Yesterday I featured the factory of the J. H. Sessions Clock Company, which is located at 61 East Main Street in the Forestville section of Bristol. Part of the factory complex is the company’s former main office building, a Jacobethan Revival-style structure erected c. 1918. It was designed by Bristol architect Harold A. Hayden, who also drew the plans for the Soldiers’ Memorial Monument of Bristol after serving in World War One.
In 1870, John Humphrey Sessions (1828-1899) of Bristol merged his wood turning business with a trunk hinge factory that had been established by his late brother, Albert J. Sessions. The company expanded in the following decades under the leadership of J. H. Sessions, who brought his son, John Henry Sessions, on as a partner. After the elder Sessions’ death in 1899, the family would continue to run the business well into the twentieth century. In addition to the hardware business, the family built a huge foundry on Farmington Avenue in 1895 and acquired a large clock factory on East Main Street in Forestville after taking over the E. N. Welch Manufacturing Company in 1902. Elisha N. Welch (1809-1887) had started manufacturing clocks in the 1850s. The company he founded began to decline after his death in 1887. Although it rebuilt its East Main Street factory complex a year after it was devastated by two fires in 1899, the firm had had to borrow money and continued to suffer financially. William E. Sessions, a son of John Humphrey Sessions, and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, son of John Henry Sessions, soon bought enough Welch stock to take control of the company in 1902. They changed its name to the Sessions Clock Company on January 9, 1903. The company would flourish for many years, but went into decline after World War II. The company was sold in the 1950s and eventually liquidated. By the early 1970s the various factory buildings were sold off. The complex is now known as the Forestville Industrial Center and is now used by small industrial and commercial firms.
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The Congregational Church in Pomfret Center was organized in 1715 and its first meeting house was erected on White’s Plains, located on Pomfret Hill, just north of Needle’s Eye Road. The next meeting house was built on the town common in Pomfret Center in 1762. Interestingly, the church was painted orange. (In the coming years, the neighboring towns of Windham, Killingly, Thompson, and Brooklyn would emulate Pomfret’s example!). The church’s third meeting house was erected in 1832 on land acquired from a Dr. Waldo. The land was purchased with proceeds generated by the women of the church, who had knitted a hundred pairs of stockings to sell. In erecting the new church, builder Lemuel Holmes salvaged much of the building materials from the previous structure.
On December 7, 2013, a fire (likely caused by an accident during the repair of the building’s front steps) destroyed the historic church. It was soon rebuilt, following the original design as closely as possible, while creating a building that is a little larger than the original and set further back on the property at 13 Church Road. Construction took three years, with the new steeple being raised into place on August 30, 2016.
Happy Independence Day! To celebrate I’m sharing some photos I took last October at Fort Griswold in New London. First established in 1775, at the start of the American Revolution, the fort was the site of the Battle of Groton Heights, fought on September 6, 1781, during Benedict Arnold’s destructive raid on New London. In use as a fort at different times until after the Spanish-American War, today the site can be visited by the public at Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park. On this site I’ve previously featured two structures at the park: the monument, erected in 1830 to commemorate the 1781 battle, and a powder magazine built in 1843. Click below for more pictures and have a safe holiday!
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In the early nineteenth century, David Strong ran a tavern on South Main Street in East Hampton. His son, John C. A. Strong, a tobacco farmer, acquired the property after his father’s death in 1825. Thirty years later he replaced the old tavern with an Italianate-style house that still stands at 2 South Main Street. John’s sons, Clark and David, both served in the Civil War and later formed the Strong Manufacturing Company in Winsted.
Horatio D. Chapman (1826-1910), another Civil War veteran, acquired the house in 1869. As related in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1903):
Horatio D. Chapman was born August 7, 1826, in the town of East Haddam. His early educational advantages were such as were afforded by the district and private schools of his native town, but he improved them to the utmost, and before reaching his majority had qualified himself as a teacher, and in that vocation met with marked success, his experience covering a period of twenty years in all. [. . . .]
