One of the historic buildings at Mystic Seaport represents a nineteenth-century general store called George H. Stone & Co. The objects on exhibit were donated by George H. Stone, a retired merchant from North Stonington who had his own collection of historical items. The building itself was originally erected circa 1850 as a house in Pawcatuck. It was acquired by the museum in 1954.
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The gambrel-roofed colonial cape-style house at 25 Marjorie Circle in Hebron was built c. 1745-1750 by Samuel Feilding. Soon after construction it was owned by Rev. Benjamin Pomeroy (1735-1784), a congregational minister who was influenced by the First Great Awakening. In 1791 the house was acquired by Amasa Gillett, whose widow later married Benjamin Phelps (the house was later called the Widow Polly Phelps Place). Gillett’s daughter Sibyl, who lived in the house until her death at the age of 95, made bonnets and had her shop in the house in the 1850s. Earlier, in 1835 the largest room in the house was used for Miss Bradford’s school for select young ladies. There is also a gambrel-roofed barn on the property.
Built circa 1850 and much altered in later years, the house at 10 Chestnut Street in Bethel was the home of shoemaker Walker Ferry, who had his shoe store in the building next door at 12 Chestnut Street. By 1867 the house was the residence of William Judson, a hatter, who had married Emeline Judd in 1849.
A postcard in the collection of the Gunn Historical Museum in the town of Washington depicts the house at 250 New Milford Turnpike in the village of Marbledale in Washington, describing it as the Tomlinson Home. A real estate site gives a construction date for the house of 1860. Presumably this house is associated with the family of Philo Tomlison, who conducted marble quarrying in Marbledale in the early nineteenth century.
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Last Sunday I featured St. Andrew’s Church in Kent, erected in 1826. Not far away, in the village of Marble Dale in the town of Washington, is another St. Andrew’s Church built about four years earlier, between 1821 and 1822. Both of these Episcopal churches (as well as ones in Caanan and Salisbury) were built at a time when these parishes had Reverend George B. Andrews as their pastor. The parish in Marble Dale was originally established in 1764 in New Preston. Harassed during the American Revolution because they were predominantly loyalist, the members of the congregation temporarily abandoned their original building, but after the war were formally organized as the New Preston Episcopal Society in 1784. After plans to move their church building to be near the Congregational Church fell through, they rented and then purchased a Quaker meeting house, which was used for services until the current church was built. The building was enlarged in 1855 to plans by the Rev. Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton (1792-1862), who also underwrote for the project. Rev. Wheaton later served (1831-1837) as second president of Trinity College in Hartford.
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The earliest part of the house at 613 Main Street in Portland was constructed in 1703 for Jonathan Warner. It was one room over one room with an end chimney (a style typical of Rhode Island). The house was enlarged over the years. Behind the northwest part was a section built in 1764 by sea captain Ithamar Pelton (1744-1806). The south part of the house was added in 1912 by William Gildersleeve.
Now comprising part of the “Main House” on the campus of the Rectory School in Pomfret is a house erected circa 1795 for Thomas Grosvenor (1744-1825), a lawyer who served in the Revolutionary War. Wounded in his right hand at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Grosvenor ended the was as a Lieutenant Colonel. The house was remodeled and greatly enlarged in about 1885 by Thomas Skelton Harrison, a Philadelphia industrialist. In 1925, Rev. Frank H. Bigelow and his wife, founders of the Rectory School in 1920, acquired the Harrison estate to become the school’s campus. In the ensuing years they erected a complex of wood-framed colonial revival buildings on the estate, which has been the school’s campus ever since.
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