Built on South Main Street in Suffield for Henry Phelps Kent, a tobacco merchant, in 1872. It was designed in the Second Empire style by local architect John Mead. Later, for almost sixty years, it the home of Samuel Reid Spencer, the prominent merchant and philanthrophist who had bought and restored the King House Museum next door. Today the house has been restored as a bed-and-breakfast called Spencer on Main.
One of the few surviving homes built in the nineteenth century in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood. It was built on Forest Street in 1875 for Charles Boardman Smith, of the Smith Worthington Saddlery Company, and was designed by Richard M. Upjohn in the High Victorian Gothic style. It shares similarities with Upjohn’s Connecticut State Capitol building and the (now demolished) West Middle School of 1873.
Built in 1861, on Main Street in Wethersfield, for Edward Robbins, who owned the Johnson & Robbins seed company. Charles C. Hart was connected to this company for fourteen years before he began his own business in the 1892. As the Chas. C. Hart Seed Co. grew, it eventually moved into the old offices and warehouses of the Johnson & Hart Company, and remains in the same location today, currently in a 1955 brick complex just south of the Robbins House.
As a plaque in front of the house indicates, it stands at the former site of Nathaniel Stillman’s Tavern. When Washington had his famous conference with the Comte de Rochambeau, just down the street in the Webb House, in May of 1781, the Stillman Tavern housed the French staff.
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Built in 1859 for James Ashmead, on Wethersfield Avenue in Hartford, adjacent to the Day-Taylor House and across from Samuel Colt’s Armsmear. Ashmead and his partner, Edmund Hurlbut, were in the business of gold beating. Sam Colt’s nephew, Sam C. Colt, bought the Italianate house in 1865 and it was most likely he who added the Second Empire style tower and porte-cochere. A later owner added the Colonial Revival portico and pilasters on the corners. Today, the house is home to a legal firm.
Built in 1764 on South Main Street in Suffield for Dr. Alexander King, who was a physician, farmer, and deacon of the Congregational church, as well as serving as a selectman, town clerk and State Representative. The house, which features an original porch leading to the doctor’s office, was later bought and restored by Mr. Samuel Reid Spencer, who gave it to the Suffield Historical Society in 1960. It is currently open as a house museum, which includes galleries on local history.
Rev. James Lockwood, Wethersfield’s Congregational minister from 1738-1772, had turned down the presidencies of Yale and Princeton to stay in town. In gratitude, members of the congregation of First Church donated the money, materials and labor to build this center-chimney, gambrel-roofed house on Main Street in 1767. It was therefore not a parsonage, but instead a personal gift to the pastor. It currently serves as a rectory for neighboring Trinity Episcopal Church.
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The earliest part of the house was the main block with center-chimney, built around 1761-1767 for merchant Shem Burbank. In 1788, the house was purchased by the merchant, and extensive land owner, Oliver Phelps, who altered the roof to a gambrel style and added other features of the fashionable Georgian style. In 1794, he further altered the house by adding a new wing in the Federal style. The main architect of the addition was Thomas Hayden of Windsor. A young Asher Benjamin, later to become one of the most important architects of the Federal period, was one of the workers on the new wing and carved the Ionic capitals of the wing’s entryway. The interior of the Federal wing is notable for its surviving original French-made wallpaper. When Phelps died, the house was owned by the Hatheway family for a century and is currently open as a house museum, the Phelps-Hatheway House & Garden, administered by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society.
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