The attempted disruption of the Union by the seceding Southern States fired his patriotic blood, and on August 6, 1862, he enlisted in Company C, Twentieth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, serving with marked gallantry as corporal, until June 13, 1865, when he was discharged. His regiment was engaged in many of the most important battles of that great struggle, but he passed through them all unscathed, although more than once the cutting of his uniform or his hat by a Confederate bullet warned him, how closely Death hovered over the battlefield. Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were among the memorable engagements in which he participated. Later he followed “Sherman to the sea,” and tramped through the Carolinas and across Virginia’s “sacred soil” to Richmond. During these memorable campaigns, even while on the march, he found time to keep a diary, which—today—is of surpassing interest, and excerpts from which he is constantly asked to read when the “old boys” gather on Memorial Day to revive memories of the past and to lay chaplets upon the graves of the heroes of the Republic.
In 1866 Mr. Chapman came back to his native State, settling at East Hampton. For a year thereafter he was foreman in the Skinner saw-mill, and during the next year was in the employ of D. W. Watrous. For three terms he taught a village school in Chatham. Wearying of the teacher’s dais, he accepted an offer to become a traveling salesman for the bell and coffin trimmings industries of East Hampton. In this line of work he was successfully engaged for twenty-five years. In the Spring of 1899 he traveled for N. N. Hill, and he is still erect, hale and hearty, with undimmed mental factulties, at the age of seventysix years. He is a man held in high esteein by the community which best knows and appreciates his worth, and has filled various local offices with marked distinction and fidelity, among them being those of selectman (two years), member of the board of relief, and of the board of education for between twelve and fifteen years. In 1897 he served as doorkeeper for the General Assembly[.]
In the early nineteenth century, town meetings in Pomfret were held in churches and other borrowed buildings. In the 1830s there was a movement to build a permanent town hall, but the citizens disputed where to locate the building. Eventually a council was formed to select the location. To ensure neutrality, the council of three was composed of individuals who were not members of the Pomfret community, being chosen from the neighboring towns of Hampton, Thompson, and Killingly. The spot chosen was roughly midway between the town’s two larger villages of Abington and Pomfret Center. Erected in 1841 (at what is now 17 Town House Road), the new building would serve as Town House for many years and is now owned by the Pomfret Historical Society.
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The house at 6-8 Maple Avenue in Unionville was built in 1882-1883 as a double house by Abner Slade Hart (1823-1912) and his son, Henry W. Hart (1858-1931). As described in the Illustrated Popular Biography of Connecticut (1891)
Abner S Hart was a member of the general assembly in 1887, representing the town of Farmington in the house. Mr. Hart cast his first vote for Henry Clay for president in 1844 and has since been a member of the whig and republican parties. He was born in Barkhamsted, July 15, 1823, and received a thorough education, preparing him for the avocation of teaching in the public schools. He pursued that calling for fourteen years, teaching winters and farming through the summer. In 1866 he established himself in the drug business at Riverton and became postmaster there in 1869. The latter position was retained for twelve years. He has held various local offices, including that of acting school visitor for fourteen years and chairman of the board of relief. Since 1881 he has resided at Unionville, where he is engaged in mercantile pursuits. Mr. Hart is a member of Evening Star Lodge, No. 101, F. and A. M., of Unionville. He is descended from revolutionary stock, both of his grandfathers having served in the war for independence. He has in his possession a sword that was carried in the service by one of them. Mr. Hart is a prominent citizen of Unionville, and is held in thorough esteem in that community as well as in his old home in Barkhamsted.
Abner S. Hart had three sons with his first wife, Julia. The older two continued in business in Riverton, while the youngest, Henry, joined his father in Unionville, where Abner lived with his second wife, Margaret. Abner retired from his store, called A. S. Hart and Son, in 1896, and the business was continued by Henry under the name H. W. Hart and Company. The house remained in the Hart family until 1937. In recent years, it has had significant alterations, with a redesigned entryway and windows, a new porch, and the addition of a rooftop cupola, which is in keeping with the building’s Italianate style.
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