William Lewis was the partner of Nelson Hotchkiss in a company which produced sashes and blinds. The partners also developed real estate along Chapel Street in New Haven, each building a house there in 1850. In 1854, Hotchkiss built a second house down the street. The Lewis House, like the two Hotchkiss houses, may be the work of New Haven architect Henry Austin, or at least inspired by his designs.
Yale University’s Horcow Hall, on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, was originally built in 1859 as a house for Pelitiah Perit, a merchant. It was the first home on the street to be painted brown. The architect was Sidney Mason Stone, the father of Margaret Sidney, author of the Five Little Peppers series of children’s books). A third floor was added to the Renaissance-Revival home in the 1860s and a large rear wing was added by Henry L. Hotchkiss, who acquired the house in 1888. In the 1930s, the house was purchased by Yale and became an annex for the Peabody Museum and the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory. In the 1960s, it became a faculty residence and in 1984, renamed Horchow Hall, it was renovated to become one of the buildings of Yale’s School of Management.
The north section of the Wyllys-Orton House, which was most likely separated from the rest of the 1659 home in the 1790s, is adjacent to the south section, on Main Street in Farmington. It was later enlarged. Another Connecticut house that was divided into two (south and north sections) is the John Chester Tavern in Wethersfield.
The Wyllys-Orton House, on Main Street in Farmington, was divided in half, probably in the 1790s. It was originally built around 1659 by Thomas Orton, on land that had once been owned by Samuel Wyllys, son of the early Connecticut Governor George Wyllys. The house had various later owners who made numerous changes, the most significant being the removal of the original house’s north section to an adjacent lot on Main Street. This northern section was later enlarged. There are a number of stories as to why the house was divided. According to one, a mother and her daughter-in-law both lived in the home but each wanted to rule in her own kitchen, so the house was split in two.
Designed by Ehrick K. Rossiter, the 1904 Seymour Cunningham House, on South Street in Litchfield, is an example of the types of high style Colonial Revival houses that were built as summer homes for the wealthy in the early twentieth century. Seymour Cunningham was the son of William Orr Cunningham, a wealthy papermill owner from New York State. Seymour married in 1892 and it is possible that he built the house the following year, 1893. That is the date given in a biographical sketch of Cunningham in the Genealogical and Family History of the State of Connecticut, Vol. II (1911):
Seymour, son of William Orr Cunningham, was born in Troy, New York, September 13, 1863. He attended the Troy Academy. Later he entered the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated with the degree of civil engineer in 1884. He became interested in the oil business in Pennsylvania and Ohio. In 1887 the old home at Troy, New York, was sold and he brought his mother to Washington, D. C., and built a residence at No. 1719 K street, where he still maintains his winter residence. His Litchfield home, “Forked Chimney,” was built in 1893, on South street, near the site of the old Parmelee house. In politics he is a Republican. In religion he is an Episcopalian. He married, June 6, 1892, Stephanie Whitney, of Oakland, California, born October 22, 1869, daughter of Hon. George E. Whitney, lawyer and state senator of California, and Mary (Van Swaringen) Whitney, of Louisville, Kentucky. Mrs. Cunningham was named Stephanie in honor of her uncle, Justice Stephen J. Field, of the United States supreme court. Children of Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham: Cecil, born March 8, 1893; Macklin, February 21, 1894; Jane Chester, February 27, 1896; Pamela, May 5, 1906. The three oldest were born in Washington, D. C., the youngest in Litchfield, Connecticut.
The Oliver Smith House, on Main Street in Stonington Borough, perhaps the oldest surviving house in town, was built in the early 1760s (after 1761). Smith, a merchant and one of the defenders of Stonington during the American Revolution, was the last owner of Venture Smith. Born under the name Broteer Furro, Venture was an African prince enslaved at the age of six and brought to America. Eventually buying his freedom when in his 30s from Oliver Smith, Venture went on to purchase land and became prosperous by farming, fishing and shipping goods. In the 1790s, Venture Smith dictated his life story to a schoolteacher named Elisha Niles. This autobiography was then published as A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself (1798).
The homestead of James Stokes is on Elm Street in Ansonia. The current house, completed around 1830, either replaced or incorporated an earlier one on the site, built in 1778. Stokes married Caroline Phelps, the daughter of Anson Greene Phelps, who founded Ansonia. Born in Simsbury, Phelps had become a successful businessman and manufacturer in New York. In the 1830s, Phelps joined with Sheldon Smith to found a manufacturing village in Derby called Birmingham (now the City of Derby). Facing obstacles in his attempts to expand Birmingham to the north in the 1840s, Phelps founded a new manufacturing settlement on the east bank of the Naugatuck River, in the older part of Derby which was named “Ansonia” after its founder. Phelps established a copper wire mill in 1845, which merged with Birmingham Copper Mills in 1854 and later became Ansonia Copper & Brass. Ansonia separated from Derby in 1889, later incorporating as a city in 1893. Anson G. Phelps was active in the Congregational Church and contributed to many philanthropic causes. His daughter, Caroline Phelps Stokes, and son-in-law, James Stokes, used their Ansonia house as a summer home and Anson Phelps often visited. Stokes’s son, Anson Phelps Stokes I, was a merchant, banker and multimillionaire; his grandson, Anson Phelps Stokes II, was a philanthropist; his great-grandson, Anson Phelps Stokes III, was an Episcopal Bishop. Another son of James Phelps was William Earl Dodge Stokes, a multimillionaire who developed much of New York’s Upper West Side and built a famous hotel called the Ansonia on Broadway. James Phelps’s daughter, Caroline Phelps Stokes, a philanthropist whose will established the Phelps-Stokes Fund, donated a library to the City of Ansonia.