An early brick building, constructed on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield, the John Francis Tavern of 1764 was built in the same year the town’s brick meetinghouse was completed. Like the John Robbins House, also used as a tavern and built a few years later in what would become Rocky Hill, the Francis Tavern features a stringcourse as a decorative element.
Nathaniel Shipman was a lawyer, Federal judge, and a founding partner of the law firm of Shipman & Goodwin, which is still prominent today. His house, on Charter Oak Place in Hartford, was built in 1860 in the Italianate style. Charter Oak Place was a fashionable neighborhood when Shipman moved there, and today has many surviving houses built between 1858 and 1875, including two Italianate double houses, the Kingsbury-Gatling House, the Robinson-Smith House and the Charles Northam House.
Wallace Stevens was one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. Originally from Reading, Pennsylvania, he came to Hartford in 1916 , where he worked at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, eventually rising to become a vice-president. In 1932, Stevens purchased a 1926 Colonial Revival style house (designed by William T. Marchant) at 118 Westerly Terrace in Hartford. As he did not drive, Stevens would regularly walk the two miles from his home to his office, often walking through nearby Elizabeth Park as well. He would compose poems in his head during these walks. A non-profit group called the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens seeks to increase awareness in the Hartford area of Stevens, who died in 1955, and his work. The house is now owned by Christ Church Cathedral.
In 1767, John Robbins built his house, on Old Main Street in Rocky Hill, on land he had purchased from the Duke of Cumberland, who had earlier been granted the land by George II. The house was later used as a tavern, known as the Duke of Cumberland Inn. The brick Georgian-style house was updated in the Colonial Revival style in 1910.
Located on Palisado Avenue in Windsor, the Taylor Chapman House was constructed in 1764 in the Georgian style.
Built for Jonathan Cowles, a wealthy merchant, in 1799 on Main Street in Farmington. Like the John Watson House in South Windsor, the Jonathan Cowles House is a three-story Federal mansion. It was bought by Miss Porter’s School in 1908 and is now a dormitory known as Colony. This was the dorm lived in by Jacqueline Bouvier when she went to the school.
Asa Andrews was a tinsmith in Farmington whose Federal-style house on Main Street was probably built sometime after he purchased the land in 1804. Nearby stands his c. 1803 tin shop (which perhaps originally dates to the 1690s). After Andrews‘ death in 1831, his widow, Nancy Bidwell Andrews, ran a school for young children in the house. In the mid-nineteenth century, the house was owned by Deacon Simeon Hart, a teacher and headmaster at the Farmington Academy, who later ran his own boarding school in his home. Deacon Hart was the Farmington Savings Bank‘s first secretary and treasurer and the bank was originally located in his house. After his death, in 1853, the bank moved down Main Street to the home of Samuel Smith Cowles, its second Treasurer.