Capt. Caleb Griswold was a Wethersfield sea captain. Griswold‘s house, on Main Street, not far from Wethersfield Cove, was built in 1734: one of the house‘s chimney bricks is inscribed with that date.
(more…)Capt. Caleb Griswold House (1734)
Frank S. Brown House (1880)
The Queen Anne style house of Frank S. Brown, on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield, was built sometime in the 1880s. Brown was a Hartford merchant who, in 1866, joined with James M. Thomson and William McWhirter to form the dry goods firm of Brown, Thomson & Co., which became a major New England department store. Brown retired from the company in 1890 and in 1893 the house was sold out of the Brown family. Ellsworth S. Grant, the Connecticut historian, former mayor of West Hartford and brother-in-law of Katharine Hepburn, was later born in the house. In 1920, Minnie Pricone and Mary Rometta, with their husbands and families, moved into the house. They owned the Marie Phillips Dress Company and tailoring work was done in the basement area of the house.
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Rev. Samuel Seabury House (1792)
On Greene’s Alley in New London is the home of Reverend Samuel Seabury, which was built around 1792. Rev. Seabury was an Episcopal minister and a loyalist during the Revolutionary War, who was selected at a 1783 meeting in the Glebe House in Woodbury to become the first American Episcopal Bishop. Rev. Seabury also lived in an earlier house, built in 1743 (unless it’s the same house?). After his death, in 1796, he was succeeded as rector of St James Church in New London by his son, Rev. Charles Seabury.
The Acors Barns House (1837)
Acors Barns was a New London whaling agent. He was also president of the National Bank of Commerce of New London. His 1837 Greek Revival house is on Federal Street.
The Jared Shailer House (1838)
Jared Shailer built a Greek Revival-style house on Bridge Road, in the Tylerville section of Haddam, in 1838, the year after he married his cousin, Florilla Shailer. Several other Shailer cousins lived nearby. The side hall house has a side wing addition–a common method of adding more space to a front-gabled Greek Revival home.
Robert Pratt Homestead (1716)
The Robert Pratt House, on Route 154 in Centerbrook consists of a main Georgian-style center-chimney house with a smaller wing on the west side. It is possible that the wing was built first, by Robert Pratt, Sr. around 1716. The main part of the house was built around the time Nathan Pratt sold the house to Rev. Stephen Holmes in 1758. Rev. Holmes was the second pastor of the Second Ecclessiastical Society of Saybrook, located in Potapoug, which is now the village of Centerbrook in the town of Essex. As explained in the History of Middlesex County (1884), the Reverend, who died in 1773, “practiced medicine in addition to preaching the gospel.”
Samuel Lay House (1754)
Built in 1754 by Samuel Lay, the son of Robert Lay, Jr., the house at 17 North Main Street in Essex was altered the nineteenth century to conform to the popularity of the Greek Revival style. In 1924, the house was purchased and again altered by E.E. Dickinson, Jr.
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