St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Kent (1826)

St. Andrew’s Church in Kent.

The earliest Episcopal/Anglican worship in western Connecticut began in the town of Kent in 1763, served by itinerant missionary priests ordained in England. They worshipped in a now lost St. Thomas’s Church built on Kent Plain sometime between 1768 and 1772. St. Andrew’s Episcopal Parish was first organized as St John’s Parish in 1806. In 1819, Reverend George B. Andrews took charge of the Episcopal congregations in both Kent and nearby Marbledale (in New Preston). He was soon serving congregations in Caanan and Salisbury as well. His wealthy wife contributed greatly to funding the erection of churches in these parishes. The current church building in Kent, located at the corner of modern Routes 7 and 341, was constructed in 1826 of fieldstone in the Gothic Revival style. In gratitude to Rev. and Mrs. Andrews, the parish was renamed from St. John’s to St. Andrew’s.

In the 1870s the chancel and sacristy were added to the west side of the building and the bell tower’s original crenelated top was replaced with a pointed steeple. The church underwent major renovations in 2014.

Thomas Eldredge House (1842)

31 Gravel Street in Mystic

Thomas Eldredge, and his brothers George and Elam, purchased land on Gravel Street in Mystic from their father in 1842. Thomas erected the house at 31 Gravel Street soon after. The three brothers were all shipmasters and mariners. Thomas was a captain for over 45 years and was known as “the Commodore of the Mallory line.” He sold the house when he retired. He moved to New York and maintained a summer home in Mystic on Prospect Hill. After a fire in 1879 the house’s original roof was replaced with a Mansard roof.

Hank’s Mill (1882)

The village of Hanks Hill in Mansfield was the home of silk manufacturing company of Hanks Brothers. The original mill, built by Rodney Hanks and his nephew Horace Hanks in 1810 and believed to be the first water powered silk mill in the United States, was purchased by Henry Ford in the 1930s and moved to the Greenfield Village open air museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Another mill building was destroyed by fire in 1882 and replaced by the building at 247 Hanks Hill Road, now much altered to serve as a residence. It is just across the street from the Hanks Reservoir. Nearby, at 233 Hanks Hill Road, is a former boarding house for mill employees, built in the early nineteenth century (or as early as 1789).

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John Killbourne House (1740)

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.

Darragan Building and Larue Building (1891)

The adjacent buildings at 238 and 240-242 Main Street in Danbury were built simultaneously in 1891-1892. The Darragan Building (on the left in the image above) was designed by local architect Joel Foster in the Romanesque Revival style with terra cotta tile decoration around the arched windows. In 1913 the building was acquired by the Danbury and Bethel Gas and Electric Light Company and sold in 1965. It currently has businesses on the ground floor and apartments above. The Larue Building next door, at 240-242 Main Street, was designed by Leoni W. Robinson of New Haven in a similar style with brownstone window ornamentation.