Owned for more than 200 years by the Butler family, which came to Wethersfield via Hartford in the 1680s, the Roger Butler House, on Jordan Lane in Wethersfield, was built in 1769, although it may date to the 1750s or earlier. The house once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Rev. Daniel Welch, minister from 1751 to 1782 of Mansfield’s North Society Church (now the Storrs Congregational Church), constructed a house on the Old Turnpike in Mansfield, on land he had purchased in 1755. As this parsonage was his own property (not the church’s), it was passed to his children, eventually becoming the home of his son and successor as minister, Rev. Moses Cook Welch, who had earlier studied law and became known as a great ecclesiastical lawyer. When the original house burned in 1812, it was replaced by the current building. In 1825, when Moses Welch died, his son, the prominent physician Dr. Archibald Welch of Wethersfield, sold the house and farmland out of the family. The property has had a number of owners and was was bought, in 1906, by Martin Hibbard Parker, who had married Edna Mason, a daughter of Charles Mason. The house was restored in the 1990s.
The George W. Cheney House, one of the Cheney mansions in Manchester, is located across Hartford Road from the Frank Cheney, Jr. House. Built around 1860, the house has a distinctive pyramidal roof, with shed dormers, and a shed-roofed front porch.
The Jonathan Camp House, at 1430 Asylum Avenue in Hartford, may look familiar to those interested in American history. It is a virtual replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, in Virginia, but features some grand additions to its model, including a much fancier entry with a semicircular fanlight and side lights, as well as an elaborate balustrade along the roof. Mount Vernon also influenced the design of other Colonial Revival style houses, like the Hill-Stead, but this house, designed by Edward T. Hapgood and built in 1911, follows the first president’s home very closely, with some early twentieth century aggrandizement.
The house constructed in 1892 for Walter A. Ingraham, on Prospect Place in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Bristol, is a rare survival of a type of high-style Queen Anne house. It has a base of granite and was built of brick with elaborately ornamented terra cotta detailing. The corner tower also features a distinctive copper roof. In the year the house was built, Walter Ingraham succeeded his father, Edward Ingraham, as president of the E. Ingraham Clock Company. Walter Ingraham’s brother and neighbor, William S. Ingraham, served as the company’s treasurer and secretary and the houses of both brothers were heated through pipes linked to the Ingraham Company’s furnaces.
The Joseph W. Cone House is one of the few surviving Victorian era houses on Collins Street in Hartford. Dating to 1890, this Queen Anne style house features a turret with a conical roof, sunburst designs on the gable-ends and roof crestings made of iron and terra-cotta. The original front porch, visible in historic photographs, has been removed.
The Philip Cheney House, which is currently being restored, is one of the mansions of the Cheney Family of Silk Manufacturers which face Hartford Road across the Great Lawn in Manchester. It was designed by Charles Adams Platt, himself a member of the Cheney Family, who also designed the Frank Cheney, Jr. and Clifford D. Cheney Houses. The house, an H-shaped Colonial Revival building, was finished around 1900 and lies northwest of the adjacent Clifford D. Cheney House. Philip Cheney was a brother of Clifford and Russell Cheney.
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