Houses - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Nathaniel B. Wheeler House (1852)

Nathaniel B. Wheeler, partner in Wheeler & Wilson, manufacturers of sewing machines, acquired land near the Green in Watertown (now 14 Woodbury Road) from Alanson Warren, Sr., on which he built an Italianate house in 1852. Later owners of the house, Harry H. and Charlotte Heminway, hired Waterbury architect Wilfred Griggs to remodel the house. In 1914 it was altered to the Colonial Revival style with the addition of front and rear two-level porches, French doors on the east side and a fanlight over the main entrance.

Noah Parker House (1772)

Built in 1772, the house at 113 Lake Street in Coventry, across from the entrance to the Nathan Hale Cemetery, is known as the Noah Parker House. In the early nineteenth century, the house served as an inn operated by Martin Lyman (1782-1859), who was also postmaster in 1822. Lyman purchased the house from Jeremiah Fitch in 1819 and he sold it to John Boynton in 1825. By the late 1850s, the house was owned by Ralph Crittenden and William Tibbals, makers of percussion caps and metallic cartridges. During the Civil War they were the leading manufacturers of cartridges in the United States. The house was also the post office for South Coventry in the 1920s.

Jeremiah Ripley House (1792)

At 77 Ripley Hill Road on Coventry is a house that was once home to Captain Jeremiah Ripley, who ran a store and was Connecticut’s Assistant Commissary during the Revolutionary War. The earliest part of the house was built 1762 by Nathaniel Rust Jr., and Capt. Ripley stored gunpowder in the cellar in 1777. As related in the 1912 Historic Sketch of Coventry, complied by Ruth Amelia Higgins:

The assistant commissary for the State was Jeremiah Ripley, who lived on Ripley Hill in Coventry. In May, 1777, Capt. Huntington, of Norwich, was ordered to deliver 100 barrels of Continental powder to Cap. J. Ripley, of Coventry, to be carefully kept until further orders. February 26, 1778, the same Jeremiah Ripley was directed by the General Assembly to send under a guard so soon as might be, two tons of fine powder in his hands to Ezekiel Chevers, commissary of artillery at Springfield.

Across Ripley Hill Road from the house is where 116 men of the Coventry militia assembled to march to Massachusetts in response to the Lexington Alarm of 1775. Ripley later constructed what is now the main block of the house, completed in 1792. In the early twentieth century, the house was owned by George Dudley Seymour, who restored the Nathan Hale Homestead. Seymour remodeled the interior of the Ripley House, repaneling one of the rooms with boards from one of the Nathan Hale schoolhouses.

Ezekiel Sibley House (1795)

The house at 100 Common Road in Willington is thought to have been built by Ezekiel Sibley around 1795. Beza Soule bought the property in 1818. Beza Soule (1783-1825) came from a family of stone carvers from Plymouth County, Massachusetts. His widow Mary sold the house in 1837 to Clark Noble and it remained in the noble family for until 1887.

John Tyler House (1710)

The house at 242-250 East Main Street in Branford is thought to have been built by John Tyler, Jr. around 1710-1715. A rear lean-to, added later in the eighteenth century, gives the house a saltbox shape. A later owner was James Goodrich Palmer (Jimmy Palmer), who lived in the house for twenty years and made cheese in the second floor bedroom. The house is now a bed & breakfast.

Dr. John B. Griggs House (1918)

Dr. John Bagg Griggs was a general practitioner in Farmington, from 1897 to 1899 living with his wife, Mary Ellen Bolter, at 41 Main Street, where their son, Dr. John Bolter Griggs, was born. After next living at 101 Main Street, they moved to Stamford in 1903. After his first wife died in 1905, Dr. Griggs married again and moved with his wife, Valina D. Griggs, to Hartford in 1907. Dr. Griggs practiced as an internist until 1917 and was involved in the first X-ray laboratory in the city, established at Hartford Hospital in 1910 under the leadership of Dr. Arthur Heublein. Completed in 1918, the Griggs residence at 1380 Asylum Avenue in Hartford was designed by architect Edward Thomas Hapgood.

By 1996 the house had been owned by the State of Connecticut for nearly fifty years. Once used as offices but then left vacant and considered to be “surplus property,” the house was bought at auction by Peter and Diane Valin, who lovingly restored the much deteriorated house to once again become a grand West End residence.

S. G. Davidson House (1882)

The older rear section of the house at 539 Litchfield Turnpike, intersection with Carrington Road, in Bethany was built by James Seymour Tuttle, a blacksmith and axe-maker. Tuttle’s grandson, Samuel Gilbert Davidson, hired joiner Thomas H. Brooks to built the front section, erected in 1882-1883. There are also historic barns attached to the rear of the house and a carriage barn across the road. The farm run by Davidson, also called Minnow Brook Farm, is described by an admirer in Bethany and its Hills (1905):

And now, concluded Mr. Sperry, we come to a model farm, one of the model farms of Connecticut, that of our friend S. G. Davidson, who is one of Bethany’s most honored and esteemed men. It is indeed a model of what thrift, good taste, enterprise, foresight and sagacity well employed can accomplish. With Mr. Davidson in charge, even a wilderness could be made to blossom like the rose.

There Davidson’s son, Tyler D. Davidson (d. 1952), a farmer like his father and a teacher, also served as First Selectman, Justice of the Peace and was a member of the Connecticut state House of Representatives. In the 1930s the house became the “Old Elm Tea Room,” named for a large Elm in front of the house planted by S. G. Davidson. An upstairs room was also used for singing classes held by some of the women of the family.

Tyler Davidson’s daughters sold the house out of the family in 1957.