An article last Spring (April 24, 2017) in the Newtown Bee [“New Owner Brings New Life To 40 Main Street,” by Kendra Bobowick] notes the recent renovation of an 1893 Queen Anne-style Victorian house. Around 1905, Charles H. Northrop, town treasurer, lived in the house. He was accused of embezzlement and hung himself in the house’s foyer. From 1910 into the 1920s, the house was used by the local telephone exchange. The house was used as a law office from the 1940s through 2001.
Known locally as the “Balcony House,” the residence at 34 Main Street in Newtown is located just south of Trinity Episcopal Church. The nomination for the Newtown Borough Historic District gives the mansard-roofed house a date of c. 1870, but the real estate websites (linked above) give a date of c. 1820. Perhaps it was built around 1820 and updated in the Second Empire style around 1870? Until his death in 1950, it was the home of Arthur Treat Nettleton, who became treasurer of the Newtown Savings Bank in 1898 and its president in 1938. The picture above was taken back in 2010, when it was painted in darker colors than at present.
The house at 402 West Main Street in Cheshire was built around 1850. It has been much altered over the years, with the finely detailed Victorian bay windows on the second floor being added later in the nineteenth century. The house’s first resident was Samuel Hitchcock, a factory owner who started manufacturing suspenders and other forms of webbing in 1853. As described in the History of New Haven County, Connecticut, Vol. I (1892), edited by J. L. Rockey:
Samuel Hitchcock, born in Cheshire in 1813, is a son of Joseph Hitchcock, also born in Cheshire. Samuel was brought up on a farm and when 19 years old engaged in the mercantile trade, following that business until about 1860. He later engaged in manufacturing suspenders, built the large factory at West Cheshire, and operated it as the Hitchcock Manufacturing Company. The factory was sold to the American Braid Company, and they afterward added the manufacture of vegetable ivory buttons. Mr. Hitchcock had the entire charge of these industries. He retired from active business in 1882. He was married in 1835, to Lucy S. Bradley, of Cheshire. They lost their last child in October, 1889.. They celebrated their golden wedding in 1885.
The current home of the Trumbull Historical Society is the a house located at 1856 Huntington Turnpike, in the Nichols section of Trumbull. The house was built in 1820 on the property of the Nichols family, land that went back to Abraham Nichols, one of the original founders of the town of Stratford. The last of the family to live in the house was Florence Nichols Woods (died 1973), whose husband, George Woods (died 1972), was president of Bridgeport’s People’s Bank. Their estate was noted for its gardens. The couple left their property to the Nichols Methodist Church. The church did not require the property, so the house and land, known as the Woods Estate, were purchased by the town in 1974. Since 1978 the house has been rented by the Historical Society, while the grounds are now Abraham Nichols Park.
The older north section of the house at 80 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was built in 1835 by Daniel Lewis. Its next owner was Chauncey Griswold, a schoolteacher who became a maker of medicine. Starting in the 1840s, he produced a popular salve to treat burns and skin ailments. Griswold later lived with his daughter and her husband in the Gardner Mills House in Canton. His heirs continued to make the salve after Griswold’s death and later sold the formula to the Sisson Drug Company Hartford, which produced it until 1955 when it was discontinued due to its high lead content. The house was enlarged in 1893 by William Case, who brought down the ell from another property.
The William Smith House at 166 Silver Lane in East Hartford is thought to date to as early as 1730, a year before the dirt path in front became town property. Smith had to arrange with his neighbors and the town to get road access to his home. Smith also owned the house next door, at 158 Silver Lane, which he ran as a tavern. Both buildings have been much altered over the years. In the 1920s, the house was the first in East Hartford to be decorated with electric Christmas lights. By the 1930s and 1940s owner Raymond C. Dunn’s elaborate holiday displays attracted people from far and wide, causing traffic jams. A police officer was needed to direct traffic. A contest for the best Christmas display each year was discontinued because he won every year.
Partially hidden behind trees at 76 Bellevue in Bristol is a house erected in 1910 as the gardener’s cottage for William Sessions’ Beleden estate. It was built by Lemuel Stewart. The cottage was later the home of Charles Treadway, treasurer of New Deparure Manufacturing Company. He would later become president of the Bristol National Bank and was chairman of the committee that erected Bristol Hospital in response to the influenza epidemic of 1918.
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