The Ray Green House, located at 22 Moss Street in Pawcatuck, is a mansard-roofed house built in 1874. It features distinctive incised carving on the friezes, pediments, and dormers, which are all highlighted by a contrasting paint scheme.
Edward Perkins (1743-1787) built a house at what is now 6 Grant Road in Bethany, which was sold by his son, Israel Perkins (1767-1846) in 1835 to Dr. Chauncey B. Foote of Hamden. Israel Perkins is described in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Volume 17 (1863):
Israel Perkins designed to pursue professional life and had expected to commence a course of study the year that his father died. Being left by this event at the head of the family, he was compelled to forego this purpose and remain at home on the farm. He lived in the house which his father built, on the turnpike from Litchfield, near the school-house. From 1793 to 1795, he lived at Hamden Plain. When he was 28 he became quite deaf, and continued so through life. He was well known in that part of the country, as selectman of the town, settler of estates, guardian of children, &c., &c.; and was so skilled in the law that he was familiarly called “the old lawyer.”
Dr. Foote removed the original Perkins House and built a new one just in front of where it had stood. The book Bethany’s Old Houses and Community Buildings (1972), by Alice Bice Bunton, however, refers to the current structure under the heading of “The Israel Perkins House.” In 1838, Dr. Foote sold the house to Major Lounsbury (died 1863) and it remained in the Lounsbury family until 1912.
The Colonial Revival house at 70 Terry Road in Hartford was built in 1929 and is currently home to the Gengras family (only the third family to live in the house). It was designed by the architectural firm of Smith & Bassette for Ward S. Jacobs. The architects’ plans for the house are in the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, as well as a color film of the property from 1941 that shows Editha Jacobs tending to her garden and her husband, Ward S. Jacobs, mowing the lawn. Ward S. Jacobs was a mechanical engineer. In 1908, he acquired the patent and equipment for a device to remove broken taps, created by John Kinvall of Worchester, Massachusetts in 1902. Jacobs named his new enterprise the Walton Company, after the maiden name of his grandmother, Albina Walton Jacobs. He sold the business in 1936. The above photograph was taken in December, 2017, during the 37th Annual Friends of the Mark Twain House Holiday House Tour.
A sign on the house at 360 Cherry Brook Road in Canton gives a date of 1743, but according to the Canton Sesquicentennial, 1806-1956, A Short History of Canton, p. 99, it was built about 1780 by John Foote, Jr. (1760-1803). His son, Lancel Foote (1790-1865), was chosen a deacon in the Congregational Church in 1839 and was superintendent of the Sunday School organized in 1819. Lancel Foote also held many town offices and was a representative to the state legislature.
The house at 174 North Cove Road in Old Saybrook was built in 1799 by Willoughby Lynde, a wealthy sea captain. Willoughby and his father, Samuel Lynde, engaged in farming and trade with the West Indies. Both were also slave owners. Nine enslaved people worked on the Lynde farm and wharf and also increased the family’s wealth by producing cloth. The Lynde House has an ell, which was built c. 1645 as a separate building. In the eighteenth century, the ell was owned by another mariner, Captain Samuel Doty, a West Indies trader and shipbuilder, who had a shipyard, warehouse and wharf on the Connecticut River. Capt. Doty’s own house was torn down in 1813, when the Samuel Hart, Jr. House was built. He used the ell as a bakery for ship’s bread. The ell was attached to the Lynde House about the time of the latter’s construction. The ell is to the right of the house’s front facade, while on the left is a new addition, constructed since 2008.
The house at 103 Olmsted Street in East Hartford is one of several houses on the street with the same basic design, each differentiated by different choices for the decorative trim. The house was built circa 1893 for Julius M. Wolcott (possibly this one?), a farmer. However, he very soon sold the house to William Roberts.
From the mid-nineteenth century, pistols were being manufactured in the Rockfall section of Middlefield in a factory begun by Henry Aston, Ira N. Johnson, Sylvester Bailey, John North and others. The pistol factory burned down in 1879. As related in the History of Middlefield and Long Hill (1883), by Thomas Atkins,
By the burning of the pistol factory Mr. Otis Smith, who was at that time doing quite an extensive business there, lost machinery, tools, stock, and goods. Nothing was saved. In Nov., 1880, Mr. Smith again began manufacturing in P. W. Bennett’s factory, where he remained until July, 1882. In Dec, 1881, he purchased of Ira N. Johnson, the pistol factory property, and erected thereon a three-story brick building, 100 feet long by 30 feet wide, and is now manufacturing a pistol of his own invention known as the “Smith’s revolver;” also several patented articles in the hardware line.
Eight years before he constructed his new factory, which in recent years was restored and converted into a residence by owner Dick Boynton, Otis Smith erected his family residence at 135 Main Street. The French Second Empire-style house and adjacent carriage house were built in 1873. The long Colonial Revival front was probably added in the in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Smith died in 1924 and the following year his heirs sold the house to Franc and Lillie Rodowic. (more…)
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