Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Exploring the Nutmeg State One Building at a Time

Houses

Beleden (1910)

Beleden, one of Connecticut’s great high-style mansions, is located on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol. Designed by the architect Samuel Brown of Boston, Beleden was built for William Edwin Sessions, of the Sessions Clock Company. The Sessions family operated a foundry that had been producing castings for the E.N. Welch Company, a Forrestville clock manufacturer. Around 1900, Sessions purchased E.N. Welch and in 1903 renamed it the Sessions Clock Company. In 1906, William E. Sessions, who had been living in a house on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol, purchased the adjacent house and land of Nathan L. Birge. The Birge House was torn down and over the next 4 years Beleden, completed in 1910, was constructed. The U-shaped brownstone mansion was once the centerpiece of a large estate, which featured formal and English gardens, a pool, greenhouses and grape arbors. These former grounds were later divided by Beleden Gardens Drive and built-up with smaller homes. Two buildings, a coachman’s lodge and a gardener’s cottage, were originally part of the estate but are now separated from the main house by newer structures.

Samuel Boardman House (1769)

The 1769 home of Samuel Boardman, a soldier during the Revolutionary War and a manufacturer of saltpetre, is located on Main Street in Wethersfield, near Wethersfield Cove.

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John Birge House (1880)

John Birge was a state senator and president of N. L. Birge and Sons, a knitting mill, which had been founded by his father, Nathan L. Birge. His grandfather was John Birge, who had played an important role in Bristol’s clockmaking industry. Birge‘s house, on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol, was built around 1880. After his death, the house was purchased by William J. Tracy, who would found Tracy-Driscoll & Co. in 1920. Note the house in the upper-left of the historic image linked to above.

The Captain Charles Arnold House (1825)

Charles Arnold, a carpenter and builder and a captain in the Connecticut Militia, built his brick Federal-style house on Storrs Road in Mansfield soon after purchasing the land in 1824. He later exchanged houses with Joseph Sollace, also a carpenter and wagon maker. Today the brick is painted and the front entrance has a portico with columns, now glassed-in.

George Hubbard House (1669)

A very early date of 1637 has been claimed for the house of George Hubbard, an early Wethersfield settler, on Main Street, near Wethersfield Cove. It is more likely that the oldest part of the house was actually constructed in the late 1660s by the merchant and ship owner, John Blackleach. This would have been a simple one room below with a chamber above. Blackleach also had a textile and silver shop. The house was later expanded into a saltbox. One website claims this was also the home of Nathaniel Stillman III. A modern wing, with seventeenth century-style facade, has been added to the house in recent years.

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Castle Largo (1880)

Castle Largo is an unusual edifice, located at the intersection of Center and Main Streets in the Federal Hill area of Bristol. A miniature castle featuring elements of the Gothic Revival, Italianate and Second Empire styles, it was constructed in three stages in 1880 and is one of a number of interesting houses in Bristol designed by the local inventor Joel T. Case. After living in it for a few months, Case sold it to Charles Henry Wightman, a 24-year-old businessman.

The Henry Mygatt House (1833)

Built between 1833 and 1849 on Mountain Spring Road in Farmington, the Greek Revival-style home of Henry Mygatt and his wife, Sarah Woodruff was later owned (from 1936 to 1954) by James Thrall Soby, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who commissioned the architect Henry-Russell Hitchcock to design a new rear wing to the house to serve as an art gallery. An owner in the late 1970s was Alexander Haig, Jr., when he was Director of United Technologies.