Theophilus Jones House (1740)

Theophilus Jones (1690-1781) moved to Wallingford in 1711. He built up his farm property and c. 1740 built a house on Cook Hill, in the southwest corner of town, now 40 Jones Road. His son, Theophilus Jones, Jr. (1723-1815), continued to amass land and was one of the few residents of Wallingford who owned slaves. Three more generations of this wealthy family would farm the property until it was turned over to tenant farmers and then eventually sold in 1914. It continued as a dairy farm until 1937, when it was acquired by Charles F. Montgomery (1910-1978), a leading authority on American decorative arts. He undertook the restoration of the house and lived there until 1950, when he left Wallingford to become a curator at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware. He was appointed the museum’s director in 1954. In addition to the Jones House itself, the site in Wallingford has a number of outbuildings, including a woodshed and a barn, carpentry shop, carriage house and cider mill complex, all original to the farm. There’s also an icehouse and a pigeon house, moved to the property by Montgomery from Middletown.

W. F. Wescott House (1848)

The house at 30 Tolland Green in Tolland is an example of a older building that was later completely transformed. It was built in 1848 by William F. Wescott as a simple gable-front structure. Daniel Ely Benton owned this vernacular residence for a few years while he operating a general store on the corner. Two doctors later owned it and practiced medicine here: Dr. W. H. Clark owned it until moving to New York State in 1888; it was acquired by Dr. Willard N. Simmons in 1889, the same year he received his MD from the University of Vermont and married Alice Phillips. As related in Men of Progress (1898), a Connecticut biographical compendium:

At the time he began his medical studies he was a nurse in the Retreat for the Insane in Hartford. After two years and a half there, he divided his time between the Hartford Hospital and the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, Connecticut. He was also Assistant to Dr. J. E. Root in the Hartford Free Dispensary. He began practice in Tolland, his wife’s home, in August 1889, and has remained there since, building up an excellent practice. Most of this time he has been Physician of the county jail and Town Physician. Under appointment by Governors he several times has examined prisoners as to their sanity. From June 1, 1892, to June 1, 1896, he was a Deputy Sheriff of Tolland county, and for eight years has been Medical Examiner of the town.

The house was altered to the bungalow style in 1922.

John Camp House (1710)

The John Camp House is thought to be the oldest surviving building in Newington. Located at 301-303 West Hill Road, it was built around 1710 by either John Camp (1645-1711), who acquired the property in 1697, or his son, Captain John Camp (1675-1747), who led Newington’s first company of militia, when it was organized in 1726. At one time the house had a one-story front porch. One of the two front entrance doors was added in the nineteenth century.

Eleazer Welton House (1830)

The house at 72 Welton Hill Road in Roxbury was thought to have been built c. 1790 by the Welton family, which owned land in the eastern part of Roxbury for many years. According to Homes of Old Woodbury (1959), by the early nineteenth century the house was owned by Eleazer Welton, whose widow, Nancy M. Wlton, left it to their son, William Welton. He deeded it to a later Eleazer Welton in 1873. The book Roxbury Place-name Stories: Facts, Folklore, Fibs (2009), by Jeannine Green, dates the house to 1830 and speculates there may have been only one Eleazer Welton. After his first wife Nancy died, he left their son William with her father Syrenus Ward. Eleazer married his second wife, Adelia, in 1849 and his son William was probably quitclaiming his rights in the house in 1873.