The house at 104 Silver Lane in East Hartford is a classic colonial saltbox. It was built c. 1785-1786 as a small three-room cottage with a rear shed roof by Abraham Clark, who had acquired the land in 1785. The structure was expanded into a five-bay saltbox around 1814 when there was a blacksmith shop just west of the house. There is evidence a tunnel once connected the house with the Hockanum River, about 250 yards away.
At the corner of State and North Streets in Guilford is a house (1 North Street) built circa 1750. The Greek Revival front door-surround was added later. The house is named for Samuel Lee (1742-1819), who served in the Coast Guard during the Revolutionary War and was promoted to captain just before the war ended. The house may also have been erected later, around the time of Lee’s marriage to Agnes Dickinson in 1763. There are many stories of Agnes Lee’s bravery during the Revolution when her husband was frequently absent. As recounted in Old Paths and Legends of the New England Border (1907), by Katharine M. Abbott:
Agnes Lee, the wife of Captain Samuel Lee of the Harbor Guard, was a noted foe to Tories. Powder was stored in the attic: one dark night a Tory knocked at her door, when Captain Lee was on duty; “Who’s there?” — “A friend.” — “No, a friend would tell his name,” answered Mrs. Lee, and fired. An hour later, an old doctor of North Guilford was summoned to attend a mysterious gun-shot wound. When the British landed at Leete’s Island, Captain Lee fired the agreed signal; “Grandma Lee responded by blazing away on the cannon set at the head of Crooked Lane, for she had not a son, and Uncle Levi was a cripple.”
According to another account, armed Torries actually burst in and she held them off until her husband arrived to shoot them. On another occasion, Lee barn caught fire and its sparks threatened the powder stored in the attic of the house. With no one else to save the house, Agnes Lee rushed upstairs and closed the the attic window to shut out the dangerous sparks. She later remarked that she hadn’t expected to come back down the stairs alive. The Guilford chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution is named for Agnes Dickinson Lee.
Samuel’s mother and his brother, Levi, also lived with them in the house. In 1794, Levi and his mother sold the house to William Starr, Sr. At that time, Samuel and Agnes built a new house at 292 State Street.
In 1836, Charles Smith (1807-1893) built a Greek Revival house on Main Street in South Windham. The following year, he and Harvey Winchester bought a nearby factory that they used for the manufacture of paper, forming the Smith & Winchester Company. Charles Smith‘s son, Guilford Smith (1839-1923), was born in the house. He was a wealthy philanthropist who left $25,000 for the establishment of a library in South Windham. A trust and Board of Trustees were established for in 1930 and the new Guilford Smith Memorial Library, occupying the old Smith House, opened on April 4, 1931.
At 1393 South Main Street in Cheshire is a Victorian house built in 1903 by Elmer Ives. On the same property, known as Ives Corner, Ives erected a small store building. Calling it the “Why Not Rest” store, he sold tobacco, candy, soda and patent medicine. It was also a trolley freight station. The store was destroyed in 1953 when it was hit by an out-of-control vehicle.
By the 1840s, the village of Rockfall in Middlefield was an active industrial area with a number of mills. Between 1845 and 1848, William F. Boardman built two boarding houses for workers on Main Street in Rockfall. The one pictured above is the west boarding house at 127 Main Street; next door is the east boarding house. Otis Smith, who owned the nearby Smith pistol factory, bought the west boarding house in 1873. In the twentieth century, many Polish immigrants settled in the area, including the Drega family. Juzef W. and Weronica Drega acquired the house in 1923. Today it is a two-family house.
The G. T. Loomis House, at 15 Lester Avenue in Pawcatuck, was built in 1905. The owner may have been the G. T. Loomis who was a photographer in the Westerly, R.I. area. (more…)
At 3 Gravel Street in Mystic is a house, built between 1809 and 1815, that was traditionally called the “Case Bottle House” because it resembled the shape of the cases in which bottles of liquor were once shipped. It is not the only house in the area to have had that title: the same name was applied to the Elijah Williams House in the village of Wolf Neck in Stonington (noted in The Homes of Our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn. (1903), by Grace Denison Wheeler). The house on Gravel Street was built by Capt. John Anthony Wolfe and has been much altered and enlarged over the years. Restored in 1951, it is now a commercial property, home to Grover Insurance.
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