Silas Deane House (1766)

Built next door to the Webb House, on Wethersfield’s Main Street, in the late 1760s for Silas Deane, a Yale educated lawyer from Goton who settled in town in 1762. Deane married Mehitable Nott Webb, the widow of the merchant Joseph Webb, in 1763 and their son, Jesse Deane, was born in 1764. Because Mehitable died in 1767, it is probable she never lived in the Deane House. After her death, Deane married a second wealthy widow, Elizabeth Saltonstall Evards, in 1769. Deane became involved in the American Revolution, serving as a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1776, he was sent to France on a mission to secure French aid. Later joined by Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, Deane worked well with the former in negotiating an alliance with the French, but clashed with the latter. Lee’s charges that his colleague had mismanaged funds eventually led to Deane’s recall.

After a dispute with Congress, Deane returned to Europe in 1781, where he lived in poverty for many years. He later died in mysterious circumstances in 1789 before he could complete his return journey to America. By then his reputation had been severely damaged by Lee’s accusations and by the publication of private letters in which Deane had questioned the Revolution and considered rapprochment with Britain. He had never been found guilty of Lee’s charges and in 1842 was exhonorated by Congress.

His house was acquired by the Colonial Dames in 1959. After undergoing a historic restoration, it opened to the public in 1974, as part of the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum. The museum has created a website, Silas Deane Online, which features images, a timeline, exerpts from primary sources relating to Deane, and a virtual tour of the house. He was also discussed last year in the Hartford Courant.

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Dr. Jonathan Cogswell House (1834)

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Built in 1834-1835 for Dr. Jonathan Cogswell on Main Street in East Windsor Hill (now part of South Windsor). Cogswell became a professor at the Theological Institute of Connecticut in 1834. This school first opened its doors in that year and was located just across the street from the Cogswell’s Greek Revival house. In 1844, he sold the house to the Institute and it was used as a residence for its president and first professor of theology, Bennett Tyler. The Institute moved to Hartford in 1865 and is now known as the Hartford Theological Seminary. Cogswell’s daughter Elizabeth married James Dixon of Enfield, who later served as a notable anti-slavery senator. In Washington, the Dixons were personal friends of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth spent the night of the President’s assassination with the first lady to comfort her. The house is currently for sale.

Captain James Francis House (1793)

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Captain James Francis, a master builder, constructed this house for himself on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield in 1793. In 1815, he expanded the original 1 1/2-story building with a gambrel roof to two stories with a gable roof. Capt. Francis also built a number of other brick houses in Wethersfield during this period. The front and side porches were added by his granddaughter, Jane Francis, in the nineteenth century. The house is currently owned by the Wethersfield Historical Society.

Harriet Beecher Stowe House (1871)

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Built on Forest Street in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood in 1871 for a lawyer named Franklin Chamberlin, this house was bought two years later by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She lived here with her husband, Calvin Stowe (a retired minister and professor) and two unmarried twin daughters, Hatty and Eliza. In 1878 she completed her last novel Poganuc People, based on her early years growing up in Litchfield. After Stowe died in 1896, the twins sold the house and it was later bought, in 1927, by Katharine Seymour Day (Stowe’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Isabella Beecher Hooker), who left it to become a museum. The house was restored in the 1960s and is open to the public as part of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.

Roseland Cottage (1846)

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Built in 1846 in Woodstock as a summer home for Henry Chandler Bowen. He had grown up in the town, but later went to Brooklyn, NY and became a wealthy dry goods merchant. He was also an abolitionist and Republican, who hosted famous Fourth of July celebrations on his property, which included such guests as Ulysses S. Grant (who had to endure Bowen’s teetotaling). The Gothic Revival house and the grounds, which include a boxwood garden, reflect the ideas of Andrew Jackson Downing (as presented in such books as The Architecture of Country Houses) on rural dwellings and country landscaping. The house is now a museum administered by Historic New England.