The Dr. Silas Holmes House (1787)

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The Stonington Borough house of of Dr. Silas Holmes was built in 1787. Holmes was a physician and, according to Richard Anson Wheeler’s History of the Town of Stonington (1900), “He was summoned to visit a sick man on Block Island, who sent for him in his boat, which took and bore him safely over to the island, and after he had visited his patient and diagnosed his physical condition, he started with the boatman and craft to return to his home in Stonington, but unfortunately a terrible thunder storm arose with a rushing cyclone of wind, which lashed the ocean into fearful waving foam, which capsized their boat and filled it with water, which, in spite of all the efforts of the doctor and the boatman, sunk, and they were both drowned.” Wheeler gives the date of this event as September 12, 1790, but a sign on the house states that “Dr. Holmes drowned returning from an errand of mercy on Block Island in 1791.”

Hiram G. Marvin House (1824)

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The house built for Hiram G. Marvin, on Lyme Street in Old Lyme, is an 1824 Federal style structure with some Greek Revival influences. In 2007, the house became the first in Old Lyme to have an historical plaque from the Historic District Commission. Hiram G. Marvin had two brothers, one named Aaron Burr Marvin and the other named Alexander Hamilton Marvin (probably both born in the 1790s). I wonder if they got along later in life?

The Captain George Phillips House (1750)

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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.

Roberts Homestead (1822)

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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.”

Charles Deming House (1900)

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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.

Thomas Hart Hooker House (1770)

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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.