but the details of its construction are unknown. Built in 1846, it may have been the first, and is certainly one of the earliest, Italian Villas (including a prominent tower) in New Haven. Lester worked for a boot manufacturing company.
An unusual octagon house with a Mansard roof is located at 86 Hallock Street in New Haven’s Hill District. It was built by Massena Clark, a real estate speculator who once had his own large estate on Whitney Avenue.
The David Lowry Robbins house is an Italianate building with a Portland brownstone foundation, located on East Robbins Avenue in Newington and constructed in 1875 to 1876. The kitchen wing of the house is part of an earlier home on the site, built by Thomas Robbins around 1730. D. L. Robbins was on the committee which planned the incorporation of Newington in 1871. In the 1920s, the property was used as a prison farm for the Hartford County Jail, on Seyms Street in Hartford. In 1966, the house was remodeled to contain four apartments.
Around 1775, Amos Otis built a house for Capt. Dudley Wright, on the site of the old house Wright’s father, Joseph Wright in Colchester. The impressive new house also served as a store, a tavern and, on the second floor ballroom, as the meeting place of the Wooster Lodge of Masons. Capt. Wright’s daughter Lydia married Dr. John Watrous in 1783 and the couple moved into the house’s second floor. Wright lived with them until his death in 1808. In 1823, Dr. Frederick Morgan married the Watrous’s daughter, Caroline Watrous. When Dr. Watrous died in 1842, they lived in the house until 1848, when they sold the house to Nathanial Hayward. Hayward was an inventor who had conceived a process of vulcanization of rubber by treating it with sulphur and a patent for this was issued in 1837 to Hayward’s colleague, Charles Goodyear. [For more information, see Some Account of Nathaniel Hayward’s Experiments with India Rubber which resulted in discovering the Invaluable Compound of that article with Sulphur (1865)]. Hayward had founded the Hayward Rubber Company and built a factory in Colchester in 1847. In 1885, the factory closed, but was reoccupied by the Colchester Rubber Company in 1888, which operated until it was absorbed by the United States Rubber Trust in 1892.
The house was embellished by Hayward, who added a bay window. He also presented his front lawn to the town as a park. The Hayward family lived in the home into the twentieth century. The last descendants to occupy the house in the 1940s wanted it to be razed, but it was purchased and saved, although not kept up for many years. It has recently been a bed and breakfast called the Hayward House Inn, but is now a real estate office.
Built in 1787, the home of Friend Collins and his wife, Philena Norton, is on State Street in Guilford. The house has a Greek Revival front portico, added in the 1840s. John Jackson bought the house in 1851 and operated a meat market in a side addition to the house. The addition was later replaced with a side porch.
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