According to the nomination for the Hazardville Historic District, the house at 329 Hazard Avenue is a transitional Italianate/Second Empire style structure built in 1865. According to the house’s property listing with the Town of Enfield and real estate listings it was built in 1878.
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The house at 120 High Street in South Glastonbury is listed as 118 High Street in the 1978 Historical and Architectural Survey of Glastonbury, where it is described as the John Killbourne House, built in 1740. A plaque on the house reads “Spar Mill, Est. 1740.” Feldspar was quarried in the area in the early twentieth century and the nearby house at 9 Tryon Street is believed to have once been the mill’s office.
A 2001 walking tour of Main Street in Portland by Doris Sherrow (which I can no longer find online) lists the house at 576 Main Street as the home of Dr. Charles H. Gilbert with a construction date of 1856. It also explains that Gilbert married one of the daughters of Rev. Hervey Talcott, who lived next door at 572 Main Street. According to genealogical sites, it was Charles Henry Gilbert‘s father, Dr. Gershom Clark Hyde Gilbert (1817-1889) who married Rev. Talcott’s third daughter, Harriette in 1845. Dr. Talcott left Portland in 1867, later living for periods in Waterbury, Hartford and Westbrook.
Listed in the Mechanic Street Historic District as the Freestone House, the residence at 27 Lester Avenue in Pawcatuck was built in 1900.
The grand residence known as Boxwood, located at 9 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, was built in 1842 for the merchant Richard Sill Griswold (1809-1849). A third story was later added by Richard Sill Griswold, Jr. (1869-1901). In 1890, his wife opened the Boxwood School for Girls in the house. The building had connections with the Old Lyme art colony. The summer Lyme School of Art held studio classes at Boxwood in 1905 and artists could rent rooms in the house while the boarding school students were not in residence. Among the residents that year were the future president Woodrow Wilson and his wife Ellen Axson Wilson, who was enrolled at the art school. When Mrs. Griswold died in 1907 the boarding school closed, but Boxwood Manor continued as a summer inn with its gardens being a celebrated attraction. On Christmas Eve, 1943, James Streeto, the caretaker of the estate, was murdered on the property. The woman he was involved with at the time, Delphine Bertrand, threatened with the death penalty for the murder, pled guilty to the charge of manslaughter, but the charges were dropped when two men later confessed to the murder and were convicted. The inn closed in 1958 and the property was bought by Dr. Matthew Griswold, who altered it into apartments and a restaurant. The Griswold family sold the building in 1975 and it was converted into condominiums.
The house at 28 Pearl Street in Middletown was built by Charles Brewer (1778-1860) sometime between 1839 and 1851. It was one of three houses he built on Pearl Street during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and may have been intended to be a rental property. The house was owned in the later nineteenth century by Rev. Eleazor Foster, who was pastor of Middletown’s First Universalist Church from 1866 to 1868, and then by the printer J. Peters Pelton, who built a house on Court Street in the 1880s.
Charles Brewer is described in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1903):
Capt. Charles Brewer second son of George was born in Springfield Mass. March 24, 1778, and removed to Middletown on attaining his majority. He was a silversmith, and for fifty nine years was a manufacturing and merchant jeweler, being a successful and a leading merchant of his time. He was a captain in the old militia for many years, and was known as “Capt.” Charles Brewer. With his son-in-law, Edwin Stearns, he gave the real estate for and was instrumental in the building the Universalist Church at Middletown. Fraternally he was a member of St. John’s Lodge, F. & A. M., and some of his silver work was used for many years in that lodge. Capt. Brewer built the family home on the corner of Pearl and Court streets as well as the two houses south of it on the east side of Pearl street. He was married February 18, 1801, to Hannah daughter of Barakiah Fairbanks. She was born September 28, 1777, and died May 24, 1855. Capt. Brewer died May 10, 1860. They were the parents of a numerous family of children[.]
In 1831, P. T Barnum, started publishing a newspaper called The Herald of Freedom which stirred up a number of controversies. His uncle Alanson Taylor even sued him for libel, although the suit never went to trial. Another libel suit in 1832 did land Barnum in jail for two months. The prosecution was brought on behalf of Seth Seelye (1795-1869), a merchant and church deacon in Barnum’s hometown of Bethel whom Barnum accused of usury. In 1842 Seeyle built a grand Greek Revival-style house at 189 Greenwood Avenue in Bethel. In 1914 the house was donated to become the new home of the Bethel Public Library, which had been organized in 1909.
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