St. John’s Episcopal Church Parsonage, Guilford (1870)

The house at 50 Ledge Hill Road in North Guilford was built circa 1870 by St. John’s Episcopal Church to serve as a parsonage. It replaced an earlier parsonage, built in the 1830s, that had burned down. Part of the building served as a town primary school sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century. The house has been a private residence since the church sold it in 1940-1941.

John D. Latham House (1843)

James D. Latham (1813-1899) was a shipbuilder in Noank. In the 1840s he entered into a partnership to build vessels with his brother, James A. Latham (1808-1902), whose previous partner, John Palmer (1787-1859), had retired. In 1868, James left the business to John, who continued to build ships into the 1880s. John D. Latham’s house at 31 Front Street in Noank was built in 1843, the same year he married John Palmer’s daughter, Lydia.

Capt. Nathaniel Farnham House (1800)

The original owner of the house at 61 Waterside Lane in Clinton, built in 1800, was Captain Nathaniel Farnham. It is said that people living in the house were the first to see the Hartford and New Haven train passing by c. 1852 by climbing to the top of a barn on the property. Caroline A. Kelsey Oakes (born 1851) lived in the house for many years. She was the widow of Captain Lester R. Oakes, who commanded a schooner, the Marian, owned by the Eliot brothers.

Caleb Phelps House (1700)

Although vastly altered from its original appearance, the house at 32 Phelps Street in East Hartford is a survivor from c. 1700 and would have once looked like the Buttolph-Williams House in Wethersfield with a large center chimney. It now has a brick foundation, which indicates it was moved to its current location in the nineteenth century. The house’s history is described in Joseph O. Goodwin’s East Hartford: Its History and Traditions (1879):

The house once occupied by Capt. Joseph Goodwin, and now standing on the lane east of the post-office, is one of the oldest remaining in town. It once stood south of Mr. A. A. Waterhouse’s, and was occupied by Caleb Goodwin [(1713-1769)], who was a hypochondriacal bachelor, and died in 1769. It was moved to the site of the present house of Mr. S. O. Goodwin about the year 1800, and repaired. Afterwards it was moved to its present site. Joseph Goodwin, Sr., lived in the old brown house, which, in 1876, gave place to the house of the writer.

Goodwin’s store on Main street, for many years our post-office [no longer extant], dates from the time of the Revolution or thereabout. Its rear door came from the old Caleb Goodwin house.

Buckingham-Hall House (1760)

The Buckingham-Hall House at Mystic Seaport was erected circa 1760 in what is now Old Saybrook by the Buckingham family. The house, which was located near the ferry crossing at the mouth of the Connecticut River, was purchased by William Hall, Jr., son of a New York import merchant, in 1833. When construction of a new highway bridge across the river threatened it with demolition in 1951, the house was presented to Mystic Seaport by the State Highway Department. It was shipped by barge to its present location, where it was reconstructed and refurnished to represent the lifestyle of the Buckingham family in the 1810s. In 1994, the house was re-restored and reinterpreted to represent the Hall family.

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North Guilford Congregational Church Parsonage (1824)

Now a private residence, the house at 145 Ledge Hill Road in Guilford was built in the early 1820s to serve as the parsonage of the North Guilford Congregational Church (an earlier parsonage was auctioned off in 1807). The Federal-era house shares a number of architectural similarities with the church, which was erected just a few years before. The first minister to occupy the parsonage was Rev. Zolva Whitmore (1792-1867), who was active in the Underground Railroad. Future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) boarded with Rev. Whitmore when he was seven years old.