200 Beacon Street, Hartford (1875)

200-beacon-street.jpg

The house at 200 Beacon Street in Hartford was built around 1875, when the earliest homes in that section of the West End of Hartford were being constructed. Two developers, Burdett Loomis and Joseph Woodruff, opened Beacon Street, between Farmington Ave and Warrenton Ave, in 1872 and the Gothic Revival-style home at no. 200 was built soon after. Bad economic conditions soon followed, so that additional houses were not built in the area until the 1890s and after. Another house, built around the same time, is the Kenyon House on nearby Kenyon Street.

Samuel Huntington House (1785)

samuel-huntington-house.jpg

Samuel Huntington, born in Scotland, CT, had a notable career during the Revolutionary War and after. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he also served as the last President of the Continental Congress (1779-1781) and the first “President of the United States of America in Congress Assembled” under the Articles of Confederation in 1781. He was later the Chief Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court (1784-1785) and Governor of Connecticut (1786-1796). Buried in the Old Norwichtown Cemetery, located behind his Norwich home, Huntington was re-interred in the Samuel Huntington Tomb in 2003. There has been an effort in Norwich to create a Huntington Presidential Library. Huntington’s house, on East Town Street, was built in 1783-1785 and has been extensively modified over the years, with later Greek Revival style additions.