Captain George Phillips was a leading merchant of Middletown and, like his neighbor, Jehosaphat Starr, he answered the Lexington Alarm in 1775. His brick gambrel-roofed house, on Washington Street, was built around 1750. The Greek Revival entryway and the reduction in size of the first floor windows are nineteenth century changes. There is also an obviously later addition to the house’s east elevation.
The Roberts Homestead is an 1822 brick house, located across from the Town Green in Bloomfield. It was built by Lemuel Roberts. Later in the nineteenth century, owner Lester A. Roberts, who gave land to add to the Town Green, was described as “a man of unusually wide intelligence and some literary note,” who “is now a resident of Brooklyn, but still makes Bloomfield his summer home.”
In the late nineteenth century, Litchfield became a showplace for the Colonial Revival movement. Old houses were restored and new ones constructed in the Colonial Revival style. One such home is the Charles Deming House on North Street, built in 1900. The architect was E. K. Rossiter and the house was built for Charles Deming, a grandson of Julius Deming, whose house is also on North Street.
The oldest parts of the house of Captain John Latimer, on Main Street near Wethersfield Cove, date to around 1690. The house is right next door to the Captain Samuel Latimer House. The John Latimer House is currently for sale.
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The Thomas Hart Hooker House, on Main Street in Farmington, was built in 1770 by Judah Woodruff for Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker and of Stephen Hart, one of the founders of Farmington. Hooker had married Sarah Whitman Hooker in 1769 and in 1773 they moved to what is now West Hartford. The house was later owned by Samuel Deming, an abolitionist who used his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Deming also joined with Austin Williams and John Treadwell Norton in bringing the Africans from the Amistad to Farmington in 1841. The house, now owned by Miss Porter’s School, is on the Connecticut Freedom Trail.
The oldest house in Farmington was built by Samuel Steele, a farmer who served as Deputy in the General Court and lieutenant in the militia. Steele‘s wife, Mary Boosey, had inherited property in Wethersfield and the family moved there in 1678. After Samuel’s death in 1685, Mary returned to live in the house in Farmington. The house was owned by the Steele family until 1773, when it was sold to Isaac Gleason (the current sign on the house identifies it as the Gleason House). In 1843, Dr. Chauncey Brown moved the house back from Main Street and turned it to face south with its gable end towards the street. It was then used as a barn, but now has apartments. The building has been owned by the same family since 1920.
Gurdon Trumbull, a Stonington merchant, was of the volunteers who defended the town during the British bombardment of 1814. He was also involved in developing the sealing and whaling industries in town and became a prominent citizen. His Greek Revival house on Main Street was built after the fire of 1837. Trumbull eventually moved to Hartford in 1852. He had several notable children, including the author Annie Trumbull Slosson, author of such books as Seven Dreamers (1890), Aunt Abby’s Neighbors (1902), Story-tell Lib (1911) and A Local Colorist (1912). His son, J. Hammond Trumbull, was a Connecticut Secretary of State and a scholar, who wrote The True-blue Laws Of Connecticut And New Haven And The False Blue-laws Invented By The Rev. Samuel Peters (1876). Another son, Henry Clay Trumbull, was a Congregational minister, chaplain of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment in the Civil War and author of such works as The Captured Scout of the Army of the James (1869), The Blood Covenant (1885), Studies in Oriental Social Life and Gleams from the East on the Sacred Page (1894) and The Salt Covenant (1899).
Also today, check out the latest entries at Historic Buildings of Massachusetts, the Francis Parkman House in Boston and the Ashley House in Deerfield.
